MSNBC: Do The Democrats Need Dixie?

[Nicholas_J]

Interesting article, also very revealing as Kerry is starting to do what is suggeested in the heartland strategy, beating Bush in states he narrowly won in the middle of the nations, places like Pennsylvania, where Kerry is now enjoying sizable leads over Bush.
All Kerry needs is wins in a few southern states, most likely Florida where a number of polls show him leading Bush by a fairly comfortable margin.



Do The Democrats Need Dixie? By Richard S. Dunham in Washington

Updated: 7:00 p.m. ET Feb. 22, 2004President George W. Bush may have hit a rough patch, but there's one part of the country where he is still walking tall: the South. Despite sliding to a 50% job approval rating in a Feb. 12-15 CBS News Poll -- down from 60% in late December -- Bush maintains a double-digit lead in the South in matchups with his top Democratic rivals. Combine that with his sweep of 11 Southern states in 2000, and it's not hard to figure out why Democrats are contemplating a route to the White House that doesn't run through Dixie. "Al Gore proved that you can win the election without a single Southern state, if he'd only won New Hampshire," Democratic front-runner John Kerry told supporters in San Francisco last spring.
The Massachusetts senator has since explained that he was talking arithmetic, not strategy. But Democratic operatives say the party may have no choice but to bypass the South's 153 electoral votes -- 57% of the 271 total needed to win.
So party strategists are looking West -- to the Midwest or Southwest, that is. They are focusing on the industrial heartland, where manufacturing jobs have been exported by the millions, and the rapidly growing Southwest, where Democrats could reap benefits from favorable demographic trends. Either gambit will require the party to hammer Bush on economics, quiet any debate over divisive cultural issues, pick the right candidate for Veep -- and get lucky.
Still, no Democrat has ever been elected without winning some states of the old Confederacy. The candidate must hold on to all of Gore's "blue" states -- which have only 260 electoral votes now, down from 267 in 2000 because of post-census reapportionment -- and win states with 10 more. Without the South, a Democrat will have to carry 70% of the rest of the nation's electoral votes -- in the face of a $200 million GOP campaign to portray the Democratic nominee as an out-of-the-mainstream lefty. "It's mathematically possible," says Bush pollster Matthew Dowd, "but it's like drawing an inside straight."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4355409/

[Thrill]

1. Bush

won't win Tenn and NH this time

[newyawker99]

6. Hi BrentTaylor!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[DemBones DemBones]

2. They mentioned Hispanic votes in the Southwest but

there are a lot of Hispanics in the Southeast, too. Georgia's Hispanic population, mostly Mexican, keeps growing and growing, and you know they aren't coming here in hopes their jobs will be exported from the U.S. Yet many of them work in just those sorts of jobs -- textile and carpet mills, poultry processing. Spanish-speaking Democratic activists will be a must this year.

Edit: And Clinton won Georgia in 1992!!! That was partly due to the efforts of Governor Zell Miller, though, who won't be helping us this time. Still, the population has changed since then. People keep moving to Georgia from other parts of the U.S., liking our warmer weather and lower cost of living, and they're not all Republicans.


We ought to write to this MSNBC writer, though, because he admits he was too young to be drafted, and needs us to tell him what life was like in the sixties and seventies. He wrote on February 22:

"HYSTERICAL HYPERBOLE. It was reckless for Academy Award winning filmmaker Michael Moore to accuse Bush of "desertion" because of gaps in his National Guard service record, when the son of the then-U.N. ambassador was working on a Republican Senate campaign in Alabama."

He goes on in that vein a good bit, then attacks the RW for altering photos of John Kerry (adding Jane Fonda or a Viet Cong flag.)

But he apparently doesn't understand that people in the military aren't allowed to play hooky because they're working on a political campaign. Only George Bush's son George got away with that.

The article's listed at the bottom of your link, and is called "Vietnam is Ancient History."

[5thGenDemocrat]

3. The Dems can't win the South, but we can win a couple of states there

Maybe Tennessee, maybe Arkansas. And we only "lost" Florida by -- what -- 537 votes? We don't need to win the whole region, but peeling off a couple states would be great. And I sincerely think we've got a shot at doing that.
We won't know unless we try, and I believe the mood is swinging our way, at least in some places.
John
I don't just want to beat Dopey. I want a landslide.

[DemBones DemBones]

4. Me, too, John, a landslide is what we need! n/t

[Leilani]

5. Shoot for the following:

Arkansas
Louisiana
West Virginia

These are states that Bush won, but are not typical knee jerk
Repug states.

Each has 2 Dem Senators.

Which means Dems can win statewide.

[Bombtrack]

7. Titles like this make me freaking cringe, and can you link your allegation

that there are "several" polls showing Kerry leading Bush in Florida?

Also, Kerry is not going to win a "few" southern states unless Bush completely implodes. Nor does he "need" to do so in order to win. However the democratic nominee does need to make Bush work for at least a third of the electoral votes in the south, which I believe Kerry cannot do in almost any probability