The Democratic West

Hat-tip to The Commissar: Doug at Below the Beltway links to an article on RealClearPolitics predicting that the Republicans are going to lose the interior west to the Democrats because of the region's libertarian streak and the GOP's excessive social conservatism.

[Link] In fact, it's looking more and more likely that the eight states of the Southwest and the broader interior West -- Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming -- are on their way to becoming the next great swing region in American politics. As the Republican Party tilts on its South-West axis, increasingly favoring southern values (religion, morality, tradition) over western ones (freedom, independence, privacy), the Democrats have been presented with a tremendous opportunity. If the Republican Party doesn't want to lose its hold over all of the West, as it lost hold of once-reliable California more than a decade ago, its leaders are going to have to rethink their embrace of big-government, big-religion conservatism.

Why? The interior West is not the South -- not by demography and not by ideology.

The article goes on to explain why the Republicans are slowly losing the interior west, and gives some evidene of Democratic gains in that region. An additional fact it doesn't mention is that in most of the interior West, Bush did worse or no better in 2004 than in 2000, despite a 2% improvement in the national popular vote.

The article also does not mention a fact that helps explain the Democratic gains in Colorado and Montana but goes against the author's admitted libertarian view: environmentalists are finally connecting to American voters outside New York and San Francisco. Voters in the interior west are slowly realizing that mining corporations don't have their best interests at heart, and environmentalists are learning to hash out policies that clearly help average people.