In 1988, the Democratic party – arguably the oldest political party in the world – tottered on the brink of electoral oblivion. It had just suffered its third consecutive presidential election defeat. Furthermore, its only win during the previous twenty-four years had been by the narrowest of margins. Sixteen years on, and the party has hauled itself back from the edge, thanks to the rise of the New Democrats and the success of the Clinton presidency. The Democrats have won the popular vote in every presidential election since 1988 and now stand poised to wrest the White House back from George Bush.
But the Democrats are fighting the election in a polarised, ‘50/50’ nation. The number of voters describing themselves as either Democrat or Republican is finely balanced, the Republicans have wafer-thin majorities in Congress, and the 2000 election was the closest since Jack Kennedy’s narrow win in 1960. The opinion polls this year have oscillated between giving President Bush and his Democrat challenger Senator John Kerry small leads.
The election will, therefore, be decided by ‘swing’ voters: those without a strong attachment to either party, who are thus ‘up for grabs’ at election time. In 2000, these voters – many of whom were critical to both the creation of the Republican presidential majority of the 1980s and Bill Clinton’s two landslide wins during the 1990s – swung in the direction of the Republicans. While the party’s presidential candidate, Al Gore, managed to hold Clinton’s lead amongst women, retired people, and upper-income voters, he slipped sharply amongst lower-income families earning $30,000 to $50,000 (£15,000 to £25,000) per annum; Catholics; independents (those who do not identify themselves as being supporters of either of the two main parties); voters under thirty; and non-college educated voters. Additionally, the Democrats also need to improve their performance among male voters, where they lagged ten points behind the Republicans in 2000 (despite leading by eleven percent among women).
And these swing voters will have the biggest impact in the battleground states. For, although the presidential election is frequently described as America’s only national election, in fact, it comprises fifty individual state contests. In each, Kerry and Bush will be duelling to win the votes of the state’s delegates to the electoral college, the somewhat arcane body which ensured that, last time around, Bush ended up in the White House despite winning fewer votes across the country as a whole than Vice President Al Gore.
As with British general elections, each side will write off certain states as safely in the hands of their opponent. Don’t expect, therefore, to see much of John Kerry in the ‘red state’ Republican strongholds: Deep South states like Alabama and Mississippi, mountain states like Idaho and Wyoming or prairie states like North Dakota and Kansas. On the other hand, Bush strategists will be well aware that their man has little chance of wresting ‘blue’ Democrat states in the Northeast like Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland and New York, or the biggest prize of all – California – from Kerry’s final total. Instead, the battle for the presidency will be fought in a dozen or so ‘swing states’ – those which went for Bush or Gore by six percentage points or fewer in 2000.
The electoral pitch on which the two parties are playing is perhaps broader in this election than usual. In a ‘50/50’ nation, every electoral vote counts. Both campaigns are aware of the way the Gore campaign abandoned states like Ohio during the final weeks of the campaign, only to see Bush win them by tiny margins on election night. Added to which, both campaigns have raised huge sums of money, and withdrawn from campaign finance restrictions which would have capped their spending, giving them the opportunity to range further afield than they may otherwise have done.
One further factor complicates the electoral map this year: the 2000 census. Because states won by Bush in 2000 gained more population during the 1990s than those won by Gore, ‘red’ states have a net extra total of seven electoral college votes, while ‘blue’ states have lost seven votes.
The main election battleground this autumn will be in the midwest. Here, Kerry will need to hold on to states – such as Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin – that backed Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, as well as Gore in 2000. While Gore’s margins in some of these states – his twelve-point win in Illinois, for example – are unlikely to be overturned by Bush, the president will seek to challenge some of the narrower wins. Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin, for instance, are traditionally relatively liberal states that backed Democrat Michael Dukakis when George Bush Snr won the presidency in 1988. However, they were all also states where Green party candidate Ralph Nader polled strongly in 2000, splitting the centre-left vote and sharply reducing Gore’s majorities. Wisconsin particularly is seen as a possible Bush gain. If Kerry loses any of these states, he’ll have a hard job evicting Bush from office; if he loses all of them, the Democrats will be in for a very grim night.
In his search for states to take from Bush, Kerry’s two biggest targets both lie in the midwest: the president won Ohio and Missouri by tiny margins of around 3.5 percent of the popular vote in 2000. Assuming Kerry wins all the states won by Gore last time, a victory in either state – both of which backed Clinton in 1992 and 1996 – would take him to the White House. On paper, Ohio is Kerry’s better bet. Under Bush’s presidency, the state has haemorrhaged jobs – it is still heavily dependent upon manufacturing – while Missouri has a lower unemployment rate than the nation as a whole and amongst the fastest job-creation growth.
