When Barack Obama first announced that he’d pursue a 50-state strategy, those who led the Democratic Party during the 2000 and 2004 elections were up in arms. They insisted that spending money trying to be competitive in typically red states was a lost cause. But then again, they didn’t win either of the last two elections playing by that mantra. Something had to give. Obama began the general election race pledging not to relegate himself to the usual Democratic framework of New England, the central north (Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, etc.), and the West Coast. And in the last few weeks, his decision to eschew the typical aproach has begun to pay off. Democratic strategists Steve Jarding and Dave "Mudcat" Sanders have a saying that comes to mind: in politics, concede nothing. And Obama hasn't. Conventional wisdom would have told the Democratic nominee that Virginia- a state that hasn’t voted for a Democrat in 40 years (since it backed Lyndon Johnson in 1968)- was one of those lost causes. But the Illinois Democrat has broken the mold, pushing hard to maintain what is now a growing lead in th Old Dominion. The same goes for North Carolina, which has voted Republican all but once in that same time period. There, polls are now consistently showing that John McCain will face an uphill climb to keep the state in his column. You can apply this same logic to a good handful of the states in which Obama is now either leading or extremely competitive. Indiana voted for George W. Bush by more than a 20 point margin both times, but McCain is losing his already-precarious grip of just 2.4 percentage points. Or how about Colorado? That state wasn’t even remotely on John Kerry’s radar back in 2004, nor was it on Al Gore’s back in 2000. But through aggressive campaigning and new voter registration, Obama has all but sewn up the state’s 9 electoral votes. Missouri is another state that voted for Bush twice, and Obama has spent the last several months whittling what was a double-digit deficit down to just a few points. Nevada is no haven for Democrats, but Obama is doing well there, too. In fact, Intrade has made him the odds-on favorite there (and as I like to point out, Intrade had 100% accuracy in their 2004 odds making). If you add up all the states that are conventionally outside of the Democratic purview, you find that Obama has an opportunity to lay claim to more than 50 electoral votes that neither Gore nor Kerry could manage. In either case, it would have swung the election in their favors. But still, some Democrats are content with pouring all of our energy into Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, hoping to win two out of three and waltz into the White House. Obama has effectively bought himself an insurance policy with his unexpected success in the West and the South. Now, it may not matter if he loses Ohio and Florida (as was the case for Democrats in both 2000 and 2004). He’s picked up so much sipport elsewhere that he probably won’t need them. That’s why the 50-state strategy works.
