Who needs Kentucky?

It's another week, another primary, and time for another round of media hand-wringing about Barack Obama's difficulty with working-class white voters.

Is Kentucky Racist?

The latest bit of bad news comes from exit polls in Kentucky on Tuesday that showed nearly half of Kentucky Democrats said they would not support Obama in a November election against John McCain.

Almost 20 percent of whites said race was an important factor in their vote in Kentucky, and almost 90 percent of those voters supported Hillary Clinton. But wait, it gets worse for Obama. Only 29 percent of the first group say they will vote for Obama in November. Four in 10 say they'll support McCain instead. The rest say they won't vote at all, according to the exit poll.

What that tells me -- as if I needed a reminder -- is that racism is alive and well in America. And for all of Hillary Clinton's complaints about "sexist" treatment she's endured, the polls don't seem to bear it out at the ballot box. It's racism that's on the ballot in the Democratic primaries, and racism will be on the ballot again in November.

There's good news and bad news here for Barack Obama. The bad news is that there are probably a fair number of racist white people in Kentucky and West Virginia who will never vote for him. The good news is that Obama doesn't need them to win.

Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton each won Kentucky and West Virginia when they ran for president, and that statistical anomaly has confused pundits into thinking that those states are "bellwether states" or "battleground states." They aren't, and a Democrat doesn't need them to win the election.

For the past 52 years, Kentucky has only voted for southerners and Republicans in national presidential elections. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are neither, so they would have to defy half a century of electoral history to pull out a victory in that state.

It is technically possible for Clinton or Obama to win Kentucky this fall, but the commitment of resources required to gain those 8 electoral votes is not worth the effort when there are easier, more cost-efficient ways to get the 270 electoral votes to win.

What's The Matter With West Virginia?

The terrain is a little more favorable in West Virginia, which has voted Democratic in 14 of the last 19 presidential elections. Sure, southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton won in West Virginia, but northern Democrats like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy and Mike Dukakis have won there as well. Yes, even Mike Dukakis won West Virginia.

But if Mike Dukakis won West Virginia, how did Al Gore and John Kerry lose it in 2000 and 2004? Gore lost West Virginia by 6 percentage points in 2000 and Kerry lost it by 13 percentage points four year later. On the other hand, Bill Clinton easily won West Virginia by 13 points in 1992 and 15 points in 1996.

For the life of me, I still don't understand this. It's not a race issue -- all the candidates were white -- and it's not a gender issue -- all the candidates were men. Nor is it a regional issue because Massachusetts Democrat Mike Dukakis won West Virginia but Tennessee Democrat Al Gore lost it. Maybe it's because the state has changed from the 80s and 90s to the current decade. I don't know, but I do know it's not essential to a Democratic victory.

Obama lost the West Virginia primary by 41 points last week, but this week the news was brighter. The state's senior senator, Robert C. Byrd, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, endorsed Obama on Monday, calling him a "noble-hearted patriot and humble Christian." As Bob Dylan said, the times they are a changin'.

Maybe the people of West Virginia will -- like Byrd -- take a second look at Obama, and give him another chance in the fall. It would make sense if they did. West Virginia is the second poorest state in the nation. The median household income is just over $35,000 --  compared to $65,000 in Maryland, a state Obama won by 25 points. The economy is the number one issue facing Americans, and there are few places that are hurting as much as West Virginia. So why would voters support Republicans when the GOP wants to give tax cuts to the wealthy, cut Social Security for seniors, and force middle-income Americans to fend for themselves for costly health insurance?

Did I mention racism? Yes, I know it's a simple answer, and it doesn't fully explain why white candidates Gore and Kerry lost the state. But the race issue is not just a Barack Obama problem; it's a Democratic Party problem. As I said in my column last week, no Democratic candidate for president in my lifetime has won a majority of the white vote.

