Close in Mississippi?

The idea that Mississippi would be a leans McCain state rather than a solid McCain state in the event of Barack Obama being the Democratic nominee seems to me to be based on an ambiguity in the idea of leaning.

I imagine that with Obama as the nominee, you'll see him get an incredible performance from Mississippi's black population, and because that population is so large the result would probably be tighter than the 60-40 split that John Kerry got. So maybe it'll "lean" McCain and wind up as only a 55-45 state or something. But there's just no way that Obama will ever win Mississippi. The southern states with larger black populations just have more racially polarized voting. At the end of the day, most Mississippians are white, they're not going to let Obama win the state, and you can take that to the bank.

Comments

Matt's pretending to be a racist today!

April Fools!

Posted by Justin | April 4, 2008 12:33 PM

The big issue is that people assume for whatever reason (cough, racism) that African Americans are unreliable voters and that there is a lot of room for them to improve their performance. The fact of the matter is that they vote at a higher rate than whites when you account for socioeconomic factors, and of course they already vote 90% Democrat.

Posted by Anonymous | April 4, 2008 12:35 PM

You can also take a paycheck to the bank, where you can cash it or deposit it into the account of your choosing.

Posted by Freddie | April 4, 2008 12:38 PM

To be fair, I doubt any other Dem could win it either. Perhaps down the road it'd be possible, and that's why I think the 50-state initiative was and is a great idea, but it's probably a solid McCain state barring Obama absolutely crushing the man.

Posted by Demosthenes | April 4, 2008 12:47 PM

No national Democrat can win Mississippi, and it's not racist to point out that the percentage of white people in Mississippi who vote Republican in presidential races is similar to the percentage of African Americans who vote Democratic.

Posted by John | April 4, 2008 12:52 PM

MS is the probably the most racist state in the country. No way Obama can win it.

Posted by Savage | April 4, 2008 12:57 PM

Matt, have you been watching old Baretta reruns or something?

Posted by Pesto | April 4, 2008 1:03 PM

Racist, racist, racist Matt! Everyone knows that looking at demographic factors is crypto-racism!

Or has Matt now been bribed by Hillary Satanus, and is falsely trying to undercut Obama's chances of carrying all those normally Republican states like Mississippi, Utah, North Dakota, and Idaho, thereby weakening the rationale for his nomination? After all, lots of victories there will be necessary to balance out Obama's huge relative weakness in states like Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

Shame, shame, shame on Matt!

Posted by RKU | April 4, 2008 1:05 PM

I think this is a good companion article to your earlier 'Dual Track' posting. Mississippi and states like it are still basically automatic for the GOP but he's going to have to put in a little time pandering to the hardcore W loving vote in order to make sure it stays in the 'safe' column.

At minimum, it forces him to divert some resources away from competing in states that are truly up-for-grabs and represents an opportunity cost for McCain - less money and less time to campaign elsewhere. At maximum, he's forced to adopt a set of positions & slogans to protect MS that will kill him in less reactionary states.

For the flipside, think of how it would look if Clinton or Obamah had to play defense in San Francisco and Seattle.

It doesn't mean he's going to lose, it just means that he has a very challenging path ahead of him.

Posted by BFR | April 4, 2008 1:15 PM

What MY is pointing out here is that there is an average and a variance. And even though the average may be tighter in Miss, the variance is probably also correspondingly smaller. It's a good point. If McCain sees it this way, he won't bother spending money there even if the polls close some, but we'll see. There is a way for Obama to win, though, b/c not everybody votes. If they did, he'd have no chance. But if enough Republicans choose not to vote, then an Obama win could be a possibility.

People focus on voter turnout for a good reason: if you could somehow improve your base's turnout you could make up huge poll differences without even changing anyone's opinion. That's a very tempting idea. The problem is that voter turnout is somehow very insensitive to shifting political opinions. Sometimes it goes up or down, but mostly across the board. If you could find a solution to this, it would be electoral gold. That's why the old political machines were so effective.

Posted by mpowell | April 4, 2008 1:23 PM

At the end of the day, most Mississippians are white, they're not going to let Obama win the state, and you can take that to the bank.

Never say never.

Posted by fnook | April 4, 2008 1:27 PM

As a Mississippian, I have to say that Matt's right -- absent a catastrophic collapse by McCain on the eve of the election, there's no way he'll lose Mississippi. BUT, I think if Obama can fire up the Democratic base in the state and brings in a huge AA turnout, it can have important down-ticket effects. Ronnie Musgrove, the relatively popular former governorm is running as a Democrat to replace Trent Lott against former congressman Roger Wicker, who is relatively unknown outside the First District. Meanwhile, the race to replace Wicker in the First Distrct is between a pretty good Dem candidate and a Repub who carries a lot of ethics problems due to his former role as a TVA Administrator. I know McCain's carrying my state, but the possibility of turning half of Mississippi's congressional delegation blue is exciting and, IMO, is only possible with Obama. Mississippi blacks will not be particularly excited to support Clinton, especially if she takes the nomination through what appears to be some kind of chicanery, and white conservatives have an almost hysterical hatred of her.

