Op-Ed
Centrism and Flyover Country
Email: 
Share: 
Educate Your Guesses
February 7, 2008 - 12:00amAnyone who tried to talk to me about politics in the past two weeks probably got some response along the lines of “I don’t know I’m not really paying attention anymore; I’m trying to emotionally disengage so I can get some work done.”
Right so that policy is going into effect tomorrow. First I need to comment on some incredibly important and AHISTORICAL characteristics of Tuesday’s primary results. (Read: if you hail from a state that hasn’t voted yet, I implore you to take note of what just happened, and send in for an absentee ballot like stat). And how can I abstain? I mean, we were the only Ivy mentioned in the New York Times’ election coverage.
First--and this is clear--America can’t figure out what to make of either Barack or Hillary (they refer to each other by first names, so journalists can too)… or rather both campaigns are having trouble slicing America into neat pieces. The urban-rural cleavage is typically one of the most constant determinants of voting behavior, with urban voters breaking for more liberal candidates. This truism has gone haywire in recent weeks. It would be wrong to say that the effect of urbanity has deteriorated, since urban and rural voters in each state are voting for different Democratic candidates. The direction of that split, however, varies across the country. Barack received a bold mandate from Missouri’s cities, with Hillary sweeping the countryside (Barack ended up taking the state). In New Hampshire, it was Barack walking away with rural areas and Hillary with the cities. This should be interpreted to mean that regionalism is huge in this election. A voter is an Oklahoman first and an urban-dweller second.
These rare voting patterns also demonstrate how the election is being fought on grounds entirely outside of the basic liberal-conservative spectrum, and often outside of the issues. When “issues” are cited, voters show little consistency: Californians citing the economy as top priority went for Hillary, while Connecticut-people (Connecticutans/ers/ites?) who had the economy on their minds chose Barack. In an age where the precision with which campaigns can manipulate public opinion raises sharp questions about the autonomy of the average American voter and the meaning of democracy, I find this unpredictability pretty exciting. Whereas it’s typically so easy to reduce Americans into demographic-based categories which reliably translate into voting behavior, Democratic voters are this time demonstrating what I’ll call (after my fellow columnist) the Brozinsky effect, engaging in individual political calculus over reducible identities. The Hillary camp didn’t know how Bill’s actions in South Carolina would be perceived (they gave Barack moral high ground), and the Barack camp doesn’t know whether to try for presidential or emboldened during the debates.
In a similar vein, the broader geographic trends show that this year’s election has the potential to upset previous regional trends in a major way. For those of you Democratic pragmatists who put stock in electability, take note of this. Obama’s victories are coming heavily from the Midwest and the South; the middle; flyover country. And I don’t just mean like NOVA South, I mean deep South. So whereas Hillary shores up support in the reliably democratic states of California, New York, and Massachusetts, Barack has more traction in Missouri, Colorado, Minnesota… those states in which the general election battle was fought in 2004. This becomes increasingly important as McCain, dead to evangelicals, moves toward the Republican nomination without support in the South. Take a moment to internalize this: if Barack is the candidate, Republicans become automatic underdogs in the dirty-dirty. If Hillary is the nominee on the other hand, expect 2008 to look a lot like 2004, with Dems ignoring the South and still struggling for Midwestern appeal. Better hope John Kerry invites Hillary when he goes duck hunting in Ohio this October.
It’s a political cliché that Democratic candidates appeal to the base throughout the primaries and then barrel to the center of the road for the general elections (indeed it became almost common knowledge that John Kerry, when not hunting ducks, spent most of his time hunting terrorists). Although I’m not sure which direction Hillary would have to move in to get to the center, she’d definitely have to make some strategic-ideological alteration in order to take sizable slices of middle-America from McCain. I wouldn’t even hold this against her- she’d almost have a responsibility to the party to make the appropriate changes in order to have a good shot at the presidency. Conversely, strategery does not dictate that Obama, the National Journal’s “most liberal senator” or not, would need to make drastic alterations to his campaign. So to recap: Clinton, strangling the center, would still have to find a way to convince the heartland; Obama, the “most liberal senator,” already with widespread cross-spectrum appeal in the heartland. Whether you worry about the Democratic Party mangling- for the sake of the general election- the set of principles and policies that we’ve (since 2006) attached to the idea of a new progressivism, or whether you simply find it easier to trust a candidate with the least incentive to undergo a metamorphosis midway through the election, the Obama camp suggests itself.
Tim Krueger is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at tkrueger@cornellsun.com. Educating Your Guesses appears alternate Thursdays.