But West Virginia is different. It has a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators, and only one Republican in its entire congressional district. On paper, this should be an easy Democratic state for Obama, but West Virginia -- like Kentucky -- has never elected a black person to any federal office.

I'm not willing to bet on West Virginia to give Obama the election, but West Virginians will clearly benefit from a Democratic president. It's up to the voters to decide what's more important. If they want to vote for McCain, they're the ones who will pay the price if he wins. They will suffer through 4 more years of losing their sons and daughters in a pointless war, losing their jobs to layoffs, losing their health insurance to rising costs, losing their homes to unregulated predatory lenders, and losing their paychecks as they pump $4 a gallon gasoline into their tanks with no long-term energy policy in sight. Is the benefit of prejudice really worth that cost?

The Democrats Haven't Done As Poorly As You Think

Despite the bad news in Kentucky and West Virginia, the stars are still aligning for Barack Obama. That's, in part, because George Bush has been a miserable failure as president, and more than 80 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. The numbers are so shocking that even John McCain has started citing them to argue, somehow, that he's the "change candidate" because he once differed with George Bush on a few issues.

When you combine the country's mood with the electoral math, the election conditions still look favorable for Obama right now. In fact, quiet as it's kept, the Democrats have not performed really poorly in a presidential election since Michael Dukakis ran in 1988. I know. I worked on that campaign.

Since then, the Democrats have performed better than the results might suggest. Bill Clinton defeated an incumbent GOP president in 1992 on the same message of "change" and "hope" that Barack Obama is now using.

Even after his party lost control of the Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton came back and won re-election in 1996, defying bold predictions by Newt Gingrich and the Republicans that conservatives would run the country for a generation to come. 

Although the Democrats did not elect a president in 2000, they did win a majority of the popular vote. George Bush became president because of 537 votes in the state of Florida, and 5 more votes on the Supreme Court in Washington.

The 2004 race was almost as close. A mere 38,000 votes in the 2004 election could have changed the outcome. George Bush won New Mexico by just 6,000 votes, Iowa by 10,000 votes and Nevada by 22,000 votes. New Mexico has 7 electoral votes, Iowa has 5 and Nevada has 5. So the combined 38,000 votes in those three states would have given Kerry 17 more electoral votes, putting him in a tie with George Bush at 269-269.

Ohio and Florida Are The Keys

But there was an easier way for Kerry to win. It starts in Cleveland and it heads down to Cincinnati. It's Ohio.

John Kerry was a horrible campaigner going up against an incumbent war-time president who was still fairly popular, and yet Kerry managed to win 252 electoral votes. That's the key. If Obama simply wins Kerry's states, all he has to do is win one more state -- Ohio or Florida -- to win the election.

Of course, his campaign won't and shouldn't focus only on those two states. Elections are unpredictable, and it's possible that Obama may lose one or two of Kerry's states and pick up one or two of Bush's states. But the math is clearly in his favor, with or without Kentucky and West Virginia. But some people in those two states don't understand the consequences. 

I don't understand what it's like to be a poor, struggling white southerner in a world that's rapidly changing around you, but I do know the world will change regardless of whether we want it to or not. Just like the men who blocked the entrances to schoolhouse doors and turned water hoses on peaceful demonstrators, those who choose prejudice over promise will eventually find themselves on the wrong side of history.

At some point in our future, there will be a black president, women will lead armies, and gays and lesbians will be treated equally. At some point in our future, Republicans won't be able to win white voters by appealing to the lowest common denominators of fear and prejudice but will instead be forced to compete for those voters by appealing to their highest dreams and aspirations. At some point in our future, we will look back on these conversations in the way that contemporary Americans now reflect upon the backward beliefs of their ancestors and marvel at how far we have come. At some point.

In the meantime, we have an election to win. And if Barack Obama can simply hold onto John Kerry's states and add Ohio or Florida, then it won't matter what happens with the voters in Kentucky or West Virginia. They'll finally have a president on their side, whether they like it or not.