A 50-State Presidential Election?

By BJ

As the focus shifts to the general election campaign and the strategies being laid out, the Obama camp in particular is looking to vastly expand the map of battleground states.

Senator Barack Obama�s general election plan calls for broadening the electoral map by challenging Senator John McCain in typically Republican states � from North Carolina to Missouri to Montana � as Mr. Obama seeks to take advantage of voter turnout operations built in nearly 50 states in the long Democratic nomination battle, aides said.

�Nearly 50� thanks to the FUBAR of Florida and Michigan, where they will have to play catch-up. For all of the hoopla centered on seating the delegates, it is this fact that is most likely to do harm to the Democrats in those two states come November.

On Monday, Mr. Obama will travel to North Carolina � a state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 32 years � to start a two-week tour of speeches, town hall forums and other appearances intended to highlight differences with Mr. McCain on the economy. From there, he heads to Missouri, which last voted for a Democrat in 1996. His first campaign swing after securing the Democratic presidential nomination last week was to Virginia, which last voted Democratic in 1964.

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While the lengthy, contentious Democratic primary fight against Mrs. Clinton exposed vulnerabilities in Mr. Obama that the Republicans will no doubt seek to exploit, it also allowed him to build a nearly nationwide network of volunteers and professional organizers. While early assertions by presidential campaigns that they intend to expand the playing field are often little more than feints intended to force opponents to spend time and money defending states that they should have locked up, Mr. Obama�s fund-raising success gives his campaign more flexibility than most to play in more places.

Mr. Obama�s aides said some states where they intend to campaign � like Georgia, Missouri, Montana and North Carolina � might ultimately be too red to turn blue. But the result of making an effort there could force Mr. McCain to spend money or send him to campaign in what should be safe ground, rather than using those resources in states like Ohio.

Mr. Obama�s campaign manager, David Plouffe, said that the primary contest had left the campaign with strong get-out-the-vote operations in Republican states that were small enough that better-than-usual turnout could make a difference in the general election. Among those he pointed to was Alaska, which last voted for a Democrat in 1964.

�Do we have to win any of those to get to 270?� Mr. Plouffe said, referring to the number of electoral votes needed to win the election. �No. Do we have reason to think we can be competitive there? Yes. Do we have organizations in those states to be competitive? Yes. This is where the primary was really helpful to us now.�

Mr. Plouffe also pointed to Oregon and Washington, states that have traditionally been competitive and where Mr. Obama defeated Mrs. Clinton, as places the campaign could have significant advantages .

Still, the Republican Party has a history of out-hustling and out-organizing the Democratic Party in national elections. The question is whether the more organically grown game plans that carried Mr. Obama to victory in Democratic primaries and caucuses can match the well-oiled organizations Republicans have put together.

To some extent, this is a carry-over of the strategy that allowed Obama to defeat Clinton in the primaries. The math is different in the general though, where coming close in a state doesn�t offer any proportional advantage. Despite that, there are advantages to running such a broad-based campaign, and Matt Yglesias noted one of the major ones.

Bush talked in 2000 about the problems of poor minority children in school not so much because he thought he was going to get huge numbers of black people to vote for him, but to signal to voters everywhere that he was �a different kind of Republican,� caring, etc. Even if Obama doesn�t have any realistic prospect of winning North Carolina or Montana he certainly wants to win in places like Minnesota and Virginia and parts of Minnesota are like Montana, parts of Virginia are like North Carolina and an image as a broad-minded person who campaigns everywhere can be helpful. After all, Obama�s eruption onto the national stage was a critique of the red/blue politics of cultural division, so it�s good to dramatize that by running a nationwide campaign.

Beyond that, the more places you campaign the more places you�re in a position to take advantage of unexpected good fortune. If for some reason McCain commits some kind of horrible gaffe that alienates the people of the big empty square states, it�s good to have laid the groundwork to take advantage of that. Or maybe Bob Barr will catch fire in the Deep South. In a narrowcast campaign, you need to guess in advance how things will unfold over the next several months and that�s just difficult to do. If you have the cash to run a wide-focus campaign, then you can simply try to respond competently to events as they unfold however they unfold.

The other major advantage of a broad-based national campaign is that such a focus should give a boost to many of the down-ticket Dems fighting for House and Senate seats. As Fester noted a little while ago, both the Republican brand, and even more so their ideas, are in the toilet, and that means the Democrats are poised for some major pick-ups.

It is this kind of strategic thinking that I�ve always liked about the Obama-Dean style of organization. Of course, that only works if Obama wins, in which case he and Dean are organizational geniuses. If they lose, they�ll be pilloried for wasting resources in states they couldn�t win.

At the Presidential level, so long as the focus is one just McCain and Obama, the likelihood of a blow-out is slim, but if the campaign turns into a national referendum on the policies of the Republicans over the last eight years, we may yet see a serious pummeling.