At the Convention

Crossing the Missouri River, from the comparatively urbane East to the positively arid West, it isn’t difficult to glean the changes in landscape. The left side of the river is, after all, replete with rattlesnakes and the Badlands.

Beyond the tumbleweeds, one will find equally palpable social differences in these parts. This is where the Denver Broncos, not the Minnesota Vikings, reign supreme and where cowboy attire is not a novelty but rather the regional bon ton.

It’s also a stone’s throw away from the Rocky Mountains, which encompass a region of the United States that has traditionally been overwhelmingly in favor of the Republican Party.

That is, until now.

The West has been the country’s most electorally transforming region this decade, and perhaps the most encouraging ongoing development for Democrats.

In 2004, Montana elected Brian Schweitzer, a gun-toting and bolo tie-donning Democrat, as governor while Democrats also took control of the state’s legislature. Two years later, another unconventional Democrat claimed victory in Montana when Jon Tester, a husky farmer with a crew cut, was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Five states in the Rocky Mountain West-Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona-are currently led by Democratic governors. There is a new sheriff in town indeed.

Ground zero for this movement is Colorado, which is largely why Denver was chosen as the site for this year’s