Obama's 50-State Strategy: Exploring General Concepts

Last week, top figures in the Obama campaign began to speak openly and with some specifics on what many commentators and observers have dubbed the Democrat’s “50-State Strategy.” While the unofficial announcements by the Obama campaign were met with a pretty fair amount of news coverage, for the most part it was not covered as a major story. I believe that this underwhelming response was unfortunate, and that the media, caught up in its 24/7 news cycle, failed to identify an important event. From a political standpoint, Obama’s 50-State Strategy is unprecedented, and in my opinion, is perhaps the most amazing storyline in the race so far.

Whereas modern presidential campaigns – particularly in the last two, razor-thin contests – are now methodically waged along the same, weathered blueprint of consolidating one’s base states and reaching out to pluck a small handful of swing states in order to reach the magical 270 Electoral Vote threshold, Obama’s stated strategy, if properly implemented, would rip up the old model by expanding the national playing field to encompass the entire country: literally from the shores of sunny Key West to the gray, frozen tundra of Barrow, Alaska. This is not to say that I fully approve of this ambitious plan; to be honest, I think it must be carried out meticulously and shrewdly, and if Obama fails, the results could be perilous.

The point of this analysis is to both define and dissect Sen. Obama’s 50-State Strategy in order to decide whether it is a wise course, or political folly. In the interest of being straightforward, my conclusion is that the 50-State Strategy is very wise for a host of reasons, and, if implemented correctly, could even be visionary given the circumstances. However, should the campaign end spreading itself too thin in states that are absolutely unwinnable in this and future elections, a possibility that is very real, then the strategy can be seen as overly-ambitious.

This discussion will be broken up into several key parts. The first part, presented here, will first delineate the existing model and how it was implemented in the failed Gore and Kerry campaigns. It will then set out to define exactly what the Obama campaign means when it invokes the name “50-State Strategy”, though only through logical inference (in other words, what it should mean, if the campaign is smart), as the campaign has wisely not described in great deal what its overall campaign plan will look like. In doing so, this analysis hopes dispel some existed myths proffered by recent commentary. The second part, posted here tomorrow, will look at the implications of the 50-State Strategy, specifically Obama’s stated and unstated motivations in carrying out such an ambitious campaign as well as the implications on state and national politics generally. This will lead into part three, which will look at those states which the Obama campaign has specifically mentioned as targets in the campaign’s ambitions plan, and it will discuss how each state may be targeted by Sen. Obama. It will conclude by looking at how the 50-State Strategy fits with both Sen. Obama's own quest for the presidency, and the existing national political climate.

The existing model. To get a good idea of how the existing model of running for President works (or does not work, as the case may be), one need look no further than the failed campaigns of Vice President Al Gore in 2000 and Sen. John Kerry in 2004. Each of them followed the model pretty much to a T, with Gore losing a nail-biter, and Kerry being beaten a bit more decisively. Both men focused on the same handful of states – Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and some others – and with disastrous results.

In 2000, Gore’s campaign went hard after Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida, assuming that if the then-Vice President were able to capture this troika of big states, Gore would win. While their assumption was correct, and Gore did come painfully close to winning all three and thus sealing the election, he ended up losing because he did not really have a fall-back plan if one or more of the three failed to wind up in the blue column. Had Gore made a greater effort in New Hampshire, Nevada or Ohio – all fairly close states in the end – or had not taken what had been a very reliable Democratic state in West Virginia for granted, he may well have won regardless of the Florida debacle.

Sen. Kerry’s story is perhaps even more egregious. Kerry put nearly all of eggs into the hopes of winning Ohio’s 20 Electoral Votes. While Ohio turned out closer than in 2000 when the Gore campaign basically ignored it, Kerry still lost. That Kerry’s electoral map strategy was a dud can be well demonstrated by comparing the 2000 and 2004 electoral maps. In the end, Sen. Kerry only flipped one state from red to blue between elections: New Hampshire, which Bush had won by one percent in 2000, and Kerry also carried by one point. Conversely, Iowa and New Mexico flipped to the GOP, and Bush held everywhere else that he needed.

In essence, because their races were close in the end, Gore and Kerry left themselves no margin for error when they lost their key goal states – Gore with Florida, and Kerry with Ohio – and were therefore unable to get to the magical 270. While hindsight it 20-20, and it is impossible to boil down any electoral loss to a single fact or eventuality, it could be argued that had either man done a better job of expanding his map, Bush would have been defeated.

Defining Obama’s 50-State Strategy. At least in rhetoric, Sen. Obama is dedicated to not making the same mistake of having a lack of electoral map ambition in his campaign. Here is where his so-called 50-State Strategy comes into play.

Despite its straight-forward name, there has been a great deal of confusion about what the plan’s scope, reach, and particularities. Because the Obama campaign has (wisely) not delved into tremendous specifics, we can only speculate, and that is precisely what this post will do. I think that this is crucially important to not only flesh out a better idea of what the 50-State Strategy aims to do, but also to either refute or reinforce criticisms from smart men and women who have criticized the strategic approach. Therefore, the following list sets out how this author perceives the 50-State Strategy, and how Obama should actually carry it out.

The 50-State Strategy should be taken just as its name implies. In other words, it means exactly what Sen. Obama and his campaign says it means: that the campaign has a specific strategy for each of the 50 states in the Union. It means that the Democratic campaign may go at each state in its own way, with perhaps the only stated common denominator being that the campaign will (or perhaps already has) put some paid staff in each of the states. Nothing else should be implied. The general basic goal for each state, particularly those that have been long-ignored, is that the national campaign will work with staff, volunteers, and overall organization in each of the states. This contrasts greatly with campaigns like Sen. Kerry’s where his own national campaign had basically zero communication with the organizations in states where he had no hope to win, much less actually spent his campaign’s valuable resources in any of those states. Under the Democrat’s 50-State Strategy, for reasons examined in greater detail later, no state will be completely ignored by the Obama campaign, even if it has actually written off a state as viable option in the Electoral College calculus.

Under a 50-State Strategy, all states are not made equal. Just because Sen. Obama actually has a strategy to install and thereafter take advantage of resources in a state, does not mean that his campaign will end up spending large funds in every single state. This is an important distinction, and one that is seemingly lost on some commentators. One such individual is the venerable Charlie Cook, head and founder of the incomparable Cook Political Report, and one of the most astute political observers in America today. In an article titled “Don’t Bet on a 50-State Strategy,” Cook questioned the idea of a 50-State Strategy, presenting both good and bad assumptions which will examined in even greater detail in tomorrow’s post.

The constrained outlook of Cook and others overlooks a key fact. The Obama campaign’s prospective strategy for each state will ultimately be tailored for that state alone. It naturally follows that each state strategy will be different. What this means in practical terms is that just because there will be a plan for the state of Texas, does not mean that that plan entails spending tens of millions of dollars in a fruitless attempt to win the state. Rather, the campaign may have other ideas, such as ensuring that a state with a lot of eager volunteers is able to take advantage of those supporters in some way, as opposed to completely failing to utilize their energy, and in turn benefit the campaign or another political campaign in some way.

This is a very good point to end this section, as it will lead into an important discussion of just what Sen. Obama is going to with his ambitious strategy.