I've been hearing a lot about the swing states lately. But I realize that all the political analysis in the world can't give us the inside look at a swing state that someone who lives there can. So I thought that this would be a good opportunity to get some insight into the swing states from the ADers who live in them. The list of swing states usually varies, but I gleaned this from Slate:

• Arizona
• Arkansas
• Colorado
• Delaware
• Florida
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• Ohio
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• Tennessee
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin

Swingers! A guide to the swing states from Slate

That's an admittedly rather large list, but I think that by using this list we can get more input from more people. Don't think that just because you don't live in a swing state that you are discouraged from participation; if you have any input about anyone's comments, go for it!

Questions:
1.) In your opinion, does your state belong on this list? Why or why not?
2.) Which way do you think your swing state will swing?
3.) Please share any other thoughts about your swing state that are germane.


Edited to change "gat" to "get" in sentence 3

Hey TNL - your thread reminds me of something I found when I was researching for the Presidential Debates thread. Zogby is looking for people in these "Battleground States" to sign up to be part of their potential sample pool for their surveys. You can sign up here if you are interested in being polled by Zogby: 2004 Presidential Election Battleground States Tracking. There will be 3 more polls conducted before the election.

Georgia's a "red" state and isn't one of the battlegrounds. I guess this indicates my opinion means squat to the candidates. It may also explain why Kerry & Bush only visit this state when they are raising money. So vote Libertarian!!!

Edited to add - we don't actually need debate questions for Casual Conversation, I keep forgetting to tell Mike to take the notice down from this particular forum.

As for living here in Tennessee, a "battleground" state, I am unconvinced that they know what they're talking about. I read the "Swingers!" report on Slate, and I am still not convinced that this is a true battleground. Tennessee really does have an interesting Democratic makeup. We're full of conservative Yellow Dog Democrats; there are, of course, the liberals in there somewhere. The rest are Republicans. I'd really recommend reading the Slate article on the state because it really addresses the political climate of Tennessee well. The one area it does fail to mention, however, is East Tennessee where I live. I'm assuming that the reasoning is that ET isn't a battleground; in fact, I'd be shocked if a majority of it didn't go to Bush. My favorite line is:



And that's the funny thing. For all the Republicans and fundamentalist Christians we have, elections don't always go to the Republicans. As the article mentions, our governor is a Democrat (and a very good man) and our state legislature is Democrat-controlled. Our U.S. congressional delegation is majority Democrat (although both our senators and my congressman are Republicans). But the senatorial votes are probably good indicators of how we'll lean in the presidential election-- better than the gubernatorial election because we have a tendency to choose Dems on the state level. Both senators and my representative are pretty conservative.

Corey's Representatives' ACLU Scorecard

League of Conservation Voters Scorecard:
Mr. Frist-- 11%
Mr. Alexander-- 5%
Mr. Duncan-- 10%
(I'm so ashamed. )

Unfortunately, I think that the feelings of many Democrats is, as the Slate article mentioned, stuck between a rock and a hard place: they don't want to vote for Bush, but they don't like Kerry. This leaves me with the impression that Bush will wind up taking the state because many Democrats in the state will just stay home. Plus, if our Senate elections are any indicator, our Democratic representation statewide has fallen to the affluent suburbs of Nashville and the fundamentalists in my area. My call: Tennessee goes to Dubya. Again.

I live in Ohio, a traditional swing state.

Why is Ohio always a swing state? Simple: it is a microcosm of America. From (relatively) large cities (Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati) to small communities, Ohio has it all. From farm land to heavy industry, Ohio has it all.

The Democrats have a stronghold in Northeast Ohio, where a sizable portion of the population lives. The farther you go south, the more conservative Ohio becomes.

I live in the heart of the Democrats' stronghold: Cuyahoga County, where the worthy Dennis Kucinich is my personal Representative to the House. Cleveland is a traditionally Democrat city, with the only Republican mayor in recent years being George Voinovich. Voinovich went on to become Ohio's Governor and then Senator.

Ohio's governor and both Senators are currently Republicans, with Bob Taft winning re-election in 2002.

Kerry and Bush both consider Ohio a major prize, and both Dick Cheney and John Kerry will be in the Cleveland area this July 4th weekend. Ohio went to Bush in 2000 by a 50%-46% margin (Nader got 3% of the votes).

