Gallup has just released "State of the States: Political Party Affiliation", the first in a four-part series to be released this week on Gallup.com, based on Gallup Poll Daily tracking data collected throughout 2008. And the results could not be clearer: GOP plurality states (including leaners) have been reduced to a mere handful: the Mormon mountain heartland, plus Alaska and Nebraska. That's it:
This contrasts sharply with what Gallup found as recently as 2002:
I'll work up a more extensive analysis for this weekend, but this shift is so dramatic, and so sharply at odds with the ongoing Beltway narrative, that I didn't think I should wait till then to toss this out for discussion. As a further indication of what this means, consider Gallup's list of the top 10 states for both parties:
As for the amount of data, Gallup reports:
In 2008, Gallup interviewed more than 350,000 U.S. adults as part of Gallup Poll Daily tracking. That includes interviews with 1,000 or more residents of every U.S. state except Wyoming (885) and North Dakota (953), as well as the District of Columbia (689). There were more than 15,000 interviews conducted with residents of California, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida.
Now then for a couple of caveats. Firstly, Gallup's numbers consist of interviews with all adults -- not registered voters, and certainly not likely voters. Depending on the particular application that we're using this data for, that may be helpful or unhelpful. What this perhaps indicates, however, is that even after all the millions of new voters that the Democrats registered and brought to the polls in 2008, there are still probably some marginal gains to be had, particularly in areas like the deep South that the Obama campaign did not really concentrate in.
Secondly, these totals include "leaners" -- independents who lean toward one party or another, but don't identify themselves as such. This tends to increase the Democratic margin by a couple of points.
Thirdly and perhaps most importantly is a point that both Michael Barone and I have raised at various times: one consequence of the Democratic coalition being larger, particularly as it tends to include a miscellany of groups that don't always see eye-to-eye with one another (African-Americans, Hispanics, coastal liberals, union workers, young voters, etc.), is that it is more difficult to harness the entirety of that coalition in national elections. A Democratic presidential candidate from the North might have trouble appealing to voters in the South. A candidate from the South might have trouble appealing to voters in the North and West. A theoretic "generic Democrat" might have a chance at a rather large majority -- but a "generic Democrat" is an abstraction, and most real Democrats will offend the sensibilities of some or another region. In Barack Obama's case, these were voters in Appalachian and "Highlands" states like West Virginia and Kentucky, states that remain highly Democratic at the state level but which have not recently voted for Northern presidential candidates.
But, rather than get down to the micro-level and pick these apart (I promise a bit of that this weekend), just look at those maps like a board game, and ask yourself: which would you rather be: red or blue?
And then ask, given the map at the top of this post, which should Dems be playing right now, every single sound-bite of every single news cycle? Offense, or defense?
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