I used to laugh when the 1990s right-wing Clinton scandalmongers would send their pseudo-journalists and private eyes to Arkansas to look for Clinton's connections to all the nefarious characters the right-wing media machine reported about. They were effective at spinning these tales to traditional big media reporters anxious to play "gotcha", but the simple fact known to anybody who has ever done politics in a small state is that everyone is connected in one way or another to everybody else. Every time I go back home I am reminded of this connectedness.
Take me in the two states I've lived in before moving to D.C. It's been 15 years since I've lived in Iowa, but I still know the governor, lt. governor, secretary of state, attorney general, secretary of agriculture and the House and Senate majority leaders. Most of them are personal friends.
Or go back even further. It's been almost 25 years since I moved from Nebraska at the age of 22. In spite of this, I still know a ton of people in politics back home. The current mayor of Lincoln, who I've known since before I left, is the son-in-law of two of my mom's best friends. The previous mayor, who I've known since I was born, goes to the church I grew up attending. The mayor before that has been one of my best friends for almost 30 years. My wife used to run in 10K races and marathons with Bob Kerrey before he ever ran for governor the first time, and another close friend of my mom's worked for his dad. Ben Nelson's chief of staff was a friend of mine in high school. Even on the Republican side, I have personal connections. Former Governor Mike Johanns used to be a liberal Democrat, and I worked on his first race for county commissioner. And current Attorney General Jon Bruning is the son of one of my wife's best friends, and one of his top aides was my best friend in elementary school.
So what's my point in listing all these connections? I think we need to understand that the politics and language in small states has a different feel and rhetoric than the politics of big states and cities. Sometimes all those personal ties can make the political jousting really ugly and petty, like all the Clinton-era Arkansas attacks. But more often, when you know people on such a personal basis, it doesn't generally feel right to hammer them as hard as we do in national politics. I would love to know what bloggers and the OpenLeft.com community members who live in small states think about this and how it affects their political work and their writing.
I know for me, being from a small state has changed the way I do politics even though I've lived in D.C. for so long. I still try to get along with a wide variety of folks, and I still try to see the point of view of my opponents even when I think they are fundamentally wrong. Although I've given up entirely on the Bush and DeLay-style politicians who have taken over the Republican Party, because I think they are mean-spirited to the core, I still try to assume the best about most other people in politics until they prove me wrong.
I'm not at all saying, by the way, that folks from big cities or states are less likely to be like what I've described above. And God knows there is nothing idyllic about these states- there are plenty of bullies and cheats and liars in the small states I described, too.
I'm just saying that growing up in a small state has driven these kinds of attitudes that I described deep into me.
So I'm curious what folks think, especially those of you from small states, since we have to win plenty of Senate races in these small states to have a majority in the U.S. Senate- how does the kind of connectedness dynamic make the strategies for winning politically in small states different than in bigger states or cities?
I'm putting together a spreadsheet of electoral votes, adjusting for the massive swing in self-identified party membership over the last few years. In 2004, 42% of voters thought of themselves as Democrats, and 42% as voters. Today, 50% of voters self-identify as Democrats, and only 35% as Republicans. That is, well, stunning.
To put that into perspective, if you translate the party self-identification shift straight across the country and adjust percentages from 2004, we're talking about going into an election where the Republicans can count as safe 'red' states where they will have 55% majorities as Alabama, Idaho, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming. That's about 30 electoral votes. Democrats will actually have a majority of the electoral college as a base, just from states like Ohio and Nevada becoming safe 'blue' states. We'll start in a position to just run up the score.
That sounds crazy, I know, but it's not unreasonable to believe that over the past three years, 10-15% of the voting population has changed their mind and felt a sense of betrayal towards the Republican Party combined with a new sense of liberalism. In fact, it would be strange if that hadn't happened. Now, self-identified registration changes aren't evenly distributed, but it is useful as a thought experiment to think about what kind of impact they will have on the electoral map. To understand the upcoming election, we have to understand this new bloc of 'betrayed' voters and throw away the conventional wisdom of 2000-2006 red and blue modeling of politics. We're in landslide territory.
Newt Gingrich and the rest of the GOP leadership is praying that the Sarkozy model will apply here. Sarkozy is the conservative French President who was able to succeed an unpopular conservative French President by running as a change candidate. I don't think that's likely, because of the organization of the Republican Party and its authoritarian base. Matthew Yglesias points to this Ron Brownstein Op-Ed on how Republican Senators and House member are facing primary challenges.
Hagel, the most outspoken Republican critic of the war, has already drawn a serious primary opponent (Nebraska Atty. Gen. Jon Bruning) for next year, and Graham and Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens could face challenges in the primaries too -- which would make 2008 the first time since 1978 that more than one Republican senator has faced such a challenge. More than half a dozen House Republicans, all of them in Republican-leaning districts, also have attracted primary challengers.
I've hit this theme before, and I think it's one of the most underreported storylines out there. Republicans are responsive to a prowar right-wing elite and an authoritarian base, which is making them much less appealing to 70% of the country. They are living in la la land, where the economy is great and we're winning the war in Iraq. And their moderates are basically dead, or nearly so.
It's time to begin planning for a Democratic landslide election, and working to think through how to position progressive Democrats. I'm working on a piece on 'extractive industry state Democrats', progressives who come from mining and energy intensive states like Alaska, Wyoming, and Texas. But I'm not sure if that's the right place to look.
How to appeal to these 'betrayed voters' is one of the key questions we have to work through. Who are they? What do they want? And how can we make them permanently part of our coalition?
STATE BLOGS
