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Last week, I produced the following map outlining Obama's targeting strategy:
Obama Targeting Strategy
The black states are receiving both organizing fellows and television ads. The gray states receive either organizing fellows or television ads, but not both. The red and blue states are receiving neither, and are allocated according to their 2004 (and 2000) results. The fourteen highly targeted "black" states are all included in the eighteen states which the Obama campaign publicly claims it will target heaviest:
Hildebrand and Obama campaign manager David Plouffe have, in recent days, outlined the shape of the campaign. In an interview with Politico, Hildebrand said Obama would focus largely on 14 states George W. Bush won in 2004, plus one state Kerry won in 2004: New Hampshire, where Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton stage their first joint event Friday.(...)
"We're going to go in and play Nebraska 2, which is Omaha and surrounding [areas], in the hopes that we can pick up that one electoral vote," he said.
A presentation by Plouffe to donors, and Obama's own early advertising expenditures, add three more to that list of states to defend: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
In an interview, Hildebrand listed states in order of the margin by which Bush carried them: The closest four - Iowa, New Mexico, Ohio, Nevada - he said, would see "a ton of attention."
But he said Obama would campaign hard in 10 more states, with the candidate and his top surrogates spending time on the ground and his campaign spending money in the air. Those states are Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Virginia, North Carolina, Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, Georgia and Alaska.
The only real differences between the public Obama campaign statements and the targeting map are that the public statements remove New Jersey, Oregon and Washington (33 electoral votes), while emphasizing Alaska, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska-02 and North Dakota (21 electoral votes). Given that the highly targeted, black states are worth 177 electoral votes, and the "safe blue" are worth 167 electoral votes, this is really just trimming around the edges.
It is also worth noting that the highly targeted "black" states are actually pretty similar to the 2004 swing state map. In fact, if North Carolina and Georgia are removed, and the nearly identically sized Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon and West Virginia are added, then there is no difference between the highly targeted Obama states and the highly targeted Kerry states. In summary, the entire targeting difference is quite small:
--Newly targeted states (51 electoral votes): Alaska, Georgia, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska-02, North Carolina, and North Dakota.
--Targeted states no more (31 electoral votes): Arizona, Arkansas, Minnesota, West Virginia
Given that John Edwards was Kerry's VP selection in 2004, it could be argued that Kerry targeted North Carolina four years ago, making the differences in the maps even smaller.
Overall, all this talk of a new electoral map seems a bit overblown to me, as Obama's targets match up about 80% of the time. The biggest difference, in my estimation, is the underlying, fifty-state effort from the DNC and the Obama campaign alike. With better funded state parties, DNC field organizers, Obama campaign staff, and a voter registration effort taking place across the country, we have a national, long-term effort in place working not only to win the White House, but also to build a working majority both in Congress and on the ground. That is the way the map is truly expanding, not just because Alaska, Georgia, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska-02, North Carolina, and North Dakota are in competitive in this campaign.
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