View from Australia: The map is still redrawn

By Jonathan Bradley

We're currently at a stage in the presidential contest in which, unless you're a Republican candidate, geography doesn't matter a whole lot. Mitt Romney and Rick Perry can worry about Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, but if the rest of us want to get a sense of President Barack Obama's re-election chances, national statistics will provide the most useful information. That will continue to be the case all through the electoral season to some extent — if Obama's really unpopular in Pennsylvania, he's also going to be unpopular in Ohio, and probably in Virginia and Missouri as well — but when the general election gets underway regional concens will begin to get more important.

One of the big stories from the 2008 campaign was that Obama had successfully redrawn the electoral map. For the first time since John F. Kennedy, a northern Democrat running for president had proven himself able to win seats in the South. Along with Western locations like Colorado and Nevada, states like North Carolina and Virginia proved that Democrats need not stick to the coastal urban fringes of the North Eastern or Pacific states and attempting to eke out victories in swing states like Florida or Ohio. 

This was significant because states like Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, and Virginia are the locus of a shift in American society. These states, along with Republican strongholds like Georgia, Texas, and Arizona, have been the centres for American growth over the past few decades, in terms of both population and the economy. This is the Sunbelt to which America has been moving, the South and Southwestern states typified by growth in the service and knowledge industries. They are places where the exurbs have complemented the suburb as the site for population growth, and all have seen significant increases in their Hispanic populations. Most of them also experienced a harsh downturn when the housing bubble burst, with the new construction on the land surrounding the outskirts of the big cities suddenly worthless.

Obama isn't particularly popular in these states, but importantly, he's not peculiarly unpopular either. Aaron Blake, in the Washington Post, recently discussed the importance of Southern states like Virginia and North Carolina to his election effort:

North Carolina and Virginia, which emerged as two of the more surprising victories for Obama in 2008, have like most states turned against the president over the last year. But like those Rust Belt states, they remain winnable, and the president’s three-day bus tour to the Southeastern states is seen as acknowledgement that he won’t be conceding them any time soon.

The White House, of course, emphasizes that this is strictly an official trip — paid for by the government and focusing on the president’s jobs plan and not campaign politics — but the destinations should leave little doubt about what the states mean to Obama, who has made a habit of mixing official business with swing state visits.

Polling shows the two states will be tough for him, but they haven’t deserted him either.

And here's Ronald Brownstein, noting the continued importance of the West:

On one side are demographic trends that favor Democrats—rising levels of racial diversity, education, and urbanization. On the other is the ideological backlash that the party has repeatedly faced across the region, particularly from whites, when it has controlled the White House and implemented a national Democratic agenda.

President Obama and the Republican presidential contenders who gathered here on Tuesday for their most voluble debate yet all have much at stake in how those competing dynamics intersect in 2012. Obama could struggle in the graying blue-collar Midwestern states that once tipped national elections. That will increase the pressure on him to defend his 2008 victories in Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, which constitute part of a new arc of youthful and growing swing states emerging across the Sun Belt. Once, the Mountain West was a luxury for Democrats; now, it looks like a necessity.

The South and the West also represent a cultural divide within the Republican Party as well, with the former representing the more traditional model of conservative, while the latter has a pricklier, more independent streak. It's a distinction my colleague Jack Miles discussed in a recent column here on the role religion will play in the forthcoming race. But the urge for self-reliance is strong at a bipartisan level in the West, though, ironically, the region has always relied most strongly on government assistance, whether it was in the form of the railroad ushering in the goldrush or the Internet spearheading the Silicon Valley boom.

Over the coming twelve months, look for these regions to play an increasing role in the political discourse of the nation. Even if America still imagines itself as the country it was during the 20th Century — a land of neat suburbs and Midwestern industrialisation — it has become a place of big box stores and warm sunshine. Once the candidates are out of Iowa and New Hampshire, that's the terrain on which the election will be fought.

21 October 2011