The move is genius.

A big reason why Kerry lost is because he had tunnel vision and couldn’t see beyond a handful of competitive swing states in the Midwest, a failed strategy for several reasons: First, it oversaturates the target voters; secondly, it discourages friendly voters in unfriendly states (in this case Dems in red states) from getting involved; and thirdly and most importantly, it sends a very poor signal to the electorate in neglected states (in Kerry’s case the Heartland and South).

When a candidate puts all his chips on one hand, half of the time he’s going to end up felted.

Of course, resources are always an issue and something Kerry didn’t have in abundance. But as Smith notes in the Politico article, “Hilebrand’s plans underscore the unusual scope and ambition of Obama’s campaign, which can relatively cheaply extend its massive volunteer and technological resources into states which won’t necessarily produce electoral votes.”

And the ROI could be substantial. As Hokie fan Daivd “Mudcat” Saunders points out this week in the brilliant Weekly Standard cover piece “When Bubba Meets Obama,” when Dems pick off a Republican voter, it’s a “twofer” — one for Obama, and one less for McCain. Instead, Mudcat says, Dems often fall into the habit of “hunting squirrels they’ve already killed” (more on this story later).

Mudcat will probably be happy to know that the campaign has promised to contest 14 states that Bush carried in ’04 — “The closest four, Iowa, New Mexico, Ohio, Nevada, [Hildebrand] said, would see ‘a ton of attention.’” The campaign also plans to fight for Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Virginia, North Carolina, Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, Georgia and Alaska. Hildebrand also said they’d be spending a lot of time in New Hampshire, and in my personal favorite: Nebraska’s 2nd District.

I think it’s a smart move, and one that will certainly give The Electoral Map a lot to talk about in upcoming months.

I would make Missouri and Virginia tilt McCain and make Nevada a toss-up, but other than that I agree with everything.

Ambinder’s Electoral Map

Politico‘s Charlie Mahtesian and Amie Parnes wrote an article yesterday about the “Five Places Obama Should Go,” and four out of the five areas they identified were places where he struggled against Clinton: Broward County, FL (Jews), Youngstown, OH (blue-collar, gun-owning Catholics), San Antonio (Latinos) and Mingo Couny, WV (“the heart of the anti-Obama belt”). The fifth suggestion — Maricopa County, AZ — was clearly aimed at McCain.

If four out of the five places Obama has to go are aimed at shoring up his base, it means he still has plenty of loose ends to tie up from the primary before he starts trying to win over independents and Republicans.

With that in mind, where are the five places that McCain should go?

This is a tough one, since most of his weaknesses seem to be more personal (age, speaking skills, Bush) rather than geographic. Still, I think visiting areas where Obama is vulnerable and putting him on the defensive would be a smart move — So, how about:

1. Ohio River Valley Tour — From Pittsburgh to St. Louis — When it comes to the Ohio River Valley, the bad news for the GOP is that the party’s brand is in poor shape in this border region and has been resulting in substantial loses on the congressional level (think PA-04, OH-18, KY-03, IN-08 and IN-09, and the near-miss in OH-02). The good news for the GOP is that Obama is very unpopular here and was pummeled by Hillary in the primaries. In one trip, McCain could hit competitive areas in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Missouri, while also challenging the myth that Kentucky could become competitve and even making a symbolic swing through the Land of Lincoln.
2. Fairfield County, Conn. – A campaign stop with New York-area Jews and Joe Lieberman would inevitably shine a light on Obama’s comments about Iran and would fan media speculation that the state could become competitive. And Henry Kissinger lives in Kent, an hour up the beautiful Housatonic Valley from Fairfield County — perhaps he could lend an opinion on Obama’s foreign policy?
3. Northern Suburbs of Milwaukee, Wis. — The suburbs will be key nationwide and Wisconsin is a vital target state for the GOP. The north and west ‘burbs of Milwaukee also “remain overwhelmingly Republican,” notes Democratic pollster Paul Maslin. But “If Obama can crack them to any degree he probably wins the state by several points.” Besides shoring up support with voters, a McCain appearance in the “Beer Capital of the World” would also remind the media that he’s the beer track candidate and Obama is the wine track one. It would also be smart to campaign with fellow Teddy Roosevelt Republican Tommy Thompson.
4. Grand Rapids — Michigan might be Obama’s most blue vulnerable state and Gerald Ford’s hometown is at the ideological intersection of what Patrick Ruffini once called “the real dividing lines of” the GOP primary — wealthy suburbanites, religious conservatives and Ford-like mainline moderates. A smart sidekick would be Mitt Romney, who beat McCain in Grand Rapids by a 38-31% margin.
5. Iowa, Early and Often — Iowa might be McCain’s most vulnerable state; he clearly has never built much of an operation here. He needs to visit Iowa… repeatedly.

