This is a real riot:
One final element of the myth of mobilization is what we call "The California Dream." The thesis is
that rising strength in the West can counterbalance the collapse of Southern support for the party's
presidential candidates and that Democrats therefore don't have to work hard at regaining
competitiveness in the South.
This exercise in the politics of evasion fails the test of basic arithmetic. Non-Southern gains
cannot fully compensate for a Southern wipeout. If Dukakis had prevailed in all the Western states
where he had a chance, carried the heartland states he narrowly lost, and won all the Eastern states
within reach, he still would not have assembled enough electoral votes to win.
The underlying logic of the electoral college shows why. There are 155 electoral votes in the
Southern and border states, 41 in the Plains and Rocky Mountain states with impregnable
Republican majorities, and 23 more in reliably Republican states of the Midwest and Northeast. If
the South is conceded to the Republican presidential nominee, he begins with a base of 219 electoral
votes and needs only 51 more. Michigan, Ohio and New Jersey are enough to put him over the top --
and George Bush carried them handily, with margins of 8 to 14 points.
The electoral college arithmetic only gets worse in 1992. According to projections from
preliminary Census estimates, reapportionment will net the states in the Republican base 12
additional electoral votes for a total of 231. New Jersey and Ohio would be just about enough to
give Bush a victory even if he loses California and a host of other states he carried last time. If
Democrats are only competitive in states with 310 electoral votes, the odds against their nominee
attaining 270 are dauntingly high. The Republican nominee will start with two pairs while his
Democratic opponent would have to draw to an inside straight.21
I made an illustration of this to see what states exactly they were talking about.
Yellow=the South (155 EVs in 1988)
Blue=Mountain/Plains states that are solidly R (41 EVs) (I assume Alaska was an oversight, unless they were counting South Dakota as a potential D state)
Green=Northeastern/Midwestern states that are solidly R (23 EVs)
Gray=Michigan/Ohio/New Jersey (59 EVs)
Red=everything else, conceded to Dems (260 EVs)
What they didn't realize is that a lot of the "solidly Republican states" outside the south were actually potential Democratic wins: Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Nevada. That said, this never ended up being relevant: Clinton won easily with the South (but would still have won if you subtract the South), Gore and especially Kerry could have won without the South, but fell short, and Obama basically won without the South, but he still won a few Southern states on the fringes of the region. At this point it's kind of obsolete: you don't have to be that moderate to win Virginia, so no Democrat nowadays has the goal of winning without Virginia for purity's sake. There's a bit of negativity in the Democratic base towards Florida, but I don't think that has anything to do with "Southern-ness".
