The Washington Times picks up the trend in a story yesterday: Political showdown in West.
It’s an argument I’ve been putting forward for a while (OK, ad nauseum), but now an actual presidential campaign is trying to capitalize on the fact that the Interior West has become a swing region:
Republicans, with few exceptions in recent decades, have become accustomed to sweeping the Plains and Mountain States from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande - President Bush carried all of them in 2004 and all but one in 2000.
However, the Illinois Democrat is aggressively challenging Sen. John McCain in at least six of them, including Republican strongholds New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Montana and North and South Dakota, where polls show the race between the two rivals is close or in a dead heat.
I’m actually interested to see this strategy extend to North and South Dakota. They don’t fit neatly into my Interior West thesis — in that my general impression is these states are culturally conservative at a level on par with the rest of the Midwest (as opposed to the more libertarian Interior West). But maybe it’s worth some further consideration.







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