Greenfield: Democrats, westward ho?

By Jeff Greenfield
CNN Senior Analyst

Adjust font size:

NEW YORK (CNN) -- More than 140 years ago, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, uttered a famous piece of advice to an advice-seeker: "Go West, young man." Democrats seem to be heeding that advice as they look to expand their electoral base.

We're talking about the "interior West." While the Pacific Coast has been reliably Democratic for the last four elections, and where five of six Senate seats are held by Democrats, the interior West is very different. These eight states -- Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah -- have formed a reliable Republican bloc for decades.

Since Lyndon Johnson's '64 landslide, only Bill Clinton has managed to win more than one of these states in a presidential election; more typical is the John Kerry total: zero electoral votes out of 44. It's like losing Illinois and Ohio just about every time. As recently as 2000, not one of these states had a Democratic governor. However, as Weekly Standard writer Matthew Continetti wrote recently, things have changed and may well change again next week.

Democrats now hold governorships in Arizona, where Janet Napolitano is cruising to re-election; Montana with Brian Schweitzer; New Mexico, where Bill Richardson seems assured of another term; and Wyoming, where Dave Freudenthal is likewise a favorite. And Democrat Bill Ritter is leading in Colorado. In three of those states, Colorado, Montana, and New Mexico, Democrats hold the state legislatures.

They hold Senate seats in New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, and Nevada --Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid's home state -- and have a better than even chance of picking up the other Montana seat, where John Tester is challenging Sen. Conrad Burns. And in the House, Democrats have eight seats, compared with four in 2000, and have a shot at three more.

Why this success? For one thing, Western Democrats aren't big on the cultural liberal issues -- they support gun rights and some, like Sen. Reid, are pro-life. For another, the West tends to tilt more libertarian than other regions; it was Arizona's Barry Goldwater who late in his career went to war against the growing influence of the religious right; and just consider the official tourist slogan of Nevada's biggest city: "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."

There's long-term political significance to this political shift. As University of Maryland Professor Tom Schaller argues in a new book, if Democrats can stake a claim in the West, then they need worry less about finding political footing in the much more difficult region of the Deep South.

If Democrats decide that the West is a critical region for them, that could make a big difference when they begin sizing up the contenders for 2008, like asking, "Can a Senator from New York really compete in the land of the Big Sky and tall cactus?" One way to judge how seriously Democrats take this strategy: If they choose Denver over New York as the site of their next convention.