I don't support Obama because I believe he is electable. But his electability is a substantial bonus. Still, views continue to circulate that his failure to win certain states (e.g. CA, NY, MA, OH, TX) against Clinton in the primaries spell his doom in the GE. That is a flawed line of reasoning on two accounts. Firstly, the Democratic electorate's behaviour will obviously differ enormously in the GE with one Democratic candidate. Secondly, the Democratic primary is not winner-take-all like the GE (for most states anyhow). Some of Obama's opponents maintain that is current advantage is due to the technicalities of insider baseball (AKA delegate math). Others cast doubt on his ability to win a convincing majority of the popular vote. Still others proclaim his relative inability to win big states, and it is this contention against which I have seen the least argument.
Can't Obama win big states? I'm no statistician, but wanted to examine this because it's the one argument against Obama's viability whose possible validity has continually nagged me. Again, we know that a candidate's inability to win an absolute plurality in certain states' primaries does not necessarily constitute his or her inability to win as the sole Democratic candidate in the GE. So for this exercise I will look beyond the simplistic winner/loser tally and at the relative numbers of popular votes int he 10 biggest states. To begin with there is the question of what constitutes "big": physical size, population size, quantity of delegates, quantity of Democratic voters and degree of "blueness"? Any or all might apply.
Therefore I will examine Obama's relative level of support in the ten biggest states, defined five ways. Each can be interpreted -- or manipulated -- differently. Lack of support in the bluest states has already been construed to imply Obama's unpopularity amongst reliable Democratic voters in states that have historically gone blue in the winner-takes-all GE. His "defeats" -- often by relatively small margins -- in the most populous states have been interpreted as an inability to appeal to all but targeted micro-audiences in relatively ignored states. But his relative success or failure in states where Democratic primary turnout has been exceedingly high is less mentioned.
Two other ways of measuring states' size are by number of available Democratic delegates and sheer land area. The latter is important because we readily perceive abstract entities in spatial terms. The relative graphical size of political entities on maps has long been a tool of domination, and even now the amount of jokes on DK about the paucity of people in Rhode Island, the physically smallest state, masks the fact that there are eight states (some much larger) with substantially smaller populations. Plus, more blue just looks that much better on November's electoral map!
Looking at Obama's and Clinton's relative wins so far in the 10 states with the largest population, we see that Obama trails Clinton in the popular vote total by less than one quarter of one percent:
In terms of the 10 states with the largest land area (the ones that empower us on the map), Obama currently lags in the popular vote by 6.6%. But barring some unforeseen cataclysm, his expected victories in MT, WY and OR should bring his total roughly even with hers:
In terms of the 10 bluest states (as measured by Democratic margin of victory in the 2004 Presidential election), her total popular vote advantage is less than 1/2 of a percent:
If instead we look at the states with the highest numbers of participants in the 2008 Democratic primaries, we in fact see that Obama comes out ahead in the total popular vote by .72%:
In fact, the only measurement of "big" in which Clinton might be constituted to have an advantage over Obama is states with the highest number of available Democratic delegates; her total delegate lead here is 6.5%. This is an ironic victory because it derives from the very math that Clinton has dismissed as an irrelevant technicality to distract Superdelegates and the MSM from Obama's rule-based advantage:
Does the above evidence help destroy the meme that Obama can only win the small states? Furthermore, if Clinton concedes, will the the majority of Democrats reunite to ensure that CA and NY (not to mention NJ and PA) remain dependably blue come November? I never would have questioned this a month ago, but now I even question myself...