Gone
Is the McCain camp giving up on Colorado and New Mexico?
From CNN’s Jon King
While Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado are still officially listed as McCain target states, two top strategists and advisers tell CNN that the situation in those states looks increasingly bleak. Iowa and New Mexico always have been viewed as difficult races, but the similar assessment of Colorado reflects a dramatic shift for a campaign that had long counted on the state."Gone," was the word one top McCain insider used to describe those three states.
It’s not over until it’s over, and Nevada and Montana remain in play in the West, but this is good news for our Western strategy.
See FiveThirtyEight and electoral-vote for encouraging maps for Democrats.
Update October 21. The McCain camp is pushing back on the report they're losing hope in Colorado. See this link.
Update October 23. Though Senator McCain is headed to Colorado Friday, Republicans are reportedly slashing their television advertising in Colorado's three biggest television stations.
See this link.
Update October 29. CNN reports Senator Obama has doubled his lead in Colorado.
Polling in other Western states and swing states around the country continues to look favorable for Senator Obama and Democrats in general. Tonight's inspiring broadcast will surely help.
Leo Brown | October 20, 2008 | Comment on This Post (1 so far) |
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Comments
Democrats who have been working for years to remake the politics of the West can take great pride in how far we've come, and next Tuesday is going to be another big step in that political realignment. Just a quick review: In 2000, of the 8 states of the Rocky Mountain West, none had Democratic governors. Now 5 of them do. In 2000, 3 of the 16 U.S. Senate seats in the Rockies were held by Democrats. Now 5 of them are, and when the Udall cousins win in Colorado and New Mexico next week, the Democrats will hold 7 of those 16 Senate seats.
Where we haven't turned the corner yet has been with presidential politics. Al Gore barely carried New Mexico in 2000, but in 2004, Bush won all the electoral votes in the Rockies. But what a difference now: 22 electoral votes are seriously in play in the interior West, making the region as important as Pennsylvania (21 votes) or Ohio (20)
Many of us who have worked so doggedly for so many years to turn the region around have argued that the next step will be to make sure that, if Obama is elected, the region is given an appropriate role at the transition table. I know it feels premature, if not downright unlucky, to start thinking about a transition before the election, but the simple fact is that things move way too fast following the election to wait until then to start attending to western interests. While Western Democrats continue for the rest of this week to do everything possible to elect Democrats from the bottom to the top of the ticket, and all across the region, we also need to be positioning ourselves to make sure that those appointments of greatest concern to the West go to people who understand the region and whose policies will match the pragmatic, problem-solving approaches to western issues that have been enabling western Democrats to get elected and reelected across the region.
Daniel Kemmis
Missoula
Posted by: Daniel Kemmis | Oct 30, 2008 9:46:14 AM
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(and yes, we know that sometimes they're very, very wrong. Other times, they're right on.)
