Newsweek: Obama's Appalachia Problem Is Real
It's become accepted wisdom in this campaign that Obama's problem with working class voters is largely confined to Appalachia. But in the current issue of Newsweek, writer Evan Thomas claims that even if this is the case, this could still prove to be a major problem:
Appalachia is a big place, encompassing 13 states: southwestern New York, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, West Virginia, western Maryland, western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western North and South Carolina, and northern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. You cannot afford to lose all those states and still win in November. Other pollsters have suggested that the race factor is at least noticeable in a much wider swath of rural America, where 60 million voters reside.One recent Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll of rural voters in battleground states showed that you are trailing McCain by 9 points (and that Clinton runs even with him). Dee Davis, president of a Kentucky-based advocacy group called the Center for Rural Strategies, points out in a recent article on Salon.com that in June 2004, John Kerry trailed George W. Bush by the same 9-point margin in the same rural battlegrounds.
Your mission is to not wind up like Kerry, who ended up losing the rural vote by 20 points. The "reality," writes Davis, "is that when Democratic candidates run competitively in rural America, they win national elections. And when they get creamed in rural America, they lose."
The problem with all these arguments is that there are countless ways to slice and dice these demographics. As John Harwood of The New York Times points out, if you look at working class whites nationally, Obama is actually where he needs to be among that group right now, running 12 and seven points behind McCain among them in two recent national polls.
By contrast, Al Gore lost among this demographic by 17 points in 2000, and Kerry lost by 23 points four years later. The Dem doesn't need to achieve parity among working class whites to win.
Separately, all this renewed talk about Appalachia reminds me that Obama privately promised John Edwards that he'd undertake a poverty tour in the general election. Why not take that tour, with Edwards at his side, right through the heart of Appalachia?
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