New Geography

Category: Politics

  • With Debate in Town, St. Louis is the Nation’s Capital for a Day

    In 1869 L. U. Reavis spoke for many when he made the case for moving the nation’s capital from, as he put it, “the banks of the Potomac to the banks of the Mississippi.” Citing St. Louis’s location in the exact center of the nation, the growing population of the Mississippi Valley, the presumably temporary expediency that had led leaders to place the capital in Washington in the first place, and the commercial advantages of a capital city on the Mississippi River, Reavis thundered that just as Mohammed had gone to the mountain, so the nation would go to St. Louis. Predicting Congress would make the move within five years, Reavis concluded: “Before 1875 the President of the United States will deliver his message at the new seat of government in the Mississippi Valley.”

    140 years later, the mountain waits. St. Louis today is not without the advantages that led Reavis to paint it as a bustling river town. The city hosts a federal reserve bank, a growing financial sector, a Boeing factory, excellent universities, and a collection of museums, gardens, and theatres that do, in fact, rival D.C.’s. Local demographics reflect the nation as a whole. Behind the Obama and McCain signs that dot my neighborhood are union members, Catholics, college professors, veterans, Jews, Reagan Republicans, pro-lifers, Muslims, and Hillary supporters. I can walk to the city where residents debate gentrification, community continuity, the quality of schools, and the costs of segregation. But if someone had asked me to describe the political vibe of the city when I first moved here in 2006, I would have settled on “resigned.”

    Compared especially to residents of my previous home, Los Angeles, St. Louisans seemed reluctant to admit that they or their concerns mattered at all. At its best, this attitude comes across as midwestern plain-spoken humility. Whereas I couldn’t spend a day in LA without hearing about its status as the city of the future, few folks here mentioned that Missouri is a bellwether state, voting for the winner of every Presidential election since 1904 except that of 1956. And while St. Louisans regularly express familiarity with LA’s geography or its demographics or, at least, its Hollywood productions, I have had to tell Angelenos that St. Louis is on the Mississippi River, that it’s a union town and that, with a greater metro-area population of well over 2 million, we do, in fact, get first-run films in our theaters. At its worst, local humilty seemed to mean passivity and obeisance to national whims dictated by the coasts. When the rest of the nation figured out how to handle crumbling downtowns and failing schools, maybe they’d let us know what to do.

    But in the past month, there’s been a slow rise in local pride. I’ve noticed more signs out for political candidates. Maybe that’s just because the election is nearing. No doubt, too, McCain’s surprise selection of Palin had similar effects here as elsewhere in the country. I see “Hockey Mamas for Obama” scrawled in shoe polish on the backs of mini-vans and sealed with a lipstick kiss. Local moms are writing their suburban papers to say they see themselves in the governor of Alaska and it feels good. The city turns its collective head to Phyllis Schlafly to hear what she has to say. But there’s also suddenly interest in who gets to attend the vice-presidential debates. And the St. Louis Post Dispatch is interviewing a retired high school debate coach on pointers for Biden and Palin, not for Obama and McCain.

    The debates will be here, in St. Louis, at Washington University (what the father of a friend of mine used to call “the best university you’ve never heard of”) and people are excited. WashU has hosted presidential debates before. In fact, it’s hosted more than any other institution in history. And I confess that I detected the slightest disappointment among locals when we first learned that it would be the vice presidential, rather than presidential debates, that would be held there on October 2. But no one complained too loudly. After all, what are you going to do? It’s just St. Louis.

    But all that has changed now. Although the sentiment may be tacit, people are beginning to think that St. Louis matters. Maybe instead of waiting for the nation to tell us what to do, we should be telling the nation. On my way to class at St. Louis University, in the city, I stop and chat with an African American man out registering voters. He’s an Obama supporter. I ask how I can get a handle on which way different St. Louis neighborhoods will go in the election. He tells me to stay in the city: “That way you can talk to immigrants, black people, white people – you’ll get diversity.” It’s an unusually gray day for September. We shiver. I ask him what he thinks of the vice presidential debates. He lights up. “They’ll decide everything!” he tells me enthusiastically. “The debate will determine Missouri, and Missouri is a bellwether state – and it’s going to make all the difference. I’m going to be there! I’m going to be there!” It is the most enthused he’s been in our conversation, the most enthused I’ve seen anyone here about the election.

    I wonder if he’s heard of L.U. Reavis.

    Flannery Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of History at St. Louis University. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, she writes about the American West, the environment, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.

  • Pennsylvania: Where the Collar Counties Are the Big Dogs

    Pennsylvania, as with most states, can be analyzed politically by looking at a few key counties and how they break in a political campaign.

    Historically, the four collar counties of Philadelphia broke heavily Republican and neutralized the advantage Democrats had coming out of Philadelphia. Over the past decade this trend has reversed itself — and with it the political balance in the state.

