July 14, 2006
Purple Mountains Majesty
Virginia Postrel links to an RCP recap of a Ryan Sager article in Atlantic that excerpts his new book (you with me?) Like her, I roll my eyes at claims that libertarian-minded voters are a new crucial voting block, but like her I am intrigued with Sager's thesis. How can I not like an article about people who think like me and live where I live?
He points out that The West and The South have been a solid GOP block but that The South is evangelical and socially conservative, while The West is more libertarian with less of a natural majority to play with.
While after the 2004 election, plenty of people took note of the fact that a shift of 60,000-odd votes in Ohio would have handed the Electoral College to John Kerry, less remarked upon was the fact that a shift of a similar magnitude in the Southwest would have done the same trick. Fewer than 70,000 votes among Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico -- with their collective 19 electoral votes -- would have swung the election just as surely as Ohio's 60,000. And with George W. Bush having won by margins of 5 percentage points, 3 points and 1 point, respectively, these were swing states by any definition of the term.In fact, it's looking more and more likely that the eight states of the Southwest and the broader interior West -- Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming -- are on their way to becoming the next great swing region in American politics. As the Republican Party tilts on its South-West axis, increasingly favoring southern values (religion, morality, tradition) over western ones (freedom, independence, privacy), the Democrats have been presented with a tremendous opportunity. If the Republican Party doesn't want to lose its hold over all of the West, as it lost hold of once-reliable California more than a decade ago, its leaders are going to have to rethink their embrace of big-government, big-religion conservatism.
I dismissed Josh at Everyday Economist and Perry at Eidelblog for putting too much trust in rhetoric from Kos and Rep. Pelosi. Commenters on their site say they're staying home. As his Rove-ness taught us, that's all that needs to happen for Democrats to win.
I think Sager is also right that where "God, Guns and Gays" might keep the South, it will not work in Colorado. I'm going to grab this issue of Atlantic and encourage everybody to read the RCP excerpt. It's stunning in a way, and provides a complete written description of his belief. There is some term for that...