WASHINGTON, Jan. 4, 2017 - Republican Donald Trump is headed
for the White House because he upset Democrat Hillary Clinton in the “outstate”
sections – counties beyond the metropolitan areas – in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio,
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The 50 electoral votes in those five states – all of them
carried by Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 – provided Trump the margin
of victory, according to “The Outstate Effect,” a new
paper by political analyst Michael Barone of the American Enterprise
Institute.
“These states – with the exception of Iowa, which voted
narrowly for George W. Bush in 2004 – were supposedly part of a ‘blue wall’
because they had not voted Republican for president since 1988 or 1984,” he
wrote.
His paper breaks down, and shows in tabular form, the popular
vote across the metro areas and outstate regions in seven Midwestern states – Illinois,
Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin – that contain
substantial metropolitan areas with more than one million in population. He
does the same for Pennsylvania, where, he says, “two-thirds of voters beyond
metro Philadelphia are Midwestern in culture and concerns.”
Clinton prevailed in those states’ metro areas (other than
Pittsburgh) but in most cases her margin was lower than what Obama polled in
2008 and 2012 and, in some cases, below Democrat John Kerry’s percentage when
he lost to George W. Bush 12 years earlier.
In the outstate areas of those states, “Trump ran ahead of
Bush in just about every state and way ahead of John McCain and Mitt Romney,” he
said, citing the tally from the 2008 and 2012 elections. “Even more notable
than this are the huge drop-offs for Hillary Clinton in those outstate
regions,” Barone writes. “The numbers are stunning.”
He adds, “By the way, outstates are not small regions, and
they are not significantly declining percentages of the electorate in these
states. They include 100 percent of voters in Iowa, 47 percent in Ohio, 42
percent in Minnesota, 44 percent in Ohio, 47 percent in Pennsylvania, and 61
percent in Wisconsin.”
Adding Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and states with no
million-plus metro areas – Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas – Trump’s 108-30
electoral vote advantage in the larger Midwest and Great Plains states shows a
stark contrast from the three previous presidential elections. Kerry’s edge in
2004 was 69-66, while Obama’s was 118-27 in 2008 and 90-38 in 2014.
Barone opines that the outstate Republican gains in 2016
were presaged by Obama’s declining margins in two states that his campaign
targeted in 2008 but did not contest in 2012 – Indiana and Missouri. “Southern
Indiana and most of outstate Missouri were settled originally by Southerners,
and people there still speak with southern-tinged accents.” Both states’ metro
areas have become less Democratic, he says, “even as their outstate regions
have become only one-third Democratic in Indiana and only one-quarter
Democratic in Missouri.”
The rural-urban contrast is even more pronounced in Kansas,
Barone says, “where Trump’s 57 percent ran distinctly behind Romney’s 60
percent because of metro Kansas City.” The fastest growth in metropolitan
Kansas City is on the Kansas side of the border in Johnson County – a
“fast-growing county [that] now casts 24 percent of the statewide Kansas vote.”
“For many campaigns, the people’s votes in the outstate
Midwest (and Pennsylvania), have mostly been taken for granted,” he says.
“Those regions have not seen many big campaign events – and not just because it
is hard to gather a large crowd in sparsely populated areas – and their
concerns have not ranked high in campaign leaders’ concerns.”
And he adds, in one of the year’s understatements, “In the
future, the 2016 election results might draw more politicians’ attention to
voters in the previously disregarded outstate Midwest.”
#30
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