Ohio is certainly a battleground state.

I think Arizona will be a swing state this time around. The influx of people who don't own horses helps the dems. Although Bush has an edge I think Kerry can win if he can get more of the latinos, who make up 28% of the state, to vote. If I had to guess I would say Bush wins Arizona by 10,000 votes.

Non-cowboys are a big Democrat constituency?

Wow, I am really surprised to see NJ listed as a swing state. I always considered NJ to be definitely a Dem strong hold, due to Jersey City and Newark. So it prompted me to look, here: Dave Leip's Atlas of US Presidents


In the past 9 elections NJ has gone for a Dem Pres only 3 times the rest they voted Republican. Holy moley!!! Well blow me down. It is important to note that all three of them have been the most recent elections. I seriously expect NJ to go Dem this year too.

I also expect voter turn out to be outrageous this year. Maybe a new record. So really anything can happen. Most of my neighbor's are the anyone but Bush crowd. They don't care who is in office as long as it isn't him. In fact I only have 1 neighbor that is a Republican and he is going with Kerry. But then again, I live in a city so we notoriously go Dem. It does make me think, though, that the Republican's better get a message to me (asap) because I was planning on voting for 3rd party this year. And hey, you never know my vote could swing NJ back to the Republicans.

Yep. From what I've heard, no president this century has won election without carrying Ohio. Many pundits consider Ohio to be the Floria of 2004.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselect...tleground_x.htm

Though admittedly the point of view is from Ohio representatives, I think its probably accurate.

I live right down the road from TennesseeLeftWinger and I can't add much to his excellent analysis. The Chattanooga area -- the southeastern corner of the state -- is firmly in Republican territory. Knoxville, towards the northeast, has a strong liberal influence, partly due to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, a very large educational institution. I believe that you drift more towards the moderate Democrats as you go west. It's no secret that the race of the voters is a factor of importance to both parties; that's a sad fact, but it's a fact. Anyway, data from the 2000 census is worth a look:

Source: AreaConnect (Click on the name of the city for info)

Percentage of African-Americans by city: (rounded to nearest percentage point)

Chattanooga: 36%
Knoxville: 16%
Nashville: 27%
Memphis: 61%

Clearly, the racial population pattern of Memphis will make it somewhat different politically that the other large cities in the state.

Both houses of the Tennessee General Assembly have slightly more Democrats than Republicans.

Source: The Tennessee General Assembly



Overall, Tennessee is fairly evenly split between moderate Democrats and conservative Republicans. I predict a Bush victory for the state.

Missouri is a swing state but it is an odd duck as states go.

In Missouri you Have Kansas City and St. Louis which are the largest urban areas, the most densely populated areas and also the most liberal areas.

For the most part the rest of the state is rural and very conservative.

Which way the state swings on a vote depends on how well people on the left get out the vote in Kansas City and St. Louis.

For example, when Concealed Carry was up for a referendum vote, Geographically almost the entire state voted for it overwhelmingly. However, massive campaigns in Kansas City and St. Louis lead to a large turnout in those two metropolitan areas. The result, it narrowly failed.

Which way Missouri goes depends largely on how many people vote in the cities for the most part.

However, in this election, Conservatives in Rural Missouri have alot of issues with GWB and though they are unlikely to vote for Kerry, they are likely to simply skip the Presidential collum on the ballot, or possibly vote for the Libertarian Candidate.

Missouri will most likely go to Kerry, and by a wider margin then expected because of the huge get out the vote movement in the cities and the disillusionment of rural conservatives.

Note: This is all opinion, folks. I don't really want to re-hash a lot of issues which are considered "dead", but - in my state, at least - a lot of this is still very much alive...

1.) In your opinion, does your state belong on this list? Why or why not?

I live in Florida. Enough said.

2.) Which way do you think your swing state will swing?

As it did in 2000, I think Florida will go, narrowly, to the Democrats - and, this time, all the votes might get counted.

3.) Please share any other thoughts about your swing state that are germane.

Look for a somewhat more polarized version of 2000. The northern part of the state, especially the panhandle (hi, Beladonna!), will be primarily Republican. The southern part of the state will be primarily Democratic (and, with Kerry not really associated with the whole Elian Gonzalez drama, they might get more of the Cuban vote as well). This means that, again, a lot of the vote may be decided along the I-4 corridor - my territory.

