Within the Margin

It’s not quite Appomattox Court House, but…

In 2004, I was desperate for Democrats to expand the electoral map – at that point, the institutional advantages in the Electoral College clearly favored the Republicans. Further, the most recent reapportionment meant that simply winning the Gore 2000 states would actually leave Kerry further behind. Of all the Bush 2000 states, only New Hampshire (which Kerry ultimately did recapture) showed consistent signs of flipping in 2004…and those four electoral votes would not longer be enough to win the election, as they would have been in 2000. So I spent the year rooting for Kerry to fight hard in places like Colorado, Nevada and Virginia.

He opted for the first two and fell short; to my dismay (and that of John Edwards, unpleasant though it is to agree with him on any element of human existence) the Kerry campaign never seriously competed in Virginia. I saw it as a missed opportunity: Fairfax County and the other northern suburbs were rapidly trending blue and at that time, southwest Virginia’s coal country was not so virulently anti-Democratic as it is today. Throw in some Democratic strongholds in Southside Virginia and Hampton Roads, and there seemed to be the makings of a viable coalition. But they didn’t pursue it, and Bush won the state comfortably.

Four years later, Obama was always going to compete in the Commonwealth, and indeed he won pretty comfortably in the end: 52.6%-46.3%. He crushed it in the NoVA ‘burbs, including the first Democratic presidential victories in Loudoun County (the northwest suburbs and exurbs along the banks of the Potomac, going out toward Harper’s Ferry) and Prince William County (the southern ‘burbs including Manassas and the Quantico area) since 1964. 2012 saw a narrowing of the margins, but Obama still won his old and new strongholds and carried the state 51-47.

And now, just twelve years after Democrats weren’t ready to compete there when they urgently needed to remake the map, Hillary Clinton’s position in Virginia is now so strong that NBC News reports that Trump is bailing on the state. The decision appears to be borne out of a strategy to concentrate resources on four states – Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania) that get past 270 electoral votes. Presumably, Trump is banking on Iowa, as his leads in that Obama ’08 and ’12 state have been durable – but those four states, plus holding Romney’s 2012 territory, puts him at 273, so Iowa would be gravy.

This doesn’t seem like a viable strategy just now – most Pennsylvania polls have him trailing by high single- or low double-digits. But no plan looks great when you’re down as much as Trump is less than four weeks out. Clinton will now be able to shift Virginia resources elsewhere, too, either to bolster defenses in Trump’s dwindling targets or to expand the map into places like Arizona and Georgia where the campaign has at times been hopeful of triumphing for the first time since the 1990s.

It also remains to be seen how accurate this initial reporting is: Trump has been pursuing Colorado aggressively, so a pullback there would be abrupt and dramatic. And it would leave this kid with less to do.

Things evolve quickly in presidential election politics. What was a safe Republican state in the Bush years has become, for the moment, a safe Democratic state.