Thoughts?

• ALASKA: Nate Silver lays out the argument for an Obama trip to Alaska [FiveThirtyEight.com]
• GEORGIA: InsiderAdvantage has Obama tied with McCain [Southern Political Report]
• IOWA: McCain and Bush tour the Hawkeye State 60 miles apart [New York Times]
• IOWA: SurveyUSA says Obama/Webb is the strongest Democratic ticket; McCain/Bloomberg is the best GOP one [Race 4 2008]
• ELECTORAL MAP: The very real possibility that Obama wins the popular vote and looses the Electoral College [Politico]
• ELECTORAL MAP: Obama‘s battleground states ad buy includes North Dakota, Montana, Alaska and Indiana but not New Jersey, Oregon and Washington [Politico's Ben Smith]
• ELECTORAL MAP: The McCain camp is contesting 52 Democratic EV’s; the Obama team is going after 148 Republican EV’s [Cogitamus]

Well, last week the Obama camp declared that its road to the White House won’t necessary run through these behemoth battlegrounds. Cleveland and Cape Canaveral will be important campaign stops, but not the end-all-be-all’s that they use to be.

In a meeting with donors, manager David Plouffe suggested that while the campaign thinks it’s competitive in those two states and would like to win them, it doesn’t need them. “You have a lot of ways to get to 270,” Plouffe said, according to Huffington Post. “Our goal is not to be reliant on one state on November 4th.”

Plouffe pointed to a number of intriguing targets, with Virginia and Georgia on top of the list. If you’ve read my Politico column from today, “Virginia will be an uphill battle for Obama,” you’ll know the Old Dominion is not the lay-up that many in the Obama camp and national media think it is.

Georgia, however, is a fascinating prospect: I still think it’s out of reach for Democrats but if the African-American vote is boosted by, say, 500,000, as Ambinder thinks it could be, and Bob Barr runs strong in his home state, then the Peach State could be interesting.

Besides those two former linchpins of the Confederacy, the Obama camp also sees opportunities in Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Alaska and North Dakota. He also noted that they need to watch their back in Michigan, Pennsylvania and especially New Hampshire.

Map compliments of Cartophilia.

It’s a whopper of a suggestion if I’ve every heard one.

The McCain camp sent out a “Strategy Briefing” last week with a list of battleground states that included some pretty strange choices, most notably his home state of Arizona. Maybe it was an attempt to bait the Obama campaign, or more likely the media, but its seems like a couple of lefty blogs have been the only ones to bite.

FiveThirtyEight.com notes that Washington Independent observed that “In a clear signal that Arizona’s 10 electoral votes are up for grabs, the McCain campaign has added Arizona to its list of 24 ‘battleground states’ with their 242 electoral votes.” The Huffington Post subsequently followed suit and picked up the article.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com posted his own reaction to the McCain’s briefing today, smartly observing that “Even without that home state effect, Arizona would lag a few points behind pickup opportunities like Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, largely because of its large retiree population. Is it possible that Obama could win Arizona? Sure (although our model assigns him only a 4 percent chance). Is Arizona likely to make the difference between winning and losing the election? Probably not.”

I agree. Arizona is a changing at the state level with Dems gaining more offices despite districts that heavily favor the GOP. But it’s going to be a while before Dems can win the Land of Barry Goldwater in a presidential election.

“Obama can’t compete in Arkansas without Hillary as his running mate. Obama is going to get pummeled in Oklahoma either way because Oklahoma is Arkansas without those enlightened (or static, if you prefer) Democratic influences. The point is that, for all the talk of a new day and of a race that is the Democrats to lose, the Democrats find themselves in old and familiar territory. That is to say they have a nominee whose competitiveness seems foreclosed in large sections of the country, primarily ours.”

