I fully agree with Dave Weigel's takedown of William Galston's latest effort to argue Ohio Uber Alles -- that Barack Obama must win Ohio in order to win reelection.
I'd just add: this is really the wrong way of looking at elections from two years, eighteen months, even six months out. There aren't magic "Ohio" things that a president, over the long run, needs to do separate from the things he should do to keep his overall approval rating up. Neither are there magic "white working class" things he should do. If the economy thrives, Obama is going to do better everywhere, and among all groups. Sure, it's not necessarily the case that gains and losses are going to be exactly equal across the board...but it's also not the case that presidents can really calibrate what they do to affect that, very much.
Of course, it's sometimes the case that a president can direct resources to one state, or one region, over another, but most of those choices are relatively small, and matter either over the very long run or, more likely, only matter around the margins. That is, only matter to the economy around the margins. As far as the rhetoric of cultural inclusion that Galston is selling...well, I'd need to see some evidence that changed rhetoric about such things by an incumbent president could possibly have any significant effect.
Now, Ohio is certainly a close & big state, and therefore important in presidential elections -- although, as Galston's numbers show, it leans slightly to the GOP. The odds are that Ohio will go to the winner; that, of course, is true for all the close states (that is, in a blowout election, the "close" states won't actually be close; they'll be blowouts, and the states that wind up close will be the ones that tilt solidly towards the party that's losing: see Indiana, 2008). But since Ohio does tilt however slightly to the Republicans, it is possible for Democrats to win without it. More to the point, however, the best things that Obama could do to help himself in Ohio right now are generally the same things that would help him in Colorado, Florida, Virginia, Nevada, and everywhere else.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
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I don't know. A national convention in Cleveland can buy a lot of local pols off. Obama may be overdoses there (how many visits) but eating a few piergo is still a winner.
ReplyDeleteSigh. Of course Obama doesn't need Ohio to break 270 in the electoral college.
ReplyDeleteBut it's harder to visualize on the map. If we look at the figure below the map here -- I know, shameful plug -- we can see the rank ordering of states from most pro-Obama (in dark blue) to most pro-McCain (in dark red) in 2008 (but here with Census-adjusted electoral vote numbers).
And that middle column (the most competitive states) from New Hampshire at the top through, say, North Carolina is what really drives your final point home. Ohio isn't the microcosm, those states and maybe a handful of others are. What Obama does for one of them, he does in all of them -- help or hurt.
You're right that there aren't magic "Ohio things" separate from what Obama needs to do to win over the whole country. I also think Ohio may lose its bellwether status because its southern counties no longer reflect how the entire South will vote. Southern Ohio is more like Kentucky and Tennessee, which went in the opposite direction of the country in 2008, than North Carolina and Virginia, which went for Obama. I wrote more about this here: http://robertdavidsullivan.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/03/brainless-old-south-ohio-is-not-the-key-to-the-2012-presidential-election.html
ReplyDelete>Of course, it's sometimes the case that a president can direct resources to one state, or one region, over another, but most of those choices are relatively small, and matter either over the very long run or, more likely, only matter around the margins.
ReplyDeleteYou raise a point that I, as someone who would like to see the Electoral College abolished, have wondered about for some time. Candidates campaign on a state-by-state basis, putting more time and resources into swing states and practically ignoring states they have a lock on from the start (such as MD for the Dems). Yet at the end of the day, the EC winner is almost always the winner of the popular vote. In fact, a true split between the electoral and popular vote may be rarer than many people think: two of the three times when such a split occurred--1876 and 2000--the results were heavily contested and considered by many people to be the result of either fraud or error.
Another point that has occurred to me is that a lot of analysts assume Obama is the odds-on favorite to win the 2012 election (with the usual dose of uncertainty thrown in) yet also assume he'll have a lot of trouble winning states he won in '08. If both these assumptions are correct, he could easily end up winning reelection with a smaller share of the electoral vote than he did the first time around--which is historically rare. According to Wikipedia, it's happened to just two presidents: James Madison and Woodrow Wilson. The first was in the early days of the Republic, and the second had come to office in an odd, three-way race. So I suspect there's something a little off about these arguments and that whether Obama wins or loses in '12, it will turn out to be a relatively conventional race.
"he could easily end up winning reelection with a smaller share of the electoral vote than he did the first time around--which is historically rare"
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting stat. I wonder if FDR is relevant here (won in '40 and '44 with less than either 32' or '36). I'd also point out that some re-elects were awfully close to the original (Clinton, Ike), so an increase may not be very much. And Bush's two elections straddled a census; most of his gain came from winning the same states, they were just worth more.
I have no idea what any of that means, but it's interesting.
one state to rule them all?
ReplyDelete