Obama And Howard Dean Team Up to Recast the Political Map

By Sam Stein, Huffington Post. Posted June 5, 2008.

Sixteen months after he launched his campaign for the White House, Sen. Barack Obama may, just now, be entering his campaign's most perilous stage. Facing a rift of sorts within the Democratic Party and concerns over the scope of his political base, the Illinois Democrat is pursuing an unconventional path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave: unlike those before him, he has pledged to redraw the electoral map by putting new, traditionally Republican states in play.

A slew of political factors will determine Obama's success in turning red states blue. But the Senator, in no small measure, will be aided in his task by reforms that preceded his run for the presidency. For all of the hoopla surrounding the candidates, the 2008 presidential election will be the first truly national test of the viability and prescience of Howard Dean's 50-state strategy.

Four years ago, when Dean was vaulted to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee -- following a failed presidential bid months earlier -- he pledged to rewrite the rules concerning where and how Democrats would compete. In the subsequent months, resources and staff were invested into unconventional and even previously untouched locales. The idea was that the party simply couldn't compete without a margin for error.

But at the time, party insiders, who believed Dean was stripping away important resources from key races, were privately and, on occasion, publicly livid.

"He says it's a long-term strategy," said Paul Begala, the longtime Clinton aide and Democratic strategist. "What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose."

When the Democrats made major congressional gains in 2006, questions persisted as to whether the electoral success had simply been the product of a fortunate circumstance. Dean himself admitted to Time Magazine, "I didn't expect much to come of this strategy for four or even six years."

Now, four years have passed. And the Democrats have nominated a candidate that seems perfectly equipped to test-drive the party's 50-state vehicle. Obama has built his candidacy off of the pledge to expand the electoral playing field. Moreover, his campaign has leaned on an ability to drum up both grassroots support and the recruitment of Republicans and independents -- two stated objectives of the Dean vision.

On Thursday, Obama symbolically endorsed the DNC's efforts, declaring that Dean would remain party chairman heading into the general election.

As Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, told The Huffington Post: "I think that we are going to have a larger battlefield in 2008 ... I think we are going to stretch the Republicans I don't think they can take for granted nearly as many states as they have in the past. And I think we are going to add several to the Democratic column this year and so our coalition is going to be broader."

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But what tangible benefits will the 50-state strategy actually provide?

Obama will likely start the general election with 180 or so "reliably Democratic" electoral votes. With the goal of getting to 270, the DNC believes it could play a role in carrying the rest of the burden. The party already has more than 200 field staffers on the ground, and grassroots training programs in all fifty states. In addition, new Internet and communications operations have been started with the goal of facilitating participation in, and donations to, Democratic causes.

These might seem like ad-hoc measures. But if Sen. John Kerry had received ten additional votes per precinct in 2004, he would have won Iowa, Ohio, New Mexico, and, subsequently, the White House.

Perhaps the most significant, and controversial, move made under the 50-state strategy has been the modernization of the party's voter file, in which Dean has invested more than $8 million dollars.

"We have gone light years from four years ago," said Moses Mercado, a Democratic operative and a former adviser to Dick Gephardt's presidential campaign. "Then it was a rag tag of what the party had accumulated and it wasn't what other local officials were using. The DNC got every state on a national voter file. The new file has better tracking to include voter history -- they now know the political habits of those who have moved ... I don't feel the urgency now that we are behind because we have the infrastructure to capture the excitement of the primary."

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Sam Stein is a Political Reporter at the Huffington Post, based in Washington, D.C.

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