Democrats Should Look West?
I was interested in this LA Times opinion piece by Matt Bai yesterday, mainly because it’s something I have never thought about.
His argument is that a large segment of the country is moving west and yet the Democrats are still picking candidates from the Industrial states and the South to run for president.
As pundits have already noted more times than John Edwards has uttered the words “two Americas,” Democrats may well make history this presidential season by nominating, for the first time, either a woman or an African American. What the party will not do next year, however, for the 39th straight time since the massive territory of California won its statehood in 1850, is to select a nominee who hails from the West Coast.
For the record, Sen. William Gibbs McAdoo of California came closest, having narrowly lost the nomination twice in the 1920s. But, frankly, he was no more a Californian than Hillary Rodham Clinton is a New Yorker. Other than that, the nearest the party has come to nominating a true Westerner in the last century would be South Dakota’s George McGovern or Texas’ Lyndon Johnson, neither of whom would likely have known the Pacific Ocean had it carried them away while they were sleeping.
This is a telling omission. The Democratic Party, still tightly tethered to its 20th century zenith and the governing agenda that grew from it, continues to look to politicians from the old-line industrial states (New York, Illinois) and the manufacturing and farming South (North Carolina, Tennessee) even as unassuming San Jose quietly replaces Detroit on the list of the 10 largest American cities. In fact, since the modern party was born in Martin Van Buren’s time, Democratic politics at the highest levels has always been controlled by a power axis joining urban Easterners with populist Southerners.
And yet, under the surface, something is in fact changing in the party’s geographic balance. The candidates may give the impression of a party centered east of the Mississippi, but, in every other way, the Democratic universe is tilting West. The shift is most obvious in Congress, where industrial-state Democrats such as Charles Schumer and Rahm Emanuel now answer to a couple of Westerners, Harry Reid of Nevada and Nancy Pelosi of California. Its effect is even more profound at the activist level, however, where the power and energy in Democratic politics now runs increasingly along an East-West current.
When Richard Nixon ran for president the first time he lost his home state of California. Ronald Reagan, I believe, won it both times.
Republicans have always had a hard time winning in California, not because there are no Republicans or conservatives there, but because the larger cities make up the majority of the population and they are largely Democratic cities.
The same holds true for Washington state and Oregon.
Republicans have to pick up some western states in order to win the presidency, and not getting California consistently means they have to pick up a large chunk of the electoral votes in the west.
Colorado seems to be turning purple if not blue. If it goes blue we have to look elsewhere for their electoral votes with the presidential elections being as close as they have been the last few cycles.
On the other hand, with the Democrats having to win all the big states, or at least most of them, it means there is more fertile ground for Republicans and losing one small state isn’t as hard for them as losing a state with a lot of electoral votes is for the Democrats.
Maybe it’s time for the Republican party to start to invest campaign dollars into the larger western states to see if they can pick off a couple, while still hanging onto the campaign strategy for electoral votes that has helped them win the White House all but three times since Truman.
Your thoughts?
Written by ~J~
