This post by Steve Benen should be required reading for all Progressives.
A taste:
Lefties outside the South seem to think very little of suggesting the red states just get out. For kicks, I spent some time this weekend subtracting ballots for Barack Obama in the red states from the president's margin of victory in the national popular vote.
You could do this any number of ways, but if you take out just Alabama, Oklahoma, Arkansas, my own Mississippi and Georgia, the president loses the popular vote. Georgia alone added 1,761,761 votes for Obama. And yes, I realize those same states contributed enough red votes to keep the election close. But every blue ballot represents a natural ally for lefties outside the South, not votes to be thrown out.
What's more, progressives in conservative states are making a new and quite game go of it.
2 comments:
I have read this over and over again trying to figure out what point Benen is trying to make.
He seems to be saying that if you do not count the votes Obama got in AL, OK, AR, MS and GA but still do count the votes Romney got in AL, OK, AR, MS and GA, Obama would have lost the popular vote.
What does that prove? If you don't count any Obama votes and counted all the Romney votes, Romney would have gotten 538 electoral votes and he would be our next President.
I had a private conversation with Josh Marshall (ahem, ahem) about this very issue. Benen's point, as I understand it, is not so much that Obama needed the Southern votes to have a majority, but this:
...every blue ballot represents a natural ally for lefties outside the South, not votes to be thrown out.
What's more, progressives in conservative states are making a new and quite game go of it.
Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy is still paying dividends. If we write the South off as idiots, we are ignoring the fact that millions of them are not, and denying ourselves the opportunity to flip them. We got Virginia and Florida this year. North Carolina was close. In four years, Texas will be competitive. We can't write anybody off.
That's all I meant.
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