    Over the past eight years Pennsylvania has gained some 500,000 voters but the Democrats have doubled their lead over Republicans to over one million. In short, since 2000 Democrats have outgained Republicans in Pennsylvania by a ratio of 39:1. The significant growth in Independents is now a major factor in GOP victory in statewide elections.

    The City of Philadelphia has been solidly Democratic for generations. The big changes are in the four suburban “collar counties” around Philadelphia which account for 17.6 percent of the state’s voters. Starting in 2000, Republican registration in the Philadelphia suburbs has dropped by 85,494 voters or 10.1 percent.

    On the Democratic side is a far different story. Registration increased by 220,149 voters or 45.5 percent from its 2000 level. The Republican advantage now stands at a mere 55,557 voters and the number of straight ticket voters has dropped.

    This surge in registration reflects a shift in voting patterns that have existed in these counties for decades starting at the top of the ticket and slowly working their way down to local levels of government. In 2000, Al Gore defeated George W. Bush by 204,840 votes in Pennsylvania with the four collar counties going to Gore by 54,346 votes. This region supplied Gore with 27 percent of his victory margin in Pennsylvania despite Republicans having a 357,200 voter registration advantage at that time.

    In 2002, Ed Rendell defeated Mike Fisher for governor by 323,827 votes. Rendell won all four collar counties and when Philadelphia is included the southeast region supplied Rendell with a 515,441 vote margin, negating the vote in the rest of Pennsylvania which Fisher, a former State Senator and then current Attorney General, won handily.

    In 2004, John Kerry defeated then President Bush in Pennsylvania by 144,248 total votes. Kerry did not win all our collar counties. He lost to Bush in Chester County and his margins in the three others were far less than Rendell’s two years earlier. But, other Republicans including Senator Arlen Specter survived by winning in this increasingly contested territory.

    Increasingly this trend has moved down the ballot. In 2006 when State Auditor General Bob Casey, Jr. trounced incumbent Senator Rick Santorum statewide by 708,206 votes, Casey won all four collar counties by significant margins. Also, two Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives were replaced by Democrats as Patrick Murphy, an Iraq war vet, won the seat in Bucks County while Joe Sestak, a retired Navy admiral, defeated incumbent scandal-tainted Rep. Curt Weldon in Delaware County by a wide margin. Today, three of the four collar counties are represented by Democrats in Congress.

    The lessons are clear. Democrats are gaining in the collar counties, particularly when conservatives like Santorum head the ticket. Republican moderates like Specter, however, have remained competitive in these suburbs, and thus have survived the Democratic onslaught.

    Not surprisingly, the Obama campaign hopes to paint John McCain as a right-wing clone of President Bush. If he is successful, then McCain will likely lose the collar counties, and with them Pennsylvania. In a best case scenario for the Democrats, 2008 could mirror Governor Rendell’s 2002 triumph where wins in the collar counties and Philadelphia make up for losses elsewhere in the state.

    McCain, however, is not without hope. If he is able to position himself as a reformer willing to work against the interests of his party for the broader interests of the country, he could win two or even three of the collar counties. If he does that Pennsylvania could become the keystone of an unconventional victory in November.

    Dennis M. Powell is president and CEO of Massey Powell an issues management consulting company located in Plymouth Meeting, PA.

  • Campaign Money and the House Bailout Vote

    The late Jesse Unruh, longtime speaker of the California Assembly, was a giant of a man, both in accomplishment and girth. But he will be forever remembered for having said that “Money is the mother’s milk of politics”.

    Never truer words were said. We got a good glimpse of that in the recent vote on the Paulson-Pelosi Wall Street bailout. A quick survey conducted by the Berkeley, California based Maplight.Org showed that members of Congress in both parties who supported the bailout received 54% more money from the financial service industry than those who voted against it.

    The differential among Democrats was even wider — those who backed the bailout received almost twice as much from Wall Street than those who opposed the measure. A regional analysis conducted by the New York Times showed another interesting pattern, with opposition to the measure strongest in the heartland states, Texas and other places where the housing bubble was less inflated.

    Clearly constituents in these areas reached some of their representatives with complaints. As for those who went the other way, well, somewhere in heaven, California’s “Big Daddy” is wearing a sly, knowing smile.

  • Suburbs will decide the election

    By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill

    Suburbs may not have cooked up the mortgage crisis, but they absorbed much of initial damage. Now that Wall Street and the big cities are also taking the fall, suburbanites might feel a bit better — but there’s still lots of room for anger out in the land of picket fences, decent schools and shopping malls.

    Widely demeaned in the media and academe, suburbs still exercise their power at election time. Home to roughly half the country’s population, and likely a greater share of its voters, suburbs seem destined to remain — to borrow from that great wordsmith George W. Bush — “the decider” in this election.

