The general: Is the South out of reach?
Posted: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 9:17 AM by Domenico Montanaro
Author of "Whistling Past Dixie"/Democratic political analyst and political science professor Tom Schaller makes his case against Obama getting too fired about his ability to win Southern states. "Two pervasive and persistent myths about racial voting in the modern South are behind the notion that Mr. Obama might win in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Mississippi. The first myth is that African-American turnout in the South is low. Black voters are actually well represented in the Southern electorate: In the 11 states of the former Confederacy, African-Americans were 17.9 percent of the age-eligible population and 17.9 percent of actual voters in 2004, analysis of Census Bureau data shows.”
“And when socioeconomic status is held constant, black voters go to the polls at higher rates than white voters in the South. In other words, a 40-year-old African-American plumber making $60,000 a year is, on average, more likely to vote than a white man of similar background. The second myth is that Democratic presidential candidates fare better in Southern states that have large numbers of African-Americans. In fact, the reverse is true, because the more blacks there are in a Southern state, the more likely the white voters are to vote Republican.
“Mississippi, the state with the nation’s highest percentage of African-Americans in its population, illustrates how difficult Mr. Obama’s task will be in the South. Four years ago, President Bush beat John Kerry there by 20 points. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Mr. Obama could increase black turnout in Mississippi to 39 percent of the statewide electorate, up from 34 percent in 2004, according to exit polls. And let’s assume that Mr. Obama will win 95 percent of those voters, up from the 90 percent who voted for Mr. Kerry four years ago."
Schaller eliminates both Florida and Virginia from his Southern analysis, as the two states are not, well, Southern anymore.
Writing about Ohio, NBC/NJ’s Carrie Dann notes: “Obama’s team has the benefit of two different playbooks from past statewide campaigns. On the one hand, they can pore over John Kerry’s 2004 plan to swell urban turnout to unprecedented levels; on the other, they can trace the county-by-county vote totals of the state’s popular Democrats -- like Governor Ted Strickland and freshman senator Sherrod Brown -- who courted the support of Ohioans in rural and exurban areas.”
Conservative activist Gary Bauer claims the decision by CA to legalize gay marriage could help the GOP. "The Pew poll found that 41 percent of Republicans say same-sex marriage will be ‘very important’ to their vote this year, which is remarkable considering that 39 percent felt as strongly in 2004.”
“These are the voters who will be motivated by the California ruling. I asked Alliance Defense Fund senior counsel Glen Lavy, who argued against same-sex marriage in the California case, to put the ruling in context. He said the decision is ‘far worse’ than the 2003 Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, because Massachusetts had no statutory law defining marriage at the time. In California, however, four judges rewrote a law passed only eight years earlier by a significant majority of California voters.”
USA Today looks at McCain's chances to pick off Pennsylvania.
