November 12, 2006 12:14 AM UTC

Mountain States Decisive In '08?

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• by: Colorado Pols

Professor Kevin Vranes of the CU Center for Science and Technology Policy Research has a cooler title than anybody writing for this blog (at least as far as you know), so we’ll let him sum up what our readers should already understand very well:

The obvious and quick lesson the Dems should learn from this election

If they want to win the POTUS seat in 2008, the Democrats need to realize how the results of 2004 and 2006 reflect on each other.

The simple lesson is this: the right kind of Democrat can do very well in the Mountain West, and take the electoral votes here to the White House. With very popular Democrat governors in Montana, Arizona and New Mexico and a governor elect in Colorado that won by a 15-point margin, the Democrats are set up very well for the Presidential election in 2008. These four states carry 27 electoral votes. Purple Nevada gives five more. Bush won in 2004 by 35 electoral votes and each of the five states I mentioned went to him.

What’s the lesson? That the right Democrat can carry all five of these very purple states on to a win. John Kerry was not the right man. He lost by huge margins in Montana and Colorado even when local and statewide Democrats made incredible gains in the same election. Any honest westerner would tell you that if they did vote for John Kerry it was a vote against Bush, not a vote for Kerry. You need look no further than Kerry’s staged photo op in hunter orange and a shotgun to understand why.

Would Senator Clinton be the right woman?

You already know the answer to that, too: somewhere between “no” and “hell no,” just like Dr. Vranes does. He suggests that Barack Obama would do well here for President, especially with New Mexico governor Bill Richardson or Montana’s governor Brian Schweitzer riding shotgun (pun intended).

Whether or not you agree, he correctly points out that as a bloc of contentious but winnable states, solidly demonstrated as such last Tuesday, Colorado and neighbors are flyover country no longer for the Dems. And with the election results showing a clear partisan division between blue northeast and red southeast states this year as well, it makes sense that the decisive battle for the presidency could be fought on our doorstep.