    Indeed, as the campaign has evolved, the critical position of suburbs seems to have grown. Barack Obama’s stranglehold on the urban vote seems unshakeable — even against a maverick “moderate” such as John McCain.

    At the same time, after seeming unsettled, the rural and small-town electorate appears to be returning to the GOP fold. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s place on the Republican ticket and, perhaps even more, the mainstream media’s snooty reaction to her, may have sealed the GOP deal in the countryside, at least at the presidential level. One sure sign: The small Obama strike team sent to reliably red North Dakota this summer has departed for more competitive terrain in nearby Minnesota and Wisconsin.

    So now it’s really up to the suburbanites, who come from the only geography that has grown faster than the national average over the past 30 years. But it’s critical to recognize that suburbs themselves have changed, becoming more reflective of America’s diversity, just as cities have grown more bifurcated between rich and poor. Once lily white, suburban America is now roughly 21 percent minority.

    Voting behavior among suburbs overall also has changed over the years. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan carried the suburbs in the key swing states by between 20 points and 40 points. Bill Clinton ended this dominance, essentially battling the GOP to a suburban standoff. He even beat the Republicans in the peripheral communities of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Missouri and Florida.

    In 2000 and again in 2004, President Bush recovered some of the Republican edge, running as much as 10 percent better than Sen. Bob Dole’s weak 1996 effort. But in the 2006 congressional elections, Democrats regained much of the ground Clinton had carried.

    As of now, polls suggest McCain, who lagged in the suburbs into the summer, has pushed back some of the Democratic momentum. He now enjoys, according to the latest Wall Street Journal poll, a 10-point edge among suburban voters, not far from what Bush garnered in those parts of the swing states. If McCain can combine this suburban group with his rural and small-town base, he could be in striking distance of staging an upset.

    But this may not be so easy. Democrats’ recent gains seem to be solidifying, particularly in older, metropolitan suburbs. Fairfax County, home to one out of seven Virginians, has been trending strongly Democratic in recent years, even supporting John F. Kerry in 2004.

    McCain, who appeals more to independents than Bush did, should be able to erode some of this advantage in such communities. But Palin’s social conservatism could turn off many generally well-educated, middle-of-the-road voters who are so prominent in many of the most upscale suburban communities.

    At the same time, Palin — herself a former mayor of an Anchorage exurb — could help McCain consolidate Bush’s gains in the fast-growing exurbs, which tend to be more heavily composed of traditional families and generally less ethnically diverse. In his 2004 victory, Bush won 97 of the nation’s 100 fastest-growing counties with roughly 63 percent of the vote. If McCain can duplicate that feat, he will be well-positioned.

    Several factors, notably the financial crisis, could work against these efforts. Foreclosure rates in many of these exurban suburban counties are well above the national average, particularly in Florida and the Virginia suburbs of Washington and also outside Denver, Detroit and Cleveland.

    The mortgage crisis affects not only foreclosed homeowners, but also homeowners who are still above water. First, foreclosures lower everybody’s home values and bring on the possibility of renters replacing owners — not a good development in a suburban context. Second, particularly in exurban counties, construction has often been the basis for a lot of job growth in this decade, because construction jobs and other employment related to the real estate industry has been centered there.

    All of this makes suburbs a theoretically good target for Obama. In places like Pennsylvania, as longtime Republican activist Dennis Powell suggests, Obama should try to duplicate Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell’s wildly successful performance in 2002 in the so-called collar counties around Philadelphia. By winning those counties, in addition to building up a huge margin in his native Philadelphia, Rendell built a margin of more than a half-million votes that helped him win, even while he was getting thrashed throughout most of the rest of the state.

    In 2004, Kerry also won Pennsylvania’s collar counties, not by a large margin but by enough to secure his victory in the state. If Obama does as well as Kerry in the collar counties, he will win the state — perhaps not at a Rendellian scale, but comfortably enough.

    For his part, McCain needs to emulate the success of maverick Republicans, such as Sen. Arlen Specter, who have won by winning the Philadelphia suburbs. If McCain can replicate Specter’s performance and add some of the disgruntled Clinton Democrats in the rural south and west of the state, he could pull off a game-changing upset.

    McCain also has an opportunity to win in the Detroit suburbs, where Obama’s ties to disgraced former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick could hurt him. Bush won those areas in 2000 and 2004, but not by enough to capture the state’s electoral votes. As in Pennsylvania, McCain needs to forge a rural-suburban coalition to capture this traditionally blue-tinged state.

    For Obama, suburbs in wobbly red states such as Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Virginia and Missouri offer similarly critical opportunities. Even traditionally conservative exurban voters may feel that under Bush they have been led down the bubble path only to have it pop painfully in their faces.

