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New battlegrounds for McCain and Obama

Obama sees potential in traditional red states such as Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina. McCain looks to target blue states including Pennsylvania and Michigan.

from the June 11, 2008 edition

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All campaigns, of course, say they are competing everywhere; there's no point in discouraging core voters in safe states, and making those electoral votes less than automatic – or missing opportunities in the opposition's seemingly safe states. But this time around, with the environment weighing so heavily in the Democrats' favor, a 50-state strategy may seem a bit less pie in the sky.

Republicans have lost three normally safe congressional seats this year in special elections, and signs point to another "wave" election, following the wave of 2006, when the Democrats swept the Republicans out of the leadership in both the House and the Senate.

Even though McCain is competitive with Obama so far in national polls, he faces a generic Republican vs. Democrat environment that favors the Democrats by a double-digit margin.

Also in Obama's back pocket is a large pool of unregistered black voters in states he hopes to make competitive. As of 2004, according to Census numbers, Georgia alone had 500,000 African-Americans who were not registered to vote. The Obama campaign is aggressively courting those voters with the prospect of electing the nation's first black president – and thus many political handicappers put Georgia in the "lean McCain" column, not in his base.

North Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana are also in same boat, with large untapped populations of black voters that could make those states competitive. Even if Obama does not win there, he could force the less-well-funded McCain to divert resources to them.

David Bositis, an expert on the black vote at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, notes that the states with the biggest black populations are also the most racially polarized.

"Senator Obama is not going to win these states just with black voters," he says. "He has to have some prospect of doing reasonably well with white voters."

Mississippi may be beyond reach, but states like North Carolina and Georgia, with influxes of upper-income, young, and educated white voters could become competitive with a large-enough black turnout.

"If they [the Obama campaign] can turn out enough new voters and combine them with progressive whites and even bring back some Reagan Democrats, they can be competitive," says Kerry Haynie, a political scientist at Duke University in Durham, N.C. "The economy is in the tank, and it gives them an opening."

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