As is the case with Tennessee, very few people here want to see George Bush re-elected - but even fewer are passionate about Kerry. That said, I think a lot more people here still harbor a lot of bad feeling about what was perceived as the election fraud of 2000 - and that may just get the ABB vote out enough to be even more decisive than it was last time.

I also expect that there will be a lot more scrutiny from the black community at the polls and we've just had the top secret list of "purged felons" released - by court order. So it may not be quite as easy for Jeb and Co. to manipulate the results of the election this year...

Wertz Posted on Jul 5 2004, 03:18 PM




Just a little question here, well really two.

!.) The court decided that if you are a felon, you have given up your right to privacy, even if you have served your sentence and paid your debt to society?

Glad I don't live in Florida.

2.) Just how many felons try to vote illegally anyway? They can peition the court to get their civil rights back if they have served their sentence.

Lethalletha: In most states, felons' rights are restored after they've served their sentences. Florida is one of the eight states where convicted felons are denied the right to vote after doing their time (as well as being restricted from certain jobs and things like financial aid for college).

It's estimated that over 400,000 Floridians cannot vote because they were once convicted of a felony - more than in any other state - and 31% are black (although African-Americans make up less than 15% of the population).

But the real problem with the felony "scrub list" in Florida is the number of errors. Florida is the only state in the union to turn the purging process over to a private company: ChoicePoint. This company's primary business is selling personal information from four billion public and private records - i.e., generating spam lists. The first list they produced contained the names of 8000 people convicted only of misdemeanors - a list generated by a subsidiary, Database Technologies, based in *ahem* Texas. ChoicePoint then generated a second list of 57,700 names.

Unfortunately (for some), one of the programs that ChoicePoint uses automatically transforms various forms of a single name. In one case, a voter named "Christine" was identified as a felon because she had the same last name as a convict named "Christopher". Among those purged were a Hillsborough county judge and madison County's elections supervisor. In Hillsborough, they did a comprehensive study of their list and found that blacks made up 54% of the list, though they only account for 11.5% of the county's population. They also concluded that 15% of the names were erroneous. If that ratio held state-wide, more than 7000 names were purged from the voting roster which should not have been.

Moreover, not all counties treated the lists in the same way. Many simply purged their records and left it at that. Some sent registered letters to all the names on their lists (though in Orange County , others tried to verify a sampling of the names. leon County used the original list (including those convicted of misdemeanors) and ignored the amended version. Palm Beach and Duval found the lists so erroneous that they did nothing with them.

So much for "equal protection". I guess that only applies if it's going to guarantee a Bush the White House, not deny him the White House.

Further, Florida may not purge former convicts from the voting roster if their conviction was in a state which allows felons to vote. Despite court orders to the contrary, Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris purged those voters anyway (from another list), barring many of them from registering in the first place - another 40,000 voters were disenfranchised illegally - and knowingly.

According to the InfoPlease almanac, George Bush "won" the state of Florida by 537 votes (taking into account, for example, the 3000 elderly Jews in Palm Beach County who "voted" for Pat Buchanan on the butterfly ballot).

This is why it is important that the list of felons, which Jeb Bush and Glenda Hood tried desperately to keep from public view, has been "declassified" by court order. It's also why it's important that the butterfly ballot has been abandoned.


All of the above - and much more - is documented in Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

Wertz gave some great information here, but just to add to this...

The whole issue in court was a little bit of legal hair spilting by the state of Florida. The records which detail all of the felons in Florida area availble for public viewing by the press or anyone that wants to stop by and view them (even non-residents), however you are not supposed to copy the list or take notes. CNN wanted the names released so they could be checked, but the state didn't want to allow it because even though they are publically available, technically only political candidates can request a physical list to look over.

Pretty large list of states I must say. I do notice that California isn't on the list which is probably reasonable.

I am little surprised to see Colorado is in play though, and more than a little disappointed in that. I thought Colorado was pretty solidly in Bush's corner. Of course then again, I am also surprised that both Oregon and Washington are listed as well. They seem to elect some pretty strange people up there.

