National Journal: Democrats Are Running Out of States to Flip

[bedstuy]

Texas is a pipe-dream if you ask me.  If we're really competing in Texas, the election is a huge landslide because of a crazy event.  But, you don't have to flip these states, so who cares?  Getting 400+ electoral votes is pretty much useless.  You don't get an extra bonus year of being President if you hit 400.  The question is whether we can pick up House seats in Texas by contesting the state more heavily and boosting Hispanic turnout to reasonable levels.

Georgia might just become the Democrats' version of Minnesota or Pennsylvania, where they keep talking about winning it and come up short.

Arizona, I could actually see Hillary Clinton winning in 2016.  Arizona does have a strong Democratic base to work from in Tucson, Flagstaff and the Rez.  If you can win over the old people and get Hispanics voting at a higher rate, it's pretty simple to hit 50%.  Arizona is actually not nearly as culturally conservative as Georgia or Texas.  You have less knee-jerk, pro-life Republicans and more people who are somewhat independent.

[bedstuy]

Texas is a pipe-dream if you ask me.  If we're really competing in Texas, the election is a huge landslide because of a crazy event.  But, you don't have to flip these states, so who cares?  Getting 400+ electoral votes is pretty much useless.  You don't get an extra bonus year of being President if you hit 400.  The question is whether we can pick up House seats in Texas by contesting the state more heavily and boosting Hispanic turnout to reasonable levels.

Georgia might just become the Democrats' version of Minnesota or Pennsylvania, where they keep talking about winning it and come up short.

Arizona, I could actually see Hillary Clinton winning in 2016.  Arizona does have a strong Democratic base to work from in Tucson, Flagstaff and the Rez.  If you can win over the old people and get Hispanics voting at a higher rate, it's pretty simple to hit 50%.  Arizona is actually not nearly as culturally conservative as Georgia or Texas.  You have less knee-jerk, pro-life Republicans and more people who are somewhat independent.

I agree that Clinton could win Arizona, but I suspect that she could win in Georgia too. While Georgia is culturally conservative, it was closer than Arizona in 2012, and the Peach State does have the Atlanta metropolitan area. Furthermore, Barack Obama actually won the female vote in Georgia back in 2008. If Clinton manages to do better with women than Obama, I suspect that she could be the one Democrat to flip Georgia.   

Now, I think her possible wins in both states would be similar to how Obama won Indiana in 2008, so neither would necessarily become permanent swing states (the notion that Kraushaar seems to argue against), but they both have the potential to be flukes (for lack of a better term) in 2016.

Maybe Clinton could win Georgia.  I just think people can overestimate what it means when you hit 46-47% of the vote in a strong election year for your side.  Hillary Clinton can utterly trounce the Republican candidate and hit a very high popular vote percentage and only hit 49% in Georgia.  These southern states have a lot of people who will never vote for a pro-choice, East Coast elite Democrat like Hillary Clinton. 

The other thing is that I think bigger states are harder to flip.  How much more money, staff and organization do you need to win Georgia vs. Arizona?  In Arizona you could just put staff and money in two or three cities and pretty well blanket the state.  Also, remember Arizona has been very friendly to female candidates in the past.  Arizona has had a female governor since like 1997, right?

[bedstuy]

It's possible that Hillary Clinton wouldn't be able to make it above 50% in Georgia, though I suppose it would depend on how large her national victory is (for the sake of this discussion, I suppose we can assume that Clinton will win in 2016). If she wins by less than Obama's 2008 margin of victory, Georgia might be a tough state for a Democrat like Clinton to flip, but if she wins with 53-54% of the vote, Georgia might narrowly vote Democratic.

I suppose Georgia would require more resources than Arizona, but I suspect that many candidates would target the former over the latter because of the former's larger electoral vote share. Furthermore, a Democrat targeting Georgia might only need to target one media market, Atlanta. Also, if Georgia is being considered a major swing state, that probably means that several traditional battlegrounds like Colorado, Virginia, and Ohio are already in the Democrat's column, so the Democratic candidate could just pour more volunteers and ad dollars into the state without significant risk.

While Arizona does seem to favor female candidates and is an inexpensive target, for some reason it seems like white voters there are rigidly Republican, perhaps even more so than whites in Georgia. It would seem that this would explain how Jan Brewer could win in Arizona.

I don't think that's true at all.  Exit polls had Obama at 32% among whites in Arizona.  There's no way Obama was near 30% among whites in Georgia.