West Virginia
Hillary Clinton won West Virginia yesterday with a pretty impressive margin. As everyone but Senator Clinton knows though, that win (and her likely win in Kentucky) amounts to nothing more than window dressing, since Senator Obama is the presumptive nominee. David Weigel at Reason’s Hit & Run has a pretty good take on yesterday’s results (especially in light of Clinton’s claim that West Virginia is integral to any Democratic victory):
The good news for Obama? The states he’s losing aren’t worth as much as the states he’s winning. I discussed this with Eric Dondero on BlogTalkRadio last night. Dondero was crowing that the Democrats were losing Southern whites forever with their foolhardy Obama nomination, and I argued that they could afford to, because the electoral power of those voters is vanishing. West Virginia’s a good example. From 1913 to 1963, the state had six congressmen and eight electoral votes. Now it has three congressman and five electoral votes. It’s the 10th slowest-growing state: A political party would get far more out of locking down Hispanic votes in Nevada (5 electoral votes, set to become 6 electoral votes in 2012) than locking down poor whites in West Virginia or even Kentucky. Congressional re-districting is going to pulverize these states.
Look at it this way. Say the Democrats win the White House with the states Al Gore won in 2000 plus West Virginia. In 2000, they would have been worth 271 votes. In 2008, they will be worth 269 votes—enough to toss the election into the House of representatives. In 2012, they will be worth only 259 votes, as the rust belt and mid-Atlantic states lose clout to the West and sun belt. The smart thing for either party, then, is to win those latter states. The GOP would gladly give up its West Virginia surge if it could stop bleeding support in Colorado and (to a much lesser but more worrying extent) Texas.
Even if the winner of West Virginia’s Democratic primary was guaranteed to win the state in the general election, the impact of that win is far less than it was four or eight years ago. Winning West Virginia may have been an important part of Democratic victories in the 1920s, but that’s really no longer the case.
