What Obama Achieved

As President-elect Barack Obama savours his thumping election victory this week, he will be conscious of what he has, and has not, achieved in political terms.  This calculus will affect how ambitious a legislative agenda he pursues, and his ability to bully or cajole Congress to follow his lead.

The scale of Obama’s win is impressive, particularly for a Democrat.  His six percentage point (53-46%) margin over John McCain exceeded former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 edge over the elder George Bush.  More importantly, Obama is the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to achieve an absolute majority (over 50%) of the popular vote; his 53% vote share is the highest Democratic percentage since former President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide.  Moreover, in certain ‘blue’ (Democratic-leaning) states his tally was positively eye-watering, breaching 60% in California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

However, while he scored a number of notable breakthroughs in long-time ‘red’ (Republican-leaning) states such as Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana, he failed to effect an electoral realignment on the scale of Ronald Reagan’s triumph in 1980 or Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 landslide.  Indeed, Obama’s electoral map largely preserved the entrenched pattern of red and blue states that has prevailed since 2000.  Certainly, many blue states deepened to cobalt, and bled out at the edges -- giving adjacent red states a purple tint and drawing them marginally into the Democratic camp.  But this hardly constituted a decisive march into once-hostile territory.

Mountain man

However, an exception to this general pattern occurred in the Mountain West.  Colorado and Nevada, which were long seen as Republican bastions, went to Obama by margins usually associated with ‘liberal’ Pacific coast states like California.  New Mexico, generally seen as a perennial swing state, followed suit.  McCain’s winning margin in ultra-red Montana was wafer thin.  And Arizona would also have been in play, had it not been the Republican candidate’s home state.

So while Obama can hardly be said to have achieved a lasting realignment in the nation as a whole, he may have established a strong new Democratic redoubt in the Rocky Mountains.  This should allow him to spend political capital on potentially risky new political initiatives, such as his proposed healthcare reforms, without fear of fatally undermining his re-election chances.  Moreover, his large winning margins in the blue states -- in many cases larger than those of his fellow Democrats in Congress -- should give him a fair amount of sway over the legislative branch.

Obama hardly remade the political firmament on November 4, but he has vastly more scope for leadership than his predecessor.  The key (and, for now, unanswerable) question is whether he can transform this opportunity into tangible achievements at home and abroad.