Reply #50: Does the Electoral College Favor Dean? [View All]

[dkf]

http://www.tnr.com/etc.mhtml

DOES THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE FAVOR DEAN?: Today's edition of Roll Call reports that a group of Republican pollsters believes Howard Dean represents a serious threat to George W. Bush. Interestingly, the pollsters make two of the points we've been flogging here for the past several months: 1) Dean is the one guy capable of exciting the Democratic base without alienating moderates--since the substance of most of his policy positions is pretty moderate. 2) Dean's appeal has less to do with specific policies than with his personal charisma and apparent plainspoken-ness. The way we see it, this fact leaves Dean a ton of room to moderate himself on substance without alienating his more liberal supporters.

One interesting point the pollsters bring up that we hadn't even considered is that Dean may actually be well-suited to pick up the marginal electoral-college states a Democrat needs to win the presidency. The article cites Nevada and West Virginia in particular--the former because Dean could focus his anti-Bush vitriol on the administration's plans to turn the state into a nuclear waste dump, and the latter because Dean's moderate position on gun control could bring blue-collar voters back into the Democratic fold. (Al Gore narrowly lost the traditionally Democratic state in 2000 thanks to defections among these voters.)

What's truly amazing is that Nevada and West Virginia are (theoretically) the only two states Bush carried in 2000 that Dean would need to carry in order to win the electoral college. Meanwhile, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to think Dean would hold his own in the states Gore won. After all, the winning margin in many of the states Gore carried only narrowly--Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, even Florida--was depressed because of defections to Nader or broader liberal dissatisfaction with Gore. Dean's aggressive criticism of the president should only help him here.

Maybe the broader point is that in red/blue America, a reasonably competent Democratic nominee starts with close to 250 electoral college votes. If he can just slice off a couple more here and there, he can make a pretty compelling run for the White House.

posted 1:30 p.m.

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