Democrats look to Western states for new base

The changing demographics of the West, along with the region's deeply ingrained individualism and libertarian attitudes toward government and religion, may provide Democrats an unexpected opportunity in their efforts to rebuild a national majority coalition.

That, at least, is the argument put forth in two soon-to-be-released books by noted political analysts -- that with the Republican Party increasingly a party of "red state" Southern conservatives and evangelical Christians, the purple mountains of the West could hold a mother lode of blue votes

That also is why the Democratic Leadership Council is holding its annual meeting of state and local officials this week in Colorado, "exactly the kind of red state we must win if we are to be returned to national power," DLC founder Al From told reporters in Washington several days before the DLC gathering got under way Sunday in Denver.

Republicans suggest the Democrats are seeing a mirage in the interior West, a region that has been reliably Republican for decades, especially in presidential elections.

For example, Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y., chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, at a recent breakfast with political reporters, laughed at the suggestion that an anti-GOP wave would wash away Republican incumbents in party strongholds. "All politics is local," he said repeatedly.

But Frank Luntz, one of the most influential pollsters and strategists in the Republican Party, said there may be something to the views of theorists Ryan Sager and Tom Schaller in their upcoming books on the subject of Democrats and the West.

"Maybe," Luntz conceded. But the current anti-GOP political climate made him reluctant to comment on any long-term trends in the West beyond this fall's congressional races.

Right now, Luntz said, "I see no difference between Mountain State anger and other national anger," he said in an exchange of e-mails Friday.

But Sager, in his forthcoming book, "The Elephant in the Room," and Schaller, in his, "Whistling Past Dixie," contend that the political hue of the interior Western states has been changing from red to blue in recent years.

Part of the reason, they argue, is the increase in Hispanic voters, who tend to cast their ballots for Democrats; the exodus of socially liberal voters from California to neighboring states (400,000 Arizonans and 360,000 Nevadans were born in California); and, perhaps most important, the growing discontent with the national Republican Party and the "big government" "culture war" conservatism with which it has run Washington.

"For a long time, the GOP was balanced between the West and the South, but things have been sliding further and further toward the South," Sager said in an interview.

"The Karl Rove political machinery is built less on cutting government and more on mobilizing social conservatives. He's played 50-50 politics, but that doesn't produce an enduring Republican coalition. In fact, it's fracturing the one the GOP has had in the West for 30 years.

Schaller, in an interview, agreed.

"The West is not some cowpoke and tumbleweed outpost," Schaller said. "The fastest-growing suburban areas in the country are in the Denver and Phoenix suburbs, and these changes threaten to undermine the GOP's long-enjoyed lasso around the region."

The numbers, if not convincing, are compelling.

Compelling enough, anyway, for a special panel of Democrats to recommend Saturday that their party move up Nevada's 2008 presidential caucus to the week between the traditional campaign kickoff contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.