Terra Incognita: Obama and the General Election

Barack Obama and his staff are already gearing up for the general election and what do you think is a main focus of the campaign? According to at least one recent article, winning white Democrats in…Ohio and Pennsylvania! No matter, of course, that the Obama campaign, just as they are currently doing regarding Tuesday’s primary in West Virginia, spent a lot of time and energy on minimizing the importance of these states in the primary and, you guessed it, white working class voters.

As I write, Obama is supposedly getting boots on the ground in these states and setting up his organization to get a group of voters he is all too aware is crucial to his general election chances (see NY Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/us/politics/11strategy.html?ref=politics).

Other critical aspects of Obama’s general election campaign include making use of the organizational machinery he has used so well in the primaries and especially the caucuses to generate new voters in the demographic groups in which Obama excels—younger voters and blacks.

Bigger turnouts than either Gore or Kerry managed coupled with getting the constituencies Hillary Clinton currently is getting—white working class voters, older voters, and Hispanics—would likely mean victory for the Democrats in November. Unfortunately, Obama cannot count on getting the constituencies Clinton is doing well with. He will get some of these voters, of course, but many will likely go to McCain or perhaps not vote at all. Obama had weeks, for example, between the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries and more money than he knew what to do with to convince white working class Democrats that he was the better candidate. In the end, despite the time and money, he did no better in the state than the February 8 delegate count predictions leaked by his campaign following Super Tuesday.

Astonishingly, given that he nearly has the Party’s nomination in hand, Obama has won the white Democrat vote in only three primaries—his home state of Illinois, Vermont, and New Mexico. Can Obama make up for his weakness with white Democrats by pumping up the volume of new voters? Unlikely, I think. Younger voters make up the smallest percentage of all voters in past elections, so even a significant bump in this group will probably mean little. And black voters? There simply aren’t enough of them to make much of a difference in the states where he will need them to solve the much different electoral college equation in the math of the general election.

Proportional representation; caucuses, where the votes of a relatively few activists are hugely magnified; and the awarding of delegates based on county and precinct turnouts in previous elections, permitted Obama to launch and be successful with a strategy of accretion—winning the caucuses and picking off just enough delegates in the big states to get more overall pledged delegates. All of these Democratic primary structures are meaningless in the general election, though, where each state is winner-take-all. Had this they not played a role in the Democratic primary, and each state awarded all delegates to the victor, Obama would have been sitting on the sidelines a long time ago.

Obama now has before him, or almost has before him, the task of registering and getting out a huge number of new Democratic voters and winning over enough voters from the very Democrats that have shown little tendency to support him. He could accomplish these things, but far more likely is that the unforgiving format of the general election will throw into garish relief Obama’s weakness with the voters in the states where he will have to do especially well.

Obama’s early general election focus on states like Ohio and Pennsylvania belie his campaign’s trumpeting of victories in Idaho and Wyoming and the more fundamental argument that Obama is a candidate who will change the lines of the red/blue state electoral college map as they have been drawn the last several general elections.

Obama is all too aware that he must do well in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and, yes, West Virginia, and with white voters in states like these in order to have a chance at the presidency.

As the superdelegates stand on the verge of making Obama the Democratic Party’s nominee, it isn’t clear how anyone in the party, let alone the superdelegates, the party cognoscenti supposedly, was not aware a long time ago that Obama needed these voters too, and that his inability to get them, makes him a very flawed candidate for the general election.

Unable to win the white Democratic vote in any Democratic primary except for Illinois or Vermont and yet the Party's nominee or soon to be anyway??

It sounds almost too ludicrous to write.