Chuck wrote in March that “Mississippi is one of those rare Southern states that might be in play in the general election if Obama becomes the nominee. One Dem statistician tells First Read that there are three red states that could swing if African-American turnout was ever maximized (both in registration and in actual turnout): Georgia, Louisiana and, yes, Mississippi. So don’t assume this is just one of those untouchable red states.”

Marc took it a step further in May and broke down the actual numbers, asking, “Did you know that a half a million African Americans in Georgia are eligible to vote but haven’t registered? The Obama campaign knows this. And they plan to register these voters by November, campaign folks say.” The Southern Political Report noted on Tuesday that the DCCC and DSCC have already registered 70,000 new voters in some Louisiana parishes.

Stateline also took a look at it on Tuesday and noted that “Some Democrats hold out hope that Obama could actually win one of the six Southern states that he won so convincingly during the primary season — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina — all of which have voted strongly Republican in recent presidential elections.” But the key phrase from that observation might have been that Dems are “holding out hope,” because after all, it’ll be a long shot.

Tom Schaller, another superb political handicapper, actually crunched the numbers (something that no one else has done), and found that Obama is facing steep odds. In a conversation about white voters posted on Salon, Schaller presented his data:

“I did a correlation between the black share of statewide population in the 11 Confederate states and the share of Bush‘s support among white voters, and it correlates at .76 with all 11 confederate states and if you take Texas out, which Bush obviously did well in, though it has a relatively low black population, with a data set of just 10 data points, it correlates at .9. Human height and weight doesn’t correlate at .9. With 10 data points, it’s ridiculous. I don’t even think this is an empirical matter of dispute.”

Schaller has a point and his numbers are tough to argue with.  But if Obama’s campaign is really about redrawing the electoral map and scrapping the old Clinton-Bush model, then he needs to leave no stone unturned and leave no county uncontested.

I emailed Ferrell Guillory, director of the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC-Chapel Hill, and asked what he thought about Obama’s chances in North Carolina in 2008. This is what he told me:

“The embedded GOP general election vote surely makes McCain the frontrunner in N.C. Still, like Virginia, NC going through a transition, economically and socially that will eventually have a ripple effect politically. I’d say Virginia is somewhat farther along that N.C. in that transition. If Obama has any chance here, he clearly — emphatically — must stimulate a strong turnout in Raleigh and Research Triangle environs, not only among black citizens but also among independent high-tech folks and young newly arrived voters. It makes sense for the Obama campaign to make an early stop here to assess the situation — and determine later whether it’s worth investing more time and resources to the state. To win N.C., he has to change the dynamic.”

Interstate 4, as all political demographers know, is the main artery in what one Florida reporter recently described as “the most important swing region in the nation’s biggest swing state.”  The I-4 Corridor, as it’s called, includes 14 counties between the Tampa metro area and Daytona Beach, and is considered a pivotal area in Florida elections.

“Since at least 1980, the combined votes in those 14 counties have almost perfectly reflected the votes of the state as a whole,” wrote Tampa Tribune reporter William Marsh in May on the eve of Barack Obama‘s visit to  Tampa.   It’s the swing region between reliably Republican north and southwestern Florida and staunchly Democratic southeastern Florida.

Marsh also cited USF professor Susan McManus who predicted that Obama might have a tough time winning the I-4 Corridor.  She noted Republicans’ edge in registration, the fact that many voters here are older and value “experience and stability,” and the presence of suburbanites who could be susceptible to allegations about Obama’s patriotism.

But judging by the 1500 square foot Rebel battle flag flying 139 feet over the I-4 Corridor’s largest media market, does Obama have another hurdle to worry about here?

McCain Camp’s Battleground States

The McCain team is also all over Obama‘s weakness in Appalachian counties in Ohio and Pennsylvania (including Ted Strickland‘s former district and John Murtha‘s district) and a supposed lingering rift among Democrats in swing states.

Appalachia in Ohio and Pennsylvania

Obama’s Polling with the Base in Swing States

Lastly, the briefing names states of interest that the McCain camp says it’ll be keeping its eye on, including Schwarzenegger’s California and Lieberman‘s Connecticut.

