In the political jargon of the 2008 presidential election, it's called “expanding the map.”
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CANDIDATES VISIT S.D.
Both major-party presidential nominees-in-waiting will be in San Diego next week to address the National Council of La Raza conference, which is expected to attract more than 20,000 people.
Democrat Barack Obama will address the NCLR, which calls itself the nation's largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization, on Sunday, July 13.
Republican John McCain will speak Monday, July 14.
The conference runs from Saturday through Tuesday, July 15, at the San Diego Convention Center.
Electoral maneuvering: What the polls say now about how a map of the Electoral College could look after Nov. 4, compared with the results of close presidential elections in 1976 and 2000. A14
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The campaigns of both major-party nominees-in-waiting are plotting incursions into states that have been reliable strongholds for the other party in recent elections.
For Democrat Barack Obama, this means focusing on four states President Bush narrowly won in 2004: Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa. But his campaign team also talks of going into states such as Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia and even such unlikely targets as North Dakota, Montana and Alaska – all states where Bush racked up big victories.
The Obama campaign's goal is to win all of the states that delivered 252 Electoral College votes to Democratic nominee John Kerry in 2004 and get to the 18 more needed to win without depending on Florida and Ohio, where razor-thin victories delivered the presidency to George W. Bush in the last two elections.
“We will have a lot of states in play, a lot of ways to get to 270,”
Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told a recent Washington news conference.
The campaign of Republican John McCain believes it has opportunities in several states that voted Democratic last time – Oregon, Michigan, Wisconsin, Connecticut and New Hampshire.
McCain strategists also insist they intend to aggressively contest California, where a win would virtually assure McCain the White House but where President Bush twice lost by double digits.
“Twenty-three percent of the registered voters decline to state a party – independent, nonaligned,” said McCain campaign manager Rick Davis in a recent strategy briefing. “This is a group of voters where John McCain has a unique appeal and where we can make inroads into this historically Democratic state.”
The question is whether some of these states will truly be in play by fall or if by October the campaign will revert to the patterns of 2000 and 2004, when attention focused on such familiar battleground states as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida.
“There's a little bit of posturing involved,” said Jeff Gulati, a political science professor at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. “They always try to do that early in the campaign to try to throw the other campaign off its game. But I think both candidates feel they have the potential to appeal to voters in the other party's coalition.”
The notion that McCain, an Arizona senator, will wage a vigorous campaign in California after Bush wrote the state off four years ago has drawn legions of skeptics. A recent Field Poll showed Obama, an Illinois senator, with a 17-point lead, and most experts believe that is too much ground to make up and that it would be prohibitively expensive to try.
“I think you can see polling that will show California in single digits” for McCain, said Democratic strategist Bill Carrick. “What I don't see is them having the money getting them closer than that.”
In 2004, Bush won Georgia by 17 percentage points and North Carolina by 12. But the Obama camp believes it can make the states competitive.
“We think we're going to be able to create historic turnout in the African-American community and with younger voters,” Plouffe said.
Another factor in Georgia is Libertarian Party presidential nominee Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia, who might be able to peel away some conservative votes from McCain.
Even if McCain wins states like Georgia and North Carolina, he may have to spend precious resources there to defend them.
“A scenario that would be very far-fetched in 2000 and '04 is very easy to imagine this time, and that's McCain running around in Georgia and North Carolina to make sure he doesn't lose them, rather than concentrating on the battleground states,” Carrick said.
The Electoral College system, which gives whoever gets the most votes in a state all of that state's electoral votes, has become a much-maligned institution, especially since the 2000 election, in which Bush became president even though Democrat Al Gore got more votes nationwide.
Numerous constitutional amendments have been introduced in Congress over the years to abolish the Electoral College and switch to a straight popular vote.
“I'm an advocate of the popular vote,” said Donald Beachler, a political scientist at Ithaca College in New York. “I think the Electoral College is fundamentally flawed. It simply renders most states electorally irrelevant.”
Texas writer Tara Ross, author of “Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College,” rejects that argument.
States where there is not intensive campaigning are states where a significant majority of the voters likes one candidate or the other, Ross said.
“People say only swing states matter,” Ross said. “But if you focus on the history of states voting, you see it's not a fair argument because the identity of swing states is a constantly moving target.”
Bentley College's Gulati favors ending the Electoral College, but he acknowledged that would create its own set of problems.
He said that if the Electoral College creates a bias in favor of battleground states, the popular vote would create a bias in favor of big states.
“It would encourage candidates to campaign in the population centers – the larger urban areas,” Gulati said. “Right now, the way the map is set up, New Hampshire and New Mexico are extremely important.”
Then there would be the problem of settling an extremely close election.
“What if there was a recount that needed to be done?” he said. “How do you recount 130 million votes?”
A constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College is widely viewed as next to impossible to achieve because it would require a two-thirds vote in Congress and approval of three-quarters of state legislatures.
“The Electoral College favors small states because every state gets a minimum of three regardless of population,” said Bruce Ransom, a political scientist at Clemson University in South Carolina. “There is a bias toward those small states, and for that reason it's going to be very difficult to get a constitutional amendment.”
An organization called National Popular Vote is promoting an end-run around the Electoral College.
It proposes a compact in which states agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote regardless of how their states voted.
The compact would take effect only if enough states, whose electoral votes add up to 270, join. So far, four have: Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey and Hawaii, with a total of 50 votes.
In a repeat of 2000, there is a scenario making the rounds in political circles that has Obama winning the popular vote in November, but McCain winning the Electoral College.
It works like this: Obama racks up huge popular-vote leads on the coasts, particularly in California and New York, and picks up New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Virginia. He runs much stronger in the South than recent Democratic nominees, but not well enough to win any electoral votes.
Meanwhile, McCain narrowly moves Michigan and New Hampshire into the Republican column and wins most of the large Midwestern battleground states by small margins.
“The possibility of another Electoral College disaster looms,” warned Clyde Frazier, a political scientist at Meredith College in North Carolina and a supporter of the popular-vote idea. “Unless we change the system, it's just a matter of time until there's another election like 2000, where the winner gets fewer votes than his or her opponent.”