    Ultimately it may all come down to “body language.” In our estimation, Obama’s weakness stems not so much from his race — he may well run better in suburbia than did the very white Kerry — but with his close identification with Chicago and Mayor Richard Daley’s Democratic machine. Having spent his adulthood in college towns and big cities, Obama seems to lack the instinctive Clintonian understanding of the suburban mindset. You never got the sense that Clinton was too urbane to wolf down a Big Mac or get a Slurpee at the local strip mall — and he really seemed to “feel the pain” of an overstressed homeowner.

    In contrast, Obama and his team, including campaign manager David Axelrod, reflect the mentality of a totally urban political culture. Obama’s intellectual and media supporters also include elements — ensconced at publications such as The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly as well as within the leftist Netroots — that often regard suburbs and their denizens as a form of social and environmental pestilence.

    Obama is simply too smart, as a candidate and perhaps also as a president, to publicly give in to this mindset. He’s certainly trying to appeal to suburban voters who are too concerned with issues such as health care and foreclosures to worry about his lack of geographic empathy.

    If he can convey this message effectively, Obama could benefit from the suffering now taking place in suburban communities. There may well be enough disgruntled suburban voters, even in the more peripheral areas, to blunt McCain’s suburban lead down to manageable numbers.

    If so, McCain’s rural and small town base will not be enough to win the critical swing states and the election. If the Republicans can hold their 2004 suburban base, though, McCain could yet triumph. Whatever the result, one thing is clear: Suburban voters will be the deciders.

    Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University and executive editor of www.newgeography.com. Mark Schill is a principal at Praxis Strategy Group and the site’s managing editor.

  • Is the heartland the economic armpit of America?

    Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, native Kansan Thomas Frank isn’t too complimentary on the state of affairs:

    …you will find that small-town America, this legendary place of honesty and sincerity and dignity, is not doing very well. If you drive west from Kansas City, Mo., you will find towns where Main Street is largely boarded up. You will see closed schools and hospitals. You will hear about depleted groundwater and massive depopulation.

    While the windshield tour may yield an array of sorry small towns, much of the mostly rural Heartland has beaten the national job growth rate since the early 1970s. Like the rest of the nation, the heartland of America is urbanizing — producing many small growth nodes of prosperity.

    While many of the small prairie towns are dying on the vine, the biggest reason is not “electing people like Sarah Palin who claimed to love and respect the folksy conservatism of small towns, and yet who have unfailingly enacted laws to aid the small town’s mortal enemies,” as Frank suggests, but rather a combination of larger factors including the re-balancing of 100-year old settlement patterns and the macro effects of automating the ag industry.

    So what’s the prevailing politics in small towns? Here’s the Iowa Independent’s Douglas Burns writing about Obama’s “bitter” rural American’s gaffe:

    …does any thinking person believe Obama’s brief and failed turn as a rural anthropologist will hurt him more than what Republican presidential candidate John McCain said today in Alabama?

    “We must reduce barriers to imports, to things like ethanol from Brazil, and we’ve got to stop subsidizing ethanol in my view,” Senator McCain said.

    If the ivory-towered urban elites hawking their tiresome flyover views on cable television each night want to see what a bitter small-town American looks like, they can come to western Iowa during the second year of what we have every reason to expect would be a decidedly anti-rural John McCain presidency.

    Barack Obama misspoke. John McCain didn’t.

    Rural Americans know the difference.

    Burns also correctly predicted Palin’s Vice Presidential nomination. What all three of us can agree on is that many rural voters seem to elect candidates who enact policies contrary to their interests. Can Obama make any real inroads with Great Plains rural voters?

  • Geography, Class, and Red and Blue Voting

    Consider the following two apparently contradictory sets of statistics:

    From the Republican convention and much of the media, you’d get the impression that class voting has turned upside down—that the Democrats are the party of the “elite” and the Republicans the new friends of the “working class”.

    But the ACTUAL voting behavior in 2004, when Republicans did especially well at making inroads among socially conservative, less affluent households. Consider the accompanying chart, where Bush dominated Kerry in households making more than $100,000.

    And according to McCain, $200000 is solidly middle class!
    This looks like “economic class“ still matters!

    But then look at the following equally CORRECT statistics, (courtesy of Fred Shelley, U Oklahoma:

    The purple states are the current tossup states: CO, FL, IN,MI, NH, NV, NM, NC,OH,VA

    So is it true, contrary to the 2004 national data, that states that are richer and more educated tend Democratic (blue) and those with less educated and poorer folks lead Republican (red)? How can both sets of data be true?

    The answer lies in the math. The first set uses INDIVIDUALS, while the second uses average, aggregate values. Making inferences from averages risks what statisticians call the “ecological fallacy” , attributing to everyone the value of an average, from what in reality is probably a very heterogeneous (highly variable) population.