Outside of the cities on the coast, Washington tends to be fairly conservative due to all of the argriculture up there. You will find that the politics of Spokane are significantly different than that of Seattle.

Even some areas of Seattle are highly Republican (such as Bellevue and Redmond) due to the high incomes of families that live there. However, I think a lot of these people are being sawyed into the ABB crowd mostly because of Iraq.

Well, I just moved to Chandler, Arizona about 5 months ago from Reno, NV so I'll give my thoughts on both states.

Nevada

Nevada has a pretty interesting demographic. Probably the most transient state I've ever been to let alone lived in. The 15 years I lived there, I could probably count the number of native nevadans I knew personally on one hand.

Las Vegas is the democrat stronghold and pretty much the rest of the state is republican. The greater Las Vegas area has around 1.5M people while the entire state I believe is in the 2.2M-2.5M range. You'd think that this would mean Nevada would be a shoe-in for the democrats, however like I said, people move in and out of there like crazy. Also, taking into consideration that Nevada had only a 43.8% turnout of voting age population, tying with Georgia as the 4th worst turnout.

I could be making a generalization here....but I believe that people that tend to stick to one spot for 20+ years tend to be a little more on the conservative side. So, my theory is that people who don't live there long enough to get into local politics, much less vote on the local issues, tend not to vote in the national elections either. I could be wrong, call it a theory from observation.

Also, let's not forget that Nevada used to be part of the Utah Territory before it became a state and was home to many mormon trading posts. Mormons as a general rule are very conservative.

Nevada has a republican governor and one of it's two senators are republican. Nevada carried Bush's vote in 2000.

It will be an interesting election this year for sure.

Arizona

Well, I've only lived here for five months. There's a pretty big chunk of latino voters as well as native americans. Most of the Phoenix area seems to be pretty liberal except for Mesa, which I believe homes the second largest group of Mormons outside of Utah.

John McCain hasn't publicly endorsed the Bush campaign, however has not said he won't either.

I'm still learning here in Arizona so I don't have much else to add. It's going to be interesting here as well.

Just a quick point: McCain has endorsed Bush: McCain endorses Bush

From The Great State of Colorado

Colorado, if I'm not mistaken, is a Spanish word for red. It's a reference to all the red rocks you see poking out of what's left of the Morrison geological strata, not the voting habits of people here.

Before the big influx of conservatives from California and Texas over the past 20 or so years, Colorado had a liberal/conservative split by city/rural&military. Then it went pretty much conservative in the mid 1990s. However, Colorado also has a core of long-term residents and natives who are fundamentally liberal in the classic senses: preserve open spaces/nature, promote safety nets (boom and bust mining economy mentality), promote arts and communities, live and let live.

Several radical things that conservative leaders here have done make these core liberals sick to death. First was the anti-gay Amendment 2 that got struck down in the Supreme Court. Next were the embarassing displays of certain members of the Republican Party. I think the final straws we're experiencing are the outrageous power plays that have recently happened: an illegal gerrymandering done at the end of the 2003 state legislation session (struck down by the SC) and the stuffing of local school boards with pro-voucher folks.

Two major pressures that could cause this state to swing Demo in November: First is the anemic job growth we're experiencing, especially in high tech. This is compounded by continuing layoffs in the high tech sector. The second pressure is the redeployment of Fort Carson soldiers -- 7,000 over the next 8 months.

Think we're also just getting tired of Republicans. Governor Owens isn't well thought of (his proposals to control wildfires are just looney -- like clearcutting the forest to save the forest), nor is the legislature that seems very intent on exploiting this state.

It's notable that Owens and most of the conservative legislature are from Texas. Think Coloradans want their state back.

And if that doesn't happen, the proposal to split the EC delegates for the 2008 election will likely pass this November.

Then Fort Collins, Boulder, Denver and Pueblo will finally get a say as to who becomes President of the US -- not just the rural east, Colorado Springs, and upscale suburbia.

Little mountain communities like mine have never had much of a voice. Think my community is conservative due to all the retired folk. Or maybe not, because of all the retired folk. It's just difficult to say. Depends on the issue at hand.

Well, that's odd. All the local AM stations and local TV stations have said he has not decided who he is officially endorsing for the 2004 election. In fact, I was watching the local news just last week and he himself said he has not decided.