ELECTIONATE JULY 23, 2012
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Why isn’t Minnesota a swing state? The state voted for Obama by just 10 percent in 2010
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—closer than Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and quite comparable to New Hampshire and Iowa. The demographics would seem to advantage Romney in an overwhelmingly white state where Democrats depend on a strong performance among rural voters. Yes, the Minnesota Republican Party is a disaster, but the Romney campaign has the money to build infrastructure, and that doesn’t explain why the polls show Obama with a big advantage.
But over the last few weeks, there are a few signs that Minnesota might be inching towards competitiveness. First, Romney-aligned super PAC Americans for Prosperity went on the airwaves in Minnesota. They haven’t carpet bombed the state, but they invested as much in Minnesota as the other battlegrounds. Last night, SurveyUSA released a poll showing Obama up by just 6 percentage points in the North Star State, down from a 14 point advantage in May.
The polls are not entirely comparable, since they switched to a likely voter model and included the option of “other,” a choice selected by 7 percent of Minnesota voters, including 14 percent of moderates—a category where Democrats traditionally do quite well. But even so, Obama was at just 46 percent of the vote and the large number of voters who preferred “other” are presumably open to alternatives to the President, even if they haven’t embraced Romney.
Without converting states like Wisconsin or Minnesota into true toss-ups, Romney’s electoral map is unimpressive. Obama is historically weak among whites, but that hasn't translated into historic weakness in overwhelmingly white states that lean Democratic, like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oregon, or Michigan. At the same time, Obama has translated his strengths into real electoral opportunities in the Mid-Atlantic and Southwest. For the moment, Obama has the benefits of his “new coalition” without suffering the costs, but perhaps today’s SurveyUSA poll is a sign that's changing.
1 comments
Minnesota voted for Obama by only 10 points because there was almost no campaign advertising from either side in that state, as both assumed it was not going to be competitive anyway. That's in obvious contrast to Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Hampshire, Iowa or even Michigan, where McCain did advertise for a while before deciding it was too big of a stretch in early October (to Sarah Palin's vocal dismay). In that sense, it was a perfect laboratory of the "natural" appeal of Obama in 2008 in a largely white, moderate-to-liberal Midwestern state. One would imagine that, in the absence of advertising from either campaign in 2012, Obama would still carry Minnesota but only by about 5-6 points, which is where one would expect his margins to fall in a Midwestern state where white, working-class voters were a meaningful part of his 2008 coalition. With major unrebutted Republican SuperPAC advertising, one would assume his margin there might slip by another 2-3 points, but that would still leave him as a narrow victor. And I would presume that the Obama campaign and its SuperPACs would match at least some of the Republican fundraising just to make sure that the race is not so close.
- wildboy
July 23, 2012 at 2:43pm