The Daily Background

As somebody once said, there isn’t a red America or a blue America, there is only the United states of America.

I was told recently by an ardent (and somewhat agitated) Clinton supporter that Obama’s recent wins in states like Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas and Idaho didn’t count as much as Clinton’s recent wins, because many of his were in “red states”– ones that a Democrat is less likely to win in the general election. Which “recent wins” of Clinton’s she was referring to I’m not sure, because Obama has shut her out for the past week or so.

But anyway, that was this particular supporter’s argument in a nutshell: that the votes of Democrats in “red states” should count less because many of their neighbors don’t agree with them on politics.

There are several reasons why this argument is quite silly, some of which are so obvious that I probably don’t even need to name them. I will however note briefly that there is winner take all electoral vote allocation in general elections, and that whoever the Democratic nominee is, they will win at least the states that Kerry won in ‘04 and Gore won in ‘00. The only question is: which potential Democratic nominee can pick up more of the red and purple states? (I think we all know who that potential Democratic nominee is, but I digress…)

But I want to go back to the original question of the legitimacy of winning these contests. Frankly, votes are votes and pledged delegates are pledged delegates. Not counting them would be both undemocratic and unDemocratic. We even count the primary votes of Democrats living in territories such as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, which don’t technically have electoral votes in the general election. The same is true of Democrats living abroad.

So the fact that Obama is picking up a ton of delegates from states that Republicans have up until now dominated in doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be counted or valued. But now it seems that Clinton’s new primary strategy seems predicated on winning two big and reliably red states herself: Ohio and Texas. The NYT said as much on Tuesday:

In the past 7 presidential elections, a Democrat has only won Ohio twice (and both times quite narrowly). And Texas? You can’t get much redder than that.

But if Clinton wins both Texas and Ohio, and gets the lion’s share of delegates out of both states, she will have deserved them, and they should count just as much as those she won in Massachusetts, one of the most reliably liberal states in the union. Even if we don’t get a single damn electoral vote from either Ohio or Texas in the general election, we should value the voices of our Texas and Ohio Democrats.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog