Republican gains in three states overshadowed by Obama's success
Lurking quietly on the electoral college map thatBarack Obama splashed with Democratic blue are a small handful of states seemingly oblivious to the tide that swept the nation's first African American into the White House last week.
Obama took nine states won by George Bush in 2004 and won about 6.9m more votes than Democrat John Kerry did that year. But Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee ran counter to the trend, voting more strongly forJohn McCain than for Bush four years ago. In three other states the margin was essentially flat.
In Arkansas, a relatively poor and rural southern state, voters' rejection of Obama was most pronounced. He lost to McCain by 20 percentage points, 59% to 39% while in 2004 John Kerry lost by about nine points, 54% to 45%.
The state does not as a rule reject Democrats. After all, the last Democrat elected president, Bill Clinton, was governor of Arkansas for 12 years. The state legislature and all state-wide offices are held by Democrats, and the state voted for Clinton twice and for Georgia governor Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election.
Perhaps chief among the reasons for Obama's poor showing: He did not campaign in the state a single day, and didn't aggressively contest the state in other ways. For instance, he hired only a small handful of staffers.
"The Obama campaign nationally was a tremendous success, and pretty much every decision they made was good and turned out well. However, Arkansas was not part of that," said Pat O'Brien, clerk of Pulaski County, the largest county in the state. O'Brien was an early supporter of Obama, and stood out during the primaries in a state dominated by Hillary Clinton backers.
"That did not go unnoticed by the voters and there was just not an aggressive effort," he said. "When they would get volunteers to the office, a lot of the focus was to have them call Missouri."
Obama's inattentiveness compounded his lack of a natural constituency within the state. Like John Kerry and Al Gore before him, Obama does not fit the rural, southern mouldof Arkansas Democrats - the state has not voted for a northern Democrat since John Kennedy in 1960. In addition, several organisational factors also detracted from the Democratic vote that day, all conspiring to lend Obama won of his poorest performances of the election.
"There was a cultural disconnect between Obama and the Arkansas electorate," said Hal Bass, a political scientist at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.
"He's a pretty urbane, cosmopolitan guy and Arkansans are much more likely to be native born and not [to have] spent much time outside of their home state," said Jay Barth, a professor of politics at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, who added that Obama's race intensified the sense of his "otherness".
Indeed, a promiment Arkansas columnist, John Brummett, wrote: "Skin color aside, I'm having a hard time wondering why someone would vote for John Kerry and not Barack Obama."
Whatever the case is, voters clearly didn't know Obama very well. An October University of Arkanas poll showing only 44% of Arkansans correctly identified Obama as a Christian, while 20% believed falsely that he is a Muslim.
Arkansas lacks the large population of African Americans who kept his margins relatively narrow in other conservative southern states – 16% of Arkansas compared to 37% in neighbouring Mississippi, where Obama lost by 14 percentage points but outstripped Kerry's 2004 support.
A lack of competitive congressional races kept Democrats home on election day. Most notably, theRepublicans declined to field a candidate against incumbent Democratic senator Mark Pryor, giving Democratic voters less motivation to come to the polls.
"The Democrats just took a pass on this election," Barth said.
The state's Democratic political leadership unanimously endorsed Hillary Clinton in the primary election last February, and Obama effectively wrote off that contest, bringing in only a single paid staffer to organise supporters. Clinton beat Obama in the primary election by 130,557 votes, or 44 percentage points.
Come autumn, the Obama campaign thus lacked the broad network of volunteers and backers upon which it relied in other states to get Democratic voters to the polls on election day.
Obama barely contested the state in the general election, and when election day came around he had not been to the state a single time in 2007 or 2008.
"The Democratic party activists who were so emotionally committed to Hillary just had a hard time gearing up for Obama," Bass said.