Then again, my mother has been getting emails suggesting that Obama is the Antichrist because he's a Muslim from the East so who knows how things will play out in November.

Posted by atalex | April 4, 2008 1:30 PM

Uh. He's right. It's certainly not racist to point that out. And wait - when did anyone ever argue that Obama would sweep Mississippi, Utah, North Dakota and Idaho in a general election?

Posted by Abby | April 4, 2008 1:31 PM

If McCain sees it this way, he won't bother spending money there even if the polls close some, but we'll see.

It's not just MS though - IIRC the demographics across the deep south are pretty similar with some variance in the amount of urbanization and racial mix. So if MS is leaning more to the Dem side than it should, then it's a good bet that AL, SC, GA, TN and NC are showing the same patterns.

It's not so much that Obama would win in any more of those states than Clinton or any other Dem for that matter - it's that it creates risk for the McCain camp - if he's got his deep south demographic counts off, then what he does is MO, OH, PA, FL are pretty much irrelevant.

So, does he ignore the deep south and hope his (and everyone else's) demographic & turnout projections are right, or does he devote time and resources away from core battleground states in order to ensure that the deep south is safe?

Posted by BFR | April 4, 2008 1:33 PM

As someone who is young and grew up in the south, I could MAYBE see Obama doing well in GA and NC. The others, no way.

With the recent voter registration numbers, I don't see him losing PA, and probably not OH either.

Posted by 55 | April 4, 2008 1:41 PM

I could MAYBE see Obama doing well in GA and NC.

I haven't been in the south for a long time - I would have guessed NC and TN, since Ford did pretty well in TN last year.

Not so sure about GA - after all, I think I once read that GA put the 'fun' back in fundamentalist extremism, so I'm not sure how fertile territory that is. Atlanta has grown quite a bit in recent years so maybe it's more competitive than it used to be.

Posted by BFR | April 4, 2008 1:45 PM

But the unspoken part of your comment Mr. Yglesias is that the South is still an unending source of racist, reactionary sentiment, that has been mined gleefully by the Republican Party. Encouraging racism, bigotry, religious intolerance, ultranationalism seems to be a small cost to gain a tax cut.

Posted by della Rovere | April 4, 2008 1:50 PM

"At the end of the day, most Mississippians are white, they're not going to let Obama win the state, and you can take that to the bank."

According to Governor Rendell, the same thing can be said about Pennsylvania. LOL

Posted by Chicounsel | April 4, 2008 1:53 PM

But the unspoken part of your comment Mr. Yglesias is that the South is still an unending source of racist, reactionary sentiment, that has been mined gleefully by the Republican Party.

Where have you been the last 40 years? That's pretty much exactly what's been going on. That's not to say that all southerners are racists and reactonaries but your southern racists + reactionaries has been able to get you 51% of the vote for a good while.

Posted by BFR | April 4, 2008 1:55 PM

What's the bank, Matt? Bear Stearns?

Obama can get a LOT of white votes in Mississippi. Also in Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and especially Louisiana.

All he as to do is return to his basically centrist posture, and lose the brain-dead leftist positions increasingly represented by Matt recently.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 4, 2008 1:56 PM

What's the bank, Matt? Bear Stearns?

Obama can get a LOT of white votes in Mississippi. Also in Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and especially Louisiana.

All he as to do is return to his basically centrist posture, and lose the brain-dead leftist positions increasingly represented by Matt recently.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 4, 2008 2:03 PM

Obama can get a LOT of white votes in Mississippi. Also in Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and especially Louisiana.

I think the racial polarization factor in states with a large black population is pretty well studied and understood. The problem that I think Matt's getting at is that huge black turnout + urban professional whites can't get you over 50% in the south.

The trick for the GOP is how to max out their base in the rest of the population without having to resort to tactics that alienate the rest of the country, which is why you end up with the dog-whistle stuff like Willie Horton, Reagan's appeal to state's rights and the stuff that Corker trotted out last year.

If the base is depressed with McCain at the top of the ticket, then he might have to get more explicit, which is a risky strategy.

Posted by BFR | April 4, 2008 2:04 PM

Plus ca change ....

Posted by David in NY | April 4, 2008 2:18 PM

I don't think it matters whether Obama can actually win in Mississippi, Kansas, Nebraska, Alabama, or any of the other states which were strong McCain and are now leaning McCain. I think it matters that McCain and the RNC get worried that Obama can maybe steal one of the above, and as such, have to divert resources to hold onto them. Same goes for Hillary if (by divine intervention), she gets the nomination, and then has to put up a fight in NJ, CT, etc. Point is though, that if Obama makes McCain play defense with the limited funds at his disposal, that's fewer dollars McCain can spend in OH, PA, MI, etc

Posted by daniel | April 4, 2008 2:23 PM

I could MAYBE see Obama doing well in GA and NC.

