I hate to be a contrarian about a goal that has won near-universal praise, but I’m not sure why there’s so much talk about having the next Dem presidential candidate run a 50-state race.
At this point, it seems to be a rare point of agreement amongst almost everyone in the party. For example, it was a familiar refrain at this weekend’s regional DNC gathering, where prospective chairs repeated the meme constantly.
“You can’t compete in just 19 or 20 states,” said former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, another candidate for national party chairman. “You get better odds in Las Vegas than with that program.”
[…]
Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a fellow Democrat, told the candidates that the party needs to listen more to local officials. He said he is proof that Democrats know how to win on the statewide level in the South, and that can be translated to the presidential election with a more comprehensive strategy.
“The next time around, we want a 50-state platform. We want a 50-state party,” Bredesen said to loud applause.
They’re hardly the only ones saying this; it’s been a stated goal of Howard Dean for months.
Howard Dean, who is weighing a bid for leadership of the Democratic Party, will call on Democrats to fight for victory across the country instead of ceding wide swaths of the South and West to Republicans.
All of this sounds very nice, but I think it’s misplaced.
We should, at the outset, set the parameters. I believe Dems, as a party, definitely need to be a national, 50-state power. Indeed, I would argue that this goal has already been achieved. There are Dem governors in “red” states like Oklahoma, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kansas, Virginia, Louisiana, Montana, and West Virginia, among others. There are Dem senators in “red” states like Arkansas, Colorado, North Dakota, New Mexico, and Nevada, among others. Clearly, it’s not as if the Dems are completely dead in “wide swaths of the South and West”; we’re winning local and statewide races there, even this year, often by wide margins.
But when party leaders talk about competing nationally, they’re really referring to our presidential candidates. So, do we really need a Dem nominee who can win in every state? That’d be the ideal, but I hardly see why it’s necessary.
Wellington Webb said over the weekend that we’ll lose if we’re only competing in 19 or 20 states. That’s really not the case. John Kerry picked his targets carefully, competed on a limited map, and with about a 1% shift in Ohio, he’d be writing his inaugural address right now. Al Gore faced an almost-identical map and if Florida had counted all of its votes, he’d be writing his second inaugural address right now.
The name of the game is to get to 270. Whether a candidate gets 270 or 470, the outcome is the same. Kerry and Gore aimed for the prize and fell short, but that doesn’t mean a candidate can’t win this way.
But, you’re saying, our presidential candidates should be able to compete in some of these other states. Maybe so. But why all 50? The Dems could have nominated George Washington Reincarnated but there are a variety of states that would have backed Bush anyway. Why would we invest limited resources on a state — Oklahoma, Utah, Alabama, the list goes on — that we have little chance of winning? Just so we can say that we’re competing in all 50?
Indeed, Republicans are in a strong position right now, but they’re not anywhere close to being a 50-state party at the presidential level. The Kerry campaign may have written off half the country as unwinnable, but let’s not forget that the Bush gang was doing the same thing. How many voters in Vermont, California, Illinois, New York, Maryland, and the District of Columbia were turning on their TVs only to find BC04 ads?
In most states, the “price” of a vote is not equal between the parties. The resources needed to get a voter in Wyoming to vote for a Dem presidential candidate is far more than the resources the GOP needs to earn that same vote. The inverse is true in, say, Massachusetts. With limited time and money, neither side can afford to waste effort in states that won’t be competitive.
There are “wide swaths” of the east and west coasts that the GOP has written off entirely. They don’t care because they don’t need to be a 50-state party to win or govern. Neither do we.