On the other hand, Kerry will be keenly aware of Missouri’s psychological importance: since 1900 it has backed the winning candidate in every presidential election (with the exception of 1956). Kerry can expect solid backing from urban areas in both states – cities like Columbus and Toledo in Ohio and St Louis and Kansas City in Missouri went heavily for Gore in 2000. He will struggle more, however, in the more culturally conservative rural and small-town areas of both states. Missouri’s social conservatism was demonstrated last month when the state’s voters overwhelmingly supported an amendment to the state constitution barring gay marriage.
In contrast to the midwest, George Bush’s native south looks an unlikely region for Kerry to hunt electoral votes, although the Democrat candidate’s choice of North Carolina Senator John Edwards as his running mate showed that he had no intention of ceding the whole region to the Republicans without a fight.
The president should comfortably hold those states – such as Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina – that he won last time (although both Virginia and North Carolina are seen by some as becoming increasingly competitive). The four principal targets in the south for Kerry are Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee – all of which backed Clinton in 1996 but Bush in 2000. Remember, however, that Clinton was a southerner who hailed from Arkansas, a state that has not backed a northern Democrat since Kennedy. Kerry will do well to win states like Louisiana and Tennessee, although his strong military record may help to lessen southern cultural antipathy to a liberal Yankee.
With 27 electoral votes, however, Florida, which Bush officially won by 537 votes, is both the biggest prize and the most attainable for the Massachusetts senator. The close race in Florida in 2000, reflecting the national result, was unsurprising: demographically, the state is a microcosm of America. Kerry does face a challenge, though. Florida has only voted for the Democrat presidential candidate three times since 1960, the president’s brother, Jeb Bush, is governor, and the Republicans performed strongly in the 2002 mid-term elections.
Democrats, however, can be cheered by the fact that, were it not for ballot irregularities, Gore would probably have won Florida in 2000. Moreover, since 1988, Democrat strength has been increasing in the five counties that added the most people over the past decade. And, while the Republicans remain strong in rural Florida, the same trends that have worked in the Democrats’ favour in other states – a growing minority population and the growth of a post-industrial, hi-tech economy – are clearly evident here.
While Kerry may struggle in the south, Bush will face similar difficulties in the northeast. Al Gore swept the region – the most heavily Democratic in the country – in 2000 and Kerry will aim to do so again. New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey are all rich in electoral college votes. At the same time, Kerry will be aware that two of the region’s states – Maine and Pennsylvania – went to Gore by narrow four-to-five-point margins four years ago. While watching his back there, Kerry will, however, attempt to win back two states – West Virginia and New Hampshire – which went for Clinton in 1992 and 1996 but backed Bush in 2000.
New Hampshire is likely to prove easier. Despite libertarian tendencies – state moto: ‘live free or die’ – which have kept New Hampshire to the right of its northeast neighbours, the state shifted to the left in the nineties.
Although West Virginia has a longer tradition of support for the Democrats than New Hampshire – it even backed Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 and the Democrats still hold all the major state-wide offices – Kerry may struggle to wrest it from Bush, especially if the economy picks up. Republicans have worked hard to woo the state by exploiting Democrat support for gun control and environmental regulations in this rural state, which is heavily dependent on the coal industry.
Across the continent, on the Pacific coast, lies California. Its 55 electoral votes constitute a fifth of the total needed to win the White House. Since 1988, when George Bush Snr narrowly won there, the state has become increasingly Democratic in presidential elections. California is one of the last states to declare its results and, if Kerry has any hope of winning the presidency, the outcome should not be at all uncertain there. In addition to California, Kerry needs to win two other western states that went for Gore in 2000: Oregon and Washington. Both have been reliably Democrat since the late 1980s. However, a strong performance by Ralph Nader in the Pacific west four years ago saw the Democrat margin of victory nearly whittled away: in Oregon, Bush came within 7,000 votes of winning the state.
There are three other key swing states in the west – New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada, plus one other state, Colorado, that, despite Bush’s eight-point win there in 2000, is being wooed by Kerry. After Bush’s Florida victory, Gore’s win in New Mexico was the narrowest of 2000. Kerry will want to hold this state, while fighting Bush for Arizona (which Clinton won in 1996, the first Democrat victory there since 1948) and Nevada (which backed Clinton in both 1992 and 1996). Elsewhere in the west, Bush should comfortably win mountain states like Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming.
With the start of the general election campaign proper this month, both campaigns will be looking again at the electoral map: expanding, redirecting and contracting their state operations as they try to judge where best to spend their candidates’ money and time in the weeks leading up to election day.