Within the Margin

There’s always some risk in stepping back and analyzing elections in your own backyard. It’s more personal, so you’re at greater risk of seeing what you want to see. You might offend people you actually know who’s involved locally, or you might do your readers a disservice by refraining from an observation so as to avoid doing so. And let’s face it: New York Democrats are in a sensitive place these days. The 2022 statewide elections were much closer than they’ve been accustomed to, and things went poorly downballot. 2023 brought something of a rebound in local elections – particularly in the Hudson Valley. But ongoing questions remain about Democratic erosion with non-white voters, as well as the state party’s ability to adapt to a changing political landscape. With half a dozen truly competitive Congressional races here, the stakes are high for the party. Less so for Within the Margin, but we still like to get things right – whether it’s our backyard or across the country.

Virginia came out of the gates fast, winning eight of the country’s first nine presidential terms and adding another not long after when John Tyler succeeded William Henry Harrison’s short-lived presidency. In more recent times, Virginia’s national influence has more to do with serving as the base of operations for countless federal agencies, campaign headquarters, think tanks…and stately homes-away-from-home for many Congressmembers, especially those inclined to spent more and more of their time in the D.C. area as their seniority grows and their desire to journey back to their homes and districts wanes. Or in the case of a Josh Hawley, sometimes that desire wanes immediately, before they have any seniority whatsoever.

It also serves the function of providing political pundits something to obsess over in the first odd-numbered year following each presidential election, as one of the only two states to elect its governor on that cycle. Most years it elects a governor from the party opposite to the most recent presidential winner, allowing for dire warnings that the incumbent president has “over-reached” or “lost touch” and “faces headwinds ahead of the upcoming midterms.” The pattern commenced in the mid-70s: Democrat Jimmy Carter had won the presidency in ’76, and Republican John Dalton was elected governor in ’77. Since then, the only exception has been 2013 when Terry McAuliffe won the governorship a year after his co-partisan Barack Obama was re-elected president. It’s true enough that almost all presidents “face headwinds” by that point in their term, but that also means it says more about the fickleness of American political preferences. That’s particularly true in an era of negative partisanship.

South Carolina and its political class have taken lead roles in American upheavals. John C. Calhoun pivoted dramatically from nationalist support for a strong federal government to supporting nullification and states’ rights (specifically the right to preserve slavery) and became a massive influence on those who would ultimately secede from the union a little under a decade after his death – beginning, of course, with South Carolina. The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln became virtually criminalized in the decades following the Civil War, giving rise to the “Solid South” for Democrats. That began to crumble in 1948, when segregationists led by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond¹ abandoned the Democratic Party after its adoption of a civil rights plank at the national convention.

Mountains, bays, ocean beaches, a major city, two major metro areas, farmland, suburbs: Maryland fits a diverse landscape into its acreage, the ninth-smallest among the 50 states. There’s not as much political diversity, as Democrats dominate the Old Line State. The counties west of Frederick, stretching into the Allegheny Mountains, are rock-ribbed Republican, and the GOP does well in much of the Eastern Shore and a pair of exurban/rural counties (Harford and Cecil) northeast of the city of Baltimore. But the blue strongholds are numerous: the city of Baltimore (87% for Biden); the much more populous, suburban Baltimore County (strongly Republican in the latter decades of the 20th century, but 62% for Biden); affluent Montgomery County – the largest in the state with all its federal employees (79% Biden); fast-growing Prince George’s County (second-largest in the state, majority-Black, 89% for Biden). There’s also Howard County, another affluent and fast-growing county, east of Montgomery but increasingly oriented toward Washington, D.C. It gave Biden 71% in 2020. Anne Arundel County, home to the Naval Academy’s Annapolis where the Severn River flows into Chesapeake Bay, was once a Republican stronghold. But in 2016, it voted for its first Democratic presidential nominee since Lyndon Johnson in ’64 and gave Biden nearly 56% four years later.

1920, 1924, 1960 (both parties!), 1972, 1988, 2004, 2012: the last century was replete with Massachusetts natives and officeholders on major party tickets….even if the last one, Mitt Romney, spent a lot of time reassuring his party’s right flank that his days as a moderate New Englander were nothing to worry about. The state carried tremendous political weight in the country’s earliest days, of course, but its combination of commercial heft and professional politics contested between mostly-Protestant Yankee Republicans and mostly-Catholic Democrats of immigrant stock meant that it produced quite a few candidates on the national stage well beyond the days when it when it was a top-ten state in population, as it was through the 1970 Census. There’s not much in the way of competitive races to talk about there this cycle, but that in fact tells its own story: in an era where political divides along educational lines are taking on ever-greater prominence, Massachusetts is not only a highly-educated state but one where its plethora of colleges means that more people work in higher ed here than do in many states with larger populations. It’s not shocking, then, that the state rejected Trump even more harshly in 2020 than it had in 2016: the realignment along these lines is strong and Massachusetts does not have a factor that would offset it, like a high rate of religious adherence.

Is it the Nutmeg State? Is it the Constitution State? Only one allows for an easy demonym. That’s all the more important in a state whose name does not facilitate one (“Connecticutian?” “Connecticuter?” The syllable emphasis is awkward). What it is for sure is a Democratic state, and we’re all a bit removed from the days when a wider variety of states might earn a presidential candidate visit on the final weekend before the election – or get an impromptu speech after midnight. That’s what happened in the early morning hours of November 6, 1960, when John F. Kennedy arrived in Waterbury two days before the election. A crowd of 40,000 souls had waited hours in the rain to greet him after a day of campaigning in New York, and an exhausted Kennedy was moved to address his drenched admirers from the hotel balcony before going to bed. He spoke for nearly an hour, calling the crowd the biggest of the campaign so far. In a manner that might remind us of the contrast in vigor that has marked the 2024 race, Kennedy noted that his opponent Richard Nixon had likely been asleep for hours at that point…and not unlike the Harris’ campaign’s emphasis on not going back, he noted that “now we are moving ahead.” Kennedy campaigned the next day in Bridgeport and New Haven, and went on to win the state comfortably over Nixon.