McCain’s States of Interest

Earmarks Per Capita (AP)

“States the Democrats have won in four of the past five elections add up to 255 electoral votes; states Republicans have won in five of the past seven elections (including two Ronald Reagan electoral landslides) account for 269 electoral votes. New Hampshire, New Mexico and West Virginia, representing 14 electoral votes, fall into neither category.”

It’s striking that the GOP has such a high electoral floor.

It’s also interesting that New Hampshire and West Virginia seem be going through these fundamental political transformations. West Virginia was once a lynchpin in the New Deal Democratic coalition, voting for the Democratic presidential candidate in elections from 1920 to 2000 with the exceptions of the GOP landslides of 1954, ’72 and ’84. And the Granite State’s DNA is so Republican that the Legislature was in GOP hands from 1911 to 2004, when the Dems took it over.

Balz also notes that “In 2004, 13 states were decided by seven or fewer percentage points: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”

One state in that list stuck out for me: New Jersey. Bush lost here by only seven points, which was a smaller margin that he won the supposedly battleground state of Virginia. So the question is: is New Jersey really a swing state (Bush Sr. won here in 1988), or was it a 9/11 anomaly? And more importantly, how much time and money does McCain want to spend here in 2008?

But thirdly, and most interestingly, Nebraska is one of two states (Maine is the other) that split electoral votes by congressional district. Candidates get one EV for each district that they win and two for winning the state. In past elections, Republicans have swept all five EV’s, but Obama could possibly win Nebraska’s 2nd District, where Omaha is located. It’s an urban population and is growing rather quickly, if quietly.

Sure it’s just one electoral vote in a vault of 538, but imagine this scenario: Obama flips Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico to the Democratic column and McCain wins back New Hampshire. All other states remain constant from the 2004 election, putting the score at 269-269. The tiebreaker? Either the House or Nebraska’s 2nd District.

Here’s a possible scenario of a 269-269 tie, brought to you by 270toWin.com

I make a point of not dwelling on polls at The Electoral Map, but North Carolina is a state the Obama camp has repeatedly boasted that it could put into play.  It has a large bloc of African-American voters and a bustling new population of creative-class independents, mostly around the Research Triangle but also in Charlotte.  If Barr continues to poll well there, it makes sense for Obama to execute on his promise and make North Carolina a Tier I target.

Dissecting the Mt. Rushmore State primary, he notes “Obama didn’t win the counties that include the three largest cities in South Dakota: Sioux Falls, Rapid City, and Aberdeen. He did quite well in counties with large Native American populations, but Bill Clinton’s visit to Pine Ridge during his Presidency was well remembered; those counties were much closer than the other reservations. The Eastern portion of the state is more heavily populated and less heavily Republican, so Clinton’s big wins tended to come in areas with more votes.”

South Dakota Electoral Map (Cogitamusblog.com)

South Dakota Population Map

Looking at Montana, Beaudrot observes “The two Clinton counties in the Western portion of the state are Silver Bow and Deer Lodge, the only blue counties in Western Montana. But Obama offset those with big wins in Missoula, Helena, and Gallatin counties.”

Montana Electoral Map (Cogitamusblog.com)

Montana Population Map

So assuming that he continues to play a prominent role in the McCain campaign, and possibly is even tapped as a running mate, could Lieberman put Connecticut in play?

I doubt it, but consider some numbers: Chris Healy at The Everyday Republican is trumpeting a Rasmussen Reports poll released on Tuesday that finds Obama taking 47% in the Nutmeg State to McCain’s 44%.  “We have always felt that Sen. McCain’s positions and personal story and long record of being a maverick would play well in our state,” writes Healy. “The numbers indicate that, and they are even more amazing considering how the Democrats have dominated the news for the last two months.”

Politico‘s Jonathan Martin also noted in his March article “Maverick wants to paint blue states red” that McCain has his eyes on the state that has elected two third-party candidate to statewide office in recent years (Lieberman and Lowell Weicker).

The chances are slim for McCain in Connecticut.  But considering all the time he’ll be spending in New Hampshire, isn’t it worth the occasional day trip down the Connecticut River, if only to make things interesting?