    Blue states like CA, WA, NY or MA have high average levels of income and education, but we do not know the distribution of votes for D and R by varying levels of education and income. So to reconcile the two sets of statistics, it is reasonable to assume that despite high average levels, the more educated and wealthier are more likely to vote Republican, the less educated and poorer more likely to vote Democratic.

    For example, consider state A (big metropolitan) and state B (non-metro, small town, rural):

    A has a larger share of richer than average voters than B, but it’s a big metro state while B is a smaller rural, small city state. Richer voters tend R in both and poorer voters tend to vote D in both states, but the R share is higher for all classes in the non-metro state and D shares higher for both classes in the big metro state.

    The other part of the story is geography, largely about the split between large metropolitan and small and non-metropolitan America. Over half the population lives in large metropolitan areas. These tend to have above average levels of education and income, as they are the control centers of society, but they also have the large majority of racial and ethnic minorities and of the poor— which are the real numerical base of the Democratic vote. Not that you would know it from either party’s rhetoric!

    Now it is certainly true that a significant and increasing share of the educated affluent has shifted Democratic in the last decade or so; these folks are powerful and articulate and have effectively taken over the Democratic Party. We know from precinct level data that Democrats swept areas with highly educated professionals, especially around universities, but Republicans continued to dominate wider areas, especially suburban and exurban, of the more managerial affluent.

    Generally speaking, the Democratic “elite” overestimates its own numbers, and often unintentionally pursues policies hurtful to the poor and lower middle classes. This can be seen in the elite’s indifference to the less affluent and educated Democratic base as demonstrated by their emphasis on the virtues of dense urban, “green” living. This agenda often results in gentrification, displacement of the poor and minorities. Elite democrats also ignore —except perhaps at election time — job competition from massive immigration, legal and illegal, the ravages of excess globalization, and out of sight housing prices.

    The 2004 election data shows that the historic base of the Democratic party is not gone, at least in large metropolitan America. Middle and working class white voters in the suburbs and exurbs still matter. Obama cannot win unless that base is reassured and respected.

    Richard Morrill is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Washington. His research interests include: political geography (voting behavior, redistricting, local governance), population/demography/settlement/migration, urban geography and planning, urban transportation (i.e., old fashioned generalist).

  • Rural America could bring boon to Dems

    By Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill

    Perhaps no geography in America is as misunderstood as small towns and rural areas. Home to no more than one in five Americans, these areas barely register with the national media except for occasional reports about the towns’ general decrepitude, cultural backwardness and inexorable decline.

    Yet in reality this part of America is far more diverse, and in many areas infinitely more vital, than the big-city-dominated media suspects. In fact, there are many demographic and economic dynamics that make this part of America far more competitive this year than in the recent past.

    Both parties have acknowledged the importance of this battlefield through their choices for vice presidential nominees. Barack Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, is being touted not so much as a Washington foreign policy wonk but as the “scrappy kid from Scranton” — even though he has represented Delaware in the Senate for 35 years. Even more obvious is John McCain’s tapping of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a former small-town mayor from a rustic state without anything close to a major metropolitan area.

    Even though many very small towns — with, say, fewer than 10,000 people — have continued to decline in population, there’s a significant demographic and economic rebound taking place in a host of somewhat larger communities. Places such as Sioux Falls and Fargo in the Dakotas as well as Asheville, N.C.; Wenatchee, Wash.; and Springfield, Mo., have been drawing a steady stream of people and businesses from both big cities and suburbs.

    This dynamic could provide some welcome surprises for Democrats and potential nightmares for Republicans. During the primaries, Obama startled observers with his ability to win over Democratic voters in places like the Dakotas, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska and Indiana. More importantly, according to recent polls, he is running between 10 points and 30 points ahead of John F. Kerry in 2004.

    Where are these new Democratic voters coming from? Most of Obama’s primary wins came in what may be seen as the new heartland, a widely dispersed group of fast-growing smaller towns and cities stretching from the Sierra Nevadas to the Appalachians. He did particularly well in college towns as well as those places where high-tech and cutting-edge manufacturing companies have set up shop over the past decade.

    This demographic and political dynamic has been building for years. In 2004, even Kerry came close to winning places such as Wisconsin Rapids, a small city of 17,500 in the central part of the state. Although the area has lost some high-paying blue-collar jobs in the paper industry, it has also attracted a growing number of sophisticated companies such as software firm Renaissance Learning, which employs more than 750 in the area.

    Some of these workers are originally from the area, but many others bring with them tastes and opinions forged in Silicon Valley, Raleigh-Durham or the Massachusetts tech corridor. Their politics may not be Chicago liberal, but people settling in such emerging “virtual suburbs” tend, like their tech-oriented counterparts, toward a pragmatic, mildly liberal politics.

