The 50-State Strategy: Bad Idea.

For much of this cycle, the news networks have been atwitter that Barack Obama has been pursuing a 50-state strategy, or something akin to that. The premise of the 50-state strategy is, of course, that a campaign should not leave electoral votes on the table, but rather should attempt to compete in all 50 states. Wikipedia's entry for Howard Dean describes the strategy succinctly:

After Dean became Chairman of the DNC, he pledged to bring reform to the Party. Rather than focusing just on 'swing states,' Dean proposed what has come to be known as the 50-State Strategy. The goal, the DNC says, is for the Democratic Party to be committed to winning elections at every level in every region of the country, with Democrats organized in every single voting precinct in the country. State party chairs have lauded Dean for raising money directly for the individual state parties. Dean's strategy uses a post-Watergate model taken from the Republicans of the mid-seventies. Working at the local, state and national level, the GOP built the party from the ground up. Dean's plan is to seed the local level with young and committed candidates, building them into state candidates in future races. Dean has traveled extensively throughout the country with the plan, including places like Utah, Mississippi, and Texas, states in which Republicans have dominated the political landscape.

It is an incredibly popular idea with the netroots, and may even be considered their organizing principle. I also think, and have always thought, that it is an uncommonly dumb idea.

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The fate of Obama's initial ad buy is a case in point. His spending outlays were as follows:

ND: $160K

AK: $88K

MT: $136K

IN: $1.3M

GA: $1.8M

NC: $1.6M

VA: $2.7M

MO: $1.2M

FL: $5M

CO: $800K

NV: $633K

OH:$2.5M

NM: $260K

IA: $700K

WI: $1.2M

NH $391K

PA: $3.9M

MI: $2.2M

Now, some of those buys aren't 50-state strategy buys; they're obviously swing state buys.

But let's define 50-state strategy buys broadly, as spending in states that went for Bush twice.

Let's look at the "50-state strategy" buys, and where Obama stands in the polls according to the latest OxMethod average in each:

ND: $160K (McCain +14)

AK: $88K (McCain +28)

MT: $136K (McCain +11)

IN: $1.3M (McCain +4)

GA: $1.8M (McCain +15)

NC: $1.6M (McCain +17)

VA: $2.7M (McCain +2.3)

MO: $1.2M (McCain +5.3)

FL: $5M (McCain +4.5)

CO: $800K (McCain -2.2)

NV: $633K (McCain +1)

OH:$2.5M (McCain +1.8)

For the $5M spent between very, very red states NC, GA, IN, MT, AK and ND, only one is in single digits. To add insult to injury, let's look at these states, and compare them to Bush's percentage, normalized for the standing in the national polls:

ND: $160K (-11.4 (ie 11.4 points toward Obama from Bush/Kerry, relative to the national polling)

AK: $88K (+4.87)

MT: $136K (-7.27)

IN: $1.3M (-14.12)

GA: $1.8M (GA +1.08)

NC: $1.6M (+6.83)

VA: $2.7M (-3.62)

MO: $1.2M (+.32)

FL: $5M (+1.75)

CO: $800K (-4.65)

NV: $633K (+.63)

OH:$2.5M (+1.96)

For all of this spending, which McCain matched with all of a $70K buy in ND, the best that can be said is that a few heavily Republican states moved somewhat toward Obama, compared to how Bush performed against Kerry. In some states, he's actually faring worse than Kerry, who spent zero dollars there. And of course, this spending doesn't account for field organizers and other money sent to these states. 100 field staffers and 30 offices ain't cheap, especially in a state you're losing by fifteen points. The 50-state strategy is championed by the netroots because of a flawed understanding of history. Jon Henke likes to quote this Matt Bai article excerpt frequently, and I think it is an extremely important quote:

"One of the hallmarks of netroots culture was a complete disconnect from history – meaning, basically, anything that had happened before 1998. The political consciousness of most of the bloggers seemed to begin sometim felt as ancient to the bloggers as the underlying causes of the Peloponnesian War, and about as useful. It wae around impeachment, when they had first tuned in. Whatever had gone on before then ... all of these thingssn't just that the bloggers didn't know much about the political world before impeachment, it was that they didn't want to know, either. So burning was their contempt for "Washington insiders" and the "mainstream media" that they were moved to dismiss not just the individuals who fell into these categories, but all the knowledge such people had accumulated. In a sense, the way the netroots saw it, the more you knew about Democratic politics before 1998, the less relevant you actually were."

The downside of this lack of historical knowledge is that you base your strategy on what you hear worked for the GOP, without understanding why it worked for the GOP. The reason the 50-state strategy was a good one in 1970 is that we were about halfway through a massive partisan shift that had been underway for (at the time) about forty some-odd years. Most of the states were up for grabs, as the GOP was ascendant (but not yet dominant) in the South, and descending (but not yet near-extinct) in the North. This made possible a situation where landslides were possible, and states regularly switched sides (indeed, from 1952-1988, 7 of the 9 elections were massive landslides).

We aren't in that world anymore. The partisan entrenchment that began to set in during the Clinton years has now fully set in. I personally believe that we are in a period similar to the partisan alignment that took place from 1880-1928, the post-civil war alignment that was torn apart by the immigration of the 1910s and 1920s, and by the great depression. Consider the following, which shows how many states flipped from election-to-election from 1880-1928 (we will exclude the Wilson years as a fluke caused by the Bull Moose candidacy):

1880-1884: D-R: CA, NV R-D: IN, NY, CT

1884-1888: D-R: IN R-D: NY

1888-1892: D-R: 0 R-D: CA, WI, IL, IN, NY (Ignores switches to Populist party)

1892-1896: D-R: CA, WI, IL, IN, KY, WV, MD, DE, NY, CT R-D: WA, MT, WY, SD, NE

1896-1900: R-D: KY D-R: WA, UT, WY, SD, NE, KS

1900-1904: D-R: NV, ID, MT, CO, MO

1904-1908: R-D: NV, CO, NE

1908-1920: D-R: NV, CO, NE, OK, TN

1920-1924: R-D: OK, TN D-R: KY

That's a lot of the same names, over and over. And with the exception of the elections of the early 1890s, where the populist party turned the two-party system on its heads briefly, most elections involved only a handful of states switching sides.

The 50-state strategy is a good idea in a time of partisan change. But in a time of partisan entrenchment like the present, it is an incredibly bad idea.