This North Carolinian says Obama's likely to do better in NC than much of the rest of the South, but not anywhere close to winning. Virginia's probably his best bet to pick up a southern state.

NC's probably still a cycle or two away from being a truly competitive state in a presidential race.

Posted by apostropher | April 4, 2008 3:21 PM

I don't know if Obama can win Mississippi (if he does, we are talking Reagan-Mondale territory), but the main game there will indeed be the down-ticket races. And if McCain is massively outspent and Obama keeps it reasonably close, then that is probably going to end up being good news for the Party, even if it doesn't end up getting Obama any electoral college votes.

Posted by DTM | April 4, 2008 3:32 PM

Mississippi, my friends, ain't going blue - nice as that would be. I am more interested in Missouri, Virginia and North Carolina. Any Missouri natives or insightful pundits in the house?

Posted by maraschion | April 4, 2008 4:12 PM

Wider swings

It is true that for the past few cycles we have had increasingly narrow swings from one presidential election to the next. Elections are closer and party preference seems more fixed. If that pattern holds up, yes, MS is extremely unlikely to go blue. But not so long ago, we had Reagan, Johnson, Nixon (1972), and even Bush the Elder racking up large margins, and there were few to no permanent swing vs safe states for either party. Yes, maybe there are underlying forces at work that dictate that the narrow swings of recent years are really structural, and not simply the chance occurrence of several races in a row that were all close, but for different reasons each time. Even if you did convince yourself that the narrow swings are definitely structural, and caused by the same factor, unless you can tell us what that factor might be, you can't have any confidence that it will not remit this year as immutably as it came on 16 years ago, and leave us in another era of wide swings in which Obama wouldn't even need to be riding some wave to win MS, because there will be no safe states anymnore.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | April 4, 2008 4:13 PM

MS is the probably the most racist state in the country.

C'mon, now that's not fair. They banned slavery. Eventually. In 1995.

Posted by croatoan | April 4, 2008 4:14 PM

Wider swings

It is true that for the past few cycles we have had increasingly narrow swings from one presidential election to the next. Elections are closer and party preference seems more fixed. If that pattern holds up, yes, MS is extremely unlikely to go blue. But not so long ago, we had Reagan, Johnson, Nixon (1972), and even Bush the Elder racking up large margins, and there were few to no permanent swing vs safe states for either party. Yes, maybe there are underlying forces at work that dictate that the narrow swings of recent years are really structural, and not simply the chance occurrence of several races in a row that were all close, but for different reasons each time. Even if you did convince yourself that the narrow swings are definitely structural, and caused by the same factor, unless you can tell us what that factor might be, you can't have any confidence that it will not remit this year as immutably as it came on 16 years ago, and leave us in another era of wide swings in which Obama wouldn't even need to be riding some wave to win MS, because there will be no safe states anymnore.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | April 4, 2008 4:16 PM

Really? I had no idea that MS had such a long and proud history of racial justice....

Posted by morzer | April 4, 2008 4:17 PM

I beg to differ. I have lived in MS, have relatives in MS, and now live less than five miles from the state line. I think Obama has a real chance in MS this fall. Our last democratic governor, Ray Maybus has a better understanding of the political dynamic in the state than most and he makes a convincing argument fo Obama's viability in the state. Obama will never win DeSoto County but he could win the state with the help of the white democrats in the hills.

Posted by Larry Geater | April 4, 2008 6:02 PM

I beg to differ. I have lived in MS, have relatives in MS, and now live less than five miles from the state line. I think Obama has a real chance in MS this fall. Our last democratic governor, Ray Maybus has a better understanding of the political dynamic in the state than most and he makes a convincing argument fo Obama's viability in the state. Obama will never win DeSoto County but he could win the state with the help of the white democrats in the hills.

Posted by Larry Geater | April 4, 2008 6:03 PM

Couldn't Obama win MS just once, in 2008?

Mightn't the black turnout be so surprising and overwhelming that Obama carries the state, surprising the s*** out of white MS voters?

Of course the whites would learn and it wouldn't happen again, but mightn't Obama slip it under the door just once?

Posted by tomtom | April 4, 2008 6:20 PM

...and you can take that to the bank

More importantly though, is that the name of that tune?

Posted by RD | April 4, 2008 7:23 PM

For those who don't see the diffference between a presidential cadndidate having a bad political adviser and having a bad spiritual adviser, I would just point out that the presidency is a political position.

Posted by the obvious | April 7, 2008 2:10 PM