    Other demographic groups are also changing the political complexion of some of these areas. Hispanics, for example, have been moving in large numbers to rural and manufacturing areas in the Great Plains and rural South which, until recently, were dominated by culturally conservative Anglos.

    At the same time, affluent baby boomers from the coasts and large Midwestern cities — some retired, some working via the Internet — are also flowing into some of these places. Surveys of older Americans find far more would prefer to resettle in small towns than in big cities. Some of the fastest growing towns for seniors include Missoula, Mont.; Eugene, Ore.; Moscow, Idaho; and Charlottesville, Va.

    As a result, these areas have become more cosmopolitan in their outlook. It is no longer unusual, for example, to see Indian, Chinese and other foreign-born professionals — or Asian restaurants or edgy coffeehouses. Fargo, once the very definition of staid, now boasts an excellent boutique hotel, a clothing store catering to metro­sexuals and several pricey restaurants.

    These shifts have not escaped the notice of the Obama campaign, which has put 50 campaign workers and 100 volunteer teams in North Dakota, long considered a lock for Republicans in November. Similar deployments are taking place in other rural states.

    Yet it may still be a stretch to see some of these places voting for a big-city liberal like Obama. It’s one thing to support homegrown populist Democrats such as North Dakota’s Sen. Byron Dorgan or Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who have a fine sense of how to negotiate the sensibilities of their constituents on issues of farm subsidies, guns or gay marriage.

    McCain should hope Obama’s Hyde Park intellectualism and liberalism won’t play well beyond more affluent recent migrants and students. McCain may not win as big as President Bush did in 2000 and 2004, but he could hold on to enough rural and small-town voters to keep these states in the Republican column. McCain’s moderate image may hurt with some evangelical voters, but at least outside of the South, this may keep more moderate, younger and recently arrived voters in the fold.

    Finally, the fact that many small towns are doing relatively well may make voters somewhat less likely to bolt the GOP. Few places in the countryside are suffering anything like a Dust Bowl-level catastrophe, although some now worry about a looming decline in commodity prices. And on some issues, such as fossil fuel development, McCain can appeal to constituents of small towns that have been enjoying an energy-fed boom. Pushing American energy development will work well in these areas, although the Arizona senator’s opposition to ethanol subsidies could hurt in others.

    And even in rural places worst hit by the economy — such as traditional, manufacturing-dominated small towns in Indiana, Ohio, the Carolinas and Pennsylvania — Obama has yet to prove himself. In almost all these places, Hillary Rodham Clinton triumphed easily in the primary, usurping the grass-roots populist message. Obama has yet to show that knack.

    Rural and small-town areas have fewer very poor constituents and a greater concentration of middle-income voters than cities, and far fewer wealthy households than cities or suburbs. These mostly white, working-class voters — heavily concentrated in states like Wyoming, West Virginia, the Dakotas, Montana, Maine, Idaho and Kentucky — could be the key to winning the micropolitan and small-town electorate. And these places could prove a critical battleground.

    There are two regions where these voters might matter most. One is the sparsely populated Great Plains states that once represented a solid block of Republican strength. Obama not only has the chance to steal some electoral votes but also could divert McCain’s resources in more traditional battleground states.

    The other is a series of traditional battleground states: Ohio, Missouri and Indiana. If Obama can gain some of the traction Clinton achieved in these states’ small towns and cities, McCain’s chances fade to almost nil.

    Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University and executive editor of newgeography.com. Mark Schill is an Associate at Praxis Strategy Group in Grand Forks, N.D., and the site’s managing editor.

    Other articles in the Three Geographies Series:
    The Three Geographies
    Urban America: The New Solid South

  • The new political donor class

    Do you know who is funding your local candidate? Most of them are probably not from your district, as Lee Drutman at Miller-McCune points out after looking at the results of new report by two University of Maryland professors. Lee writes:

    Increasingly, they’re not bothering to ask the folks whom they are actually paid to represent for campaign cash. Instead, they are flocking to a handful of super-wealthy ZIP codes in places like Hollywood; the Upper East Side of Manhattan; Greenwich, Conn.; and suburban Washington, D.C. – the “political ATM’s” of the campaign trial.

    Moreover, as of 2004, only 1 in 5 congressional districts provided the majority of contributions for the candidates seeking to represent that district. And in 18 percent of congressional districts, more than 90 percent of money now comes from out of district.

    The professors write in their analysis that the new donor class is “disproportionately wealthy, urban, highly educated, and employed in elite occupations.”

    If you’re interested in where the small donors are coming from in the presidential race, check out the interactive map at Huffington Post’s Fundrace. It’s a great tool to use as a proxy to visualize which way your state or metro area might lean, or maybe you just want to spy on your neighbors.

