Re: Whistling Past Dixie May Be Whistling Past the Graveyard
Alan Abramowitz wrote in the Emerging Democratic Majority over the weekend that the premise in Whistling Past Dixie, is essentially off base. Abramowitz points out that since 1984, the better a Democratic candidate does in the South, the better they do in battle ground states:
The better the Democratic (or Republican) candidate does in the South in 2008, the better that candidate will do in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Colorado that are critical to winning the presidency. That is because southern voters respond in the same way to the candidates and issues as voters in the rest of the country.
This seems contrary to the congressional results last fall, where the South reelected an almost full slate of Republicans, and the West, Midwest and Northeast dumped practically every Republican in a swing district they could find.
But Abramowitz uses statistics to prove his point, and not being a statistician but rather a statistician's son, I'm not excited about trying to refute him on his numbers. But, I'll give it a try.
He uses two states, North Carolina and Georgia as representative of the entire South. I would have also included either Alabama or Mississippi as a core deep South state.
He also only included three other states, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Ohio as the swing states.
And, the opposite would also seem to be true from Abromowitz's argument, that the better a presidential candidate does in these swing states, the better chance their going to have winning the South.
Or, even better, the better a candidate does in a swing Western state like Colorado, the better chance they have at winning pretty much everywhere, except Georgia. Take a look at his chart, the closer the number is to 1, the better the Democratic candidate who did well in the first state did in the other states.
So for a candidate who does well in Georgia, the numbers are North Carolina .93, Ohio .85, Pennsylvania .92, Colorado .733.
And for Colorado: North Carolina .93 (the same), Ohio .89 (higher), Pennsylvania .90 (just a bit lower) and of course Colorado .733 (the same obviously and pretty low).
What he actually ends up proving is that again, the West is not the South. A candidate doing well in Southern states does just as well as a candidate who does well in a Western one. And, that politics in Georgia are somewhat antithetical to the politics in Colorado.
His example wouldn't work very well for our basic thesis on this site, that a Democrat coming from the West, actually running from the West, would have a better chance than the typical Democrats we've seen since 1984. Since then, no one has centered a campaign on winning the West. They've been mostly bi-coastal with trying to win as much of the South and Midwest to get over the top.
I think Abromowitz's stats actually prove Schaller's point, that coming from the West and winning as much as the midwest and the two coasts as possible would be a winning strategy. What works in the West works in Ohio.
Emmett O'Connell | February 12, 2007 | Comment on This Post (2 so far) |
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Comments
Emmett,
It would be interesting to see a fifty-state correlation matrix on this metric or a fifty-state correlation with another metric (e.g. congressional vote). What is shown, as you point out, is that Colorado and Georgia are NOT highly correlated compared to the other states on the chart.
Not surprisingly, then, Georgia has a GOP governor and two GOP senators, while Colorado has a Democratic governor and only one GOP senator. And that senator will retire in 2008.
Issues will play differently in Georgia than in Colorado. Georgia is more nativist than Colorado on immigration. Georgian’s will look at aid to education differently due to the rise of private, segregated schools in the South.
The battlegrounds of 2008 will likely be in the Midwest along the Mississippi, the swingable West, and the outer South. Virginia and perhaps even North Carolina might slip away from the GOP. Think Big River, El Norte meets Sagebrush, and Arlington/Alexandria/Research Triangle Park, or Obama, Richardson, and Edwards.
Posted by: Leo Brown | Feb 12, 2007 8:14:58 AM
I saw this guy on PBS. He is full of crap. He has some idea of the south that has not existed for quite some time. He says race relations are worse in the south but I remember mostly California and New York having the most race relations problems. He has some kind of grudge against the south.
Posted by: John Turner | Apr 12, 2007 9:58:26 PM
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(and yes, we know that sometimes they're very, very wrong. Other times, they're right on.)
