SOUTHERN LOWLANDS is the final region where the Democrats might pick up electoral votes. As in the Great Lakes region, the distribution of electoral votes could work against the Democrats. The party does extremely well in a band of counties with large black populations, but these strongholds are divided among 10 states, and they don't come close to a statewide majority in any of them. For example, Florida offers opportunities to a Democrat concentrating on the Southern Lowlands region. Orange County, home of Disney World, has been trending Democratic as it grows more populous: It gave the first President Bush a 26,000-vote margin even as he lost re-election in 1992, but Gore enjoyed a 5,000-vote advantage in 2000.
Virginia may actually be the most promising state for Democrats in the Southern Lowlands - ironically so, since a few years ago Virginia was as reliably Republican as West Virginia was reliably Democratic. One sign of the changing politics here was Democrat Mark Warner's five-point victory in the 2001 governor's race - held just two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks and at the height of President Bush's popularity. Warner was helped by the state's large black population in Southern Lowland cities such as Richmond and Virginia Beach, but he cemented his win by carrying places that had not voted Democratic for president since 1964. One major example is Southern Lowlands' Fairfax County, a source of more than 400,000 votes just outside Washington, DC, that could almost be part of Northeast Corridor except that its homes and offices are more spread out and much more recently built. It gave Bush only a 6,000-vote margin in 2000, though his father won by 10,000 votes during his losing campaign in 1992. Still, a concentration on Southern Lowlands may not be enough to swing the state: Warner also won places like the Appalachian city of Lynchburg, thanks to his much-vaunted "NASCAR strategy."
At the other end of Southern Lowlands, Louisiana is another target made more tempting by a post-9/11 election. Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu won re-election in December 2002 over a strong Republican candidate. New Orleans didn't help much (after Gore's 99,000-vote margin in that parish, Landrieu got only a 79,000-vote advantage), but she did take Baton Rouge's parish away from the Republicans. And she did considerably better in the Southern Comfort section of the state than Gore had, winning Shreveport's Caddo Parish and Lake Charles's Calcasieu Parish by comfortable margins. (A similar pattern emerged in the 2003 gubernatorial race. Democrat Kathleen Blanco got only a 50,000-vote advantage from New Orleans, thanks to Republican Bobby Jindal's relatively good showing among black voters there, but she prevailed in the major Southern Comfort counties and won the state overall.) As in Virginia, the Southern Lowlands section of the state gives the Democrats a great start, but they also need to hold down their losses in the less friendly part of the state.
If the Democrats win all of the states mentioned above, they'll have 391 electoral votes - a few more than Clinton's haul in 1996. At this point, almost no one believes such a win is possible, but bigger shifts have happened in other election years. Watch two states with both Southern Lowlands and Appalachia sections to see just how confident the Democratic nominee is next fall. Unless he's John Edwards, if he's spending a lot of time in Georgia and North Carolina, trying to run up the black vote while trying to make gains in the high-income suburbs of Atlanta and Charlotte, he's planning to give his acceptance speech pretty early on November 2.
CLOSE CALLS
In one respect, the red vs. blue model makes an important point about changes in national politics over the past 30 years. Though we think of the 2000 election as being the closest in memory, many more states were competitive in the 1976 contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, and that's reflected in our 10-region model. In 1976, only one region was won by more than 10 points (Southern Lowlands, which Carter carried 57-42), but in 2000 eight regions were won by double-digit margins (the exceptions being Big River and Southern Lowlands).
One reason for the closeness of so many states and counties in 1976 was that both Carter and Ford came from the moderate (some would say "electable") wings of their respective parties. The differences between the Democratic and Republican nominees have become sharper in just about every election since, particularly on social issues such as abortion. Another trend over the past few decades, widely overlooked by political reporters, is the return of straight-ticket voting. Regardless of how many voters tell pollsters that they're "independent," they are back in the habit of selecting presidents, congressmen, and (a bit less frequently) governors from the same party.
Some analysts believe that the two major parties will only encourage this habit in 2004, moving away from their longtime emphasis on "swing voters." In a September 1 New York Times article by Adam Nagourney, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg notes, "The temptation in both parties is to continue to compete for greater and greater support in the their base…. It's a lot easier to do than to go out and convince swing voters to think differently about the party." Matthew Dowd, an adviser to the Bush campaign, concurred: "The partisans have dominated because their turnout is higher and they voter with greater and greater unity."
But even if the trend toward partisanship feeds the perception of the US as a 50/50, or red-blue nation, it's unwise to assume that this is a permanent condition. American voters also have a habit of rebelling against one-party states. In 2002, on a district-by-district basis, the results of congressional elections were eerily close to the results of the 2000 presidential race. But in governor's races, where candidates are less closely identified with their national parties, several states rejected their "red" or "blue" labels: Republicans won in overwhelmingly Democratic states such as Hawaii, Maryland, and Massachusetts; and Democrats took such GOP strongholds as Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.
Support for third-party presidential candidates also indicates some discomfort with the limited red-or-blue menu. In 1992 and 1996, Ross Perot's strength in the Sagebrush region seemed to come largely from fiscally conservative but libertarian-minded Republicans, who may not have signed up for the "culture war" declared by Pat Buchanan at the Southern-accented 1992 GOP convention. In 2000, Ralph Nader's pockets of strength in the Upper Coasts region indicated some irritation with Al Gore's soft-pedaling of environmental issues.
And in the long run, the colors on the red vs. blue map may start to bleed. How "red" are the John McCain voters who supported Bush in 2000 despite their preference for a different sort of Republican? Will the popularity of moderate Republicans such as Rudolph Giuliani in true-blue New York mean that Northeast Corridor will again become part of the GOP base? And does the success of rural-oriented Democrats such as Mark Warner in Virginia mean that the South's Dixiecrats can someday rise again?
Maybe the good vs. evil nature of the war against terrorism has made it too easy to fit domestic politics into a similar kind of dichotomy. But the red vs. blue model papers over too many real differences in the national electorate. The party that understands this may gain an advantage in 2004 - but it can't expect to maintain this advantage for long.
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