    For instance, it’s pretty easy to see instantly which parts of the Los Angeles may be pockets of Republican influence, or to see Obama’s fund raising success in the Chicago region.

    Perhaps the Republicans should move this week’s convention out to the western Minneapolis suburbs for a warmer reception?

    Miller-McCune link via NewsAlert.

  • A Generation Rises with Obama

    On his way to Denver, Barack Obama has been trying to mainstream his campaign. The selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate was intended to be a steadying force as the historic nature of his campaign as a candidate of change remains unsettling for some. But so much has been said about his status as a candidate of racial change, that his status as a candidate of generational change has been little noticed. The torch, as JFK might say, is passing to a new generation.

    Obama is the first Gen X Presidential candidate — for better and for worse.

    He’s the son of a baby boomer — his mother, Anne, was born in 1942 — and although his birth in 1961 puts him slightly ahead of the textbook mid-1960s start date of Gen X, he is the same age as the man who coined the term “Generation X,” author Douglas Coupland.

    Like many Gen Xers, Obama is a child of divorce. His anthropologist mother embodied the restless drift and countercultural curiosity of the baby boomer generation. His grandparents’ lives were more typical of the “greatest generation” — with struggles through the Great Depression and then the Second World War, followed by a more conventional, even conservative, life.

    His mother married a Kenyan; his grandparents voted for Nixon — Barack tried to bridge the divide.

    Reconciling these generational tensions has been the unwelcome responsibility of Gen X. We have been living in the wake of the Boomers all our lives. We’ve benefited from the civil rights struggles and enjoyed the opening of our culture, from rock music to the sexual revolution.

    But we’ve also experienced the fallout from their excesses — drug abuse, racial strife, fractured families, homelessness, AIDS, a decaying environment and dangerous inner cities. Gen Xers have been left to clean up after the Baby Boomers’ party, to put up with the societal growing pains, and try to reconcile the warring factions.

    Obama voiced this frustration in “The Audacity of Hope,” writing, “In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

    His antidote is the rhetorical post-partisanship and professed belief in political pragmatism that are central to his political appeal amongst younger voters. His style of problem-solving — a cool assessment of the problems associated with predictable positions on both sides, and then an attempt to synthesize new solutions — fits Gen X perfectly.

    Jeff Gordinier, author of “X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking,” told me. “Obama’s talk about going beyond the old politics of ‘red’ and ‘blue’, liberal and conservative, and building a third way does resonate. Gen Xers tend to be pretty post-ideological, there is less allegiance to any one party or any one way of thinking. … Our political pragmatism comes as a result of growing up in the shadow of the Boomers’ idealism and seeing it fail miserably.”

    But there is another aspect of the Generation X experience Obama must overcome: They are the first American generation to come of age without a draft.

    While McCain entered military service as a young man, Obama opted for a combination of higher education and community service. At the age when McCain was a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton, Obama was at Harvard Law. To be fair, McCain is a legendary military hero because his experience was uncommon. Obama’s experience — inevitably cushy by comparison, both liberal and elite — is more common to contemporary Americans.

    But biography is at the root of what pollsters clinically call “character attributes,” and this does not help in the commander in chief test.

    Obama’s college years were full of generationally recognizable rites of passage — detailed with disarming candor in his first book, “Dreams from My Father” — smoking cigarettes and some pot and drinking beer while listening to ’70s and ’80s rock and soul. There were the confusing cross-currents of yuppie culture and multicultural identity politics — particularly resonant to a biracial student like Obama — and protests against the evils of apartheid while the evils of communism were comparatively ignored on campus. Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the civic demands of John McCain’s pre-Boomer generation experience of personal sacrifice and physical courage were largely limited to debate amongst Gen Xers.

    The generational fault lines under this campaign are rumbling right below the surface. It’s no accident that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s strength in the late Democratic primaries came overwhelmingly from older white Americans who have now begun to shift their allegiance to one of their own, John McCain. This is not just about race; it is also a generational judgment — the sense among older voters that Obama is a self-possessed smooth operator who is light on real world experience, and hasn’t earned the office.

    Obama, in turn, runs strongest among his contemporaries — voters under 50 and African-Americans. The younger the voter, the more likely they are to support Barack Obama.

    The so-called enthusiasm gap — and the pop-culture fascination with Obama — parallels other famous first-in-their-generation presidential candidates, Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton. The younger Millennial Generation’s reverence for Obama may have fueled the “celebrity” ads, but it’s because he’s made politics (briefly) cool again. With the Jay-Z “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” riff during the primary and pioneering use of YouTube and Facebook, Obama speaks the language of our contemporary culture and he looks like what’s next — the first high-tech, hip-hop president.

    After four decades and two administrations dominated by the Baby Boomer echo chamber, it’s understandable that we’d want to turn the page and get a president who has learned from their debates but is not held hostage by them.

