Interesting article, also very revealing as Kerry is starting to do what is suggeested in the heartland strategy, beating Bush in states he narrowly won in the middle of the nations, places like Pennsylvania, where Kerry is now enjoying sizable leads over Bush.
All Kerry needs is wins in a few southern states, most likely Florida where a number of polls show him leading Bush by a fairly comfortable margin.
Do The Democrats Need Dixie? By Richard S. Dunham in Washington
Updated: 7:00 p.m. ET Feb. 22, 2004President George W. Bush may have hit a rough patch, but there's one part of the country where he is still walking tall: the South. Despite sliding to a 50% job approval rating in a Feb. 12-15 CBS News Poll -- down from 60% in late December -- Bush maintains a double-digit lead in the South in matchups with his top Democratic rivals. Combine that with his sweep of 11 Southern states in 2000, and it's not hard to figure out why Democrats are contemplating a route to the White House that doesn't run through Dixie. "Al Gore proved that you can win the election without a single Southern state, if he'd only won New Hampshire," Democratic front-runner John Kerry told supporters in San Francisco last spring.
The Massachusetts senator has since explained that he was talking arithmetic, not strategy. But Democratic operatives say the party may have no choice but to bypass the South's 153 electoral votes -- 57% of the 271 total needed to win.
So party strategists are looking West -- to the Midwest or Southwest, that is. They are focusing on the industrial heartland, where manufacturing jobs have been exported by the millions, and the rapidly growing Southwest, where Democrats could reap benefits from favorable demographic trends. Either gambit will require the party to hammer Bush on economics, quiet any debate over divisive cultural issues, pick the right candidate for Veep -- and get lucky.
Still, no Democrat has ever been elected without winning some states of the old Confederacy. The candidate must hold on to all of Gore's "blue" states -- which have only 260 electoral votes now, down from 267 in 2000 because of post-census reapportionment -- and win states with 10 more. Without the South, a Democrat will have to carry 70% of the rest of the nation's electoral votes -- in the face of a $200 million GOP campaign to portray the Democratic nominee as an out-of-the-mainstream lefty. "It's mathematically possible," says Bush pollster Matthew Dowd, "but it's like drawing an inside straight."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4355409/