I am looking out the window of my office on the Seattle waterfront. On a clear day, I would see the deep blue of Puget Sound and the jagged peaks of the Olympics to the west. Today, there's nothing to see but the fuzzy outline of a container ship with its lights blurred by a thick gray mist.
At this moment, the race for president seems as foggy as the scene out my window. Burned by bad polls and the errors of conventional wisdom, the big-time pundits are no longer predicting which of the two leading Democratic contenders will get the chance to make history by becoming either the first woman or the first African-American to win a major party nomination. And the will of Republican voters is even more unfathomable, inclined as they seem to be to split their votes four or five ways.
All this uncertainty makes one thing almost certain: voters in the West will, for once, have a powerful voice in clarifying who the eventual nominees will be. Nevada became a prime battleground for the Democrats this last week. On Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, when 22 states will hold primaries or caucuses, a third of them will be in the West, including the big enchilada, California.
If, after that, the nominations are still in doubt, there's another prize to be won the following Saturday: Washington, with the second biggest cache of delegates in the West.
Once the nomination fights are over, the West could play a pivotal new role in determining November's victor because the West is not the Old West anymore. It's not even the New West it once was.
The political cliché is that California, Washington and Oregon are dominated by Hollywood liberals and Prius-driving tree huggers while the Mountain West is the domain of gun-toting ranchers and fervent members of evangelical megachurches. Democrats get the coast; Republicans get the Rockies.
Though superficially accurate, that division has not always held. Ronald Reagan swept all of the Western states twice while, in his two runs, Bill Clinton took the coast and picked off several of the mountain states. In 2000 and 2004, though (with the exception of New Mexico's defection to Democrat Al Gore), the cliché held true. That meant the real game was played elsewhere, in swing states like Ohio and Florida with lots of electoral votes.
In 2008, things could be different. Democrats have a strong shot at winning most of the West. If that should happen, the solid Republican base in the old Confederacy will not be enough to save the Republican candidate from defeat. Democrats could string together a new winning coalition from the states of the Northeast, the northern tier and the Far West.
Florida has 27 electoral votes; Ohio has 20. They were the pivotal states in the two narrow victories of George W. Bush. If Al Gore in 2000 or John Kerry in 2004 had been able to steal Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and Montana from the GOP column, Florida and Ohio wouldn't have mattered and Bush would be cutting brush in Crawford instead of running the country.
This year, those four states and their 27 electoral votes could go to the Democratic nominee. Why? Because Democrats are now winning in the West. Of the 11 governors in the Pacific Coast and mountain states, seven are Democrats and the most prominent of the Republicans, California's Arnold Schwarzenegger, solidified his popularity only after defying the Republican president on global warming.
Of the 22 Western U.S. senators, 10 are Democrats. Only in Idaho and Utah have voters not sent at least one Democrat to the U.S. Senate or the governor's mansion in the last few years.
In large part, this shift toward Democrats in the mountain states has been driven by demographic changes. Thousands of Californians have moved in and brought their progressive political sensibilities with them. The region has gained a more urban outlook in booming cities such as Phoenix, Las Vegas and Denver (where, significantly, the Democrats are holding their nominating convention). The Hispanic population has increased throughout the West and, especially in this year of heated immigration politics, those are people who lean sharply toward the Democrats.
This realignment has also come about because a new breed of Democrat has ridden into town. Montana provides a prime example. There, voters have elected a Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, and a new Democratic senator, Jon Tester, who are both ranchers. They don't carry themselves like citified Democrats in Seattle or Los Angeles or Boston. They don't scare their fellow ranchers with wild schemes to lock up the land and tax folks to death. They are genuine Democrats, but they speak with a Western twang and talk about common sense and common ground.
Yes, the right Democrat can take the West and leave the Republicans in the dust. But is someone named Barack or Hillary the right kind of Democrat? Read more of DAVID HORSEY @ Seattle PI
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