    The promise of Obama is in transcending outdated labels and bridging old divides, but beneath that promise there is also a dash of democracy’s vanity — we like him because he is like us. As Gen X humorist Joel Stein wrote in Time magazine, “The truth is that I like Obama because he’s young, he eats arugula, and knows who Ludacris is. Because he’s the closest thing to the person I’d really like to vote for: me.”

    John P. Avlon is the author of “Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics.” He served as chief speechwriter and deputy policy director for Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This article first appeared on www.politico.com.

    © 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC

  • Hillraisers: The New Naderites?

    I don’t know about you, but I’m still pretty astonished that aging white men – especially working class, blue-collar workers – have become “Hillary voters.” Who could have predicted that? Once upon a time, Hillary was a card-carrying member of the liberal elite, a corporate lawyer who didn’t stay home to bake cookies and have teas, who ruthlessly fired travel office workers and carted off loot from the White House, who carpet-bagged her way to a Senate seat in New York, and got booed by firefighters in the wake of 9/11.

    It just goes to show how true the old cliché is: politics makes strange bedfellows. Run a young(ish) upstart black man with Harvard Law degree against Mrs. Clinton, and next thing you know she’s doing shots of whiskey with a beer chaser, eating pizza and talking about manufacturing jobs in Crown Point, Indiana – and not getting laughed out of the joint!

    A little more understandable are the die-hard Hillary women – Hillraisers – mostly older white feminists whose day had finally arrived. They rallied, they fund-raised, they phone-banked, and now they are angry! As one editorial writer put it mildly, “these women are trying to get used to the fact that a new generation is taking center stage here: one represented by Michelle Obama.” I feel ya, sisters, I really do.

    But ya’ll are flirting dangerously with becoming this election’s Naderites — that is to say, political suicide bombers. It’s not just your bras that are going to be on fire, ladies. It’s going to be planet earth. Hyperbole? Think back to the 2000 election when Naderites argued there was little difference between Bush and Gore, and even if Bush won, it would be by such a narrow margin he would have to govern from the center. Really. Think. About. That.

    I don’t hold out much hope that Obama is going to vacuum up the blue-collar vote. Nor will Obama get a plurality of the white vote; a Democrat hasn’t done that since LBJ. But the white baby-boomer’s lack of support for Obama is nothing short of shocking. Charlie Cook – hands down the best political analyst working today, and you won’t see him bloviating on The Countdown with Keith Olberman – revealed the nasty truth back in June.

    “It finally dawned on me that white Baby Boomers are the group that is really hurting Barack Obama,” Cook wrote in his National Journal column. “Of all people, the generation that brought us the Vietnam War protests and the Summer of Love is proving to be a very tough nut for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to crack.” Cook pointed out that among whites between 50 to 64, Obama is losing by a whopping 18 points, 51 percent to 33 percent. I don’t know if the numbers have moved much since June, but that was after Hillary “suspended” her campaign.

    Cook concludes, “By doing very well among African-Americans and reasonably well among Hispanics, Obama could easily overcome his deficits among whites under 50 and over 65. But losing whites born between 1944 and 1958 — pretty much the lion’s share of the Baby Boomers — by 18 percentage points? Wow. That’s a burden.”

    Obama, of course, brought some of this on by positioning himself as the post-boomer candidate, repeating the mantra that it’s “time to turn the page.” About the elections of 2000 and 2004, Obama wrote in his second book, The Audacity of Hope: “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

    But I suspect there’s something more going on here than simply a generation gap, which Charlie Cook also hints at: “Is [Obama’s] difficulty that these are voters in their prime earnings years, when they are most sensitive to the issue of taxes?” Hmm. I wonder.

    Like politicians confirming their own worst characterizations – Bill Clinton the narcissist, Hillary the ruthless, Edwards the smarmy lawyer – boomers as a whole are living up to their worst stereotype: selfish, greedy, self-absorbed, and worse – willing to bequeath to younger generations an economic and environmental disaster of global proportions, just so long as their assets are protected.

    I can forgive the misguided Naderites who were too young to know better – hell, I’ll admit to having been one. But when it comes to boomers, age does not seem to equal wisdom. It’s like a Dennis Hopper retirement commercial writ large, as The Onion brilliantly satirized: “Retirement planning means a lot of decision making, and thank God I have the soothing presence of that amyl nitrite–huffing, obscenity-screaming, psychosexual lunatic from Blue Velvet to guide me through it.” Substitute “retirement planning” for “voting,” and that approximates how I’m starting to feel about Election 2008, thanks to the soothing presence of bra-burning, man-hating, post-menopausal ‘feminists’ to guide me through it.

    Lisa Chamberlain is the author of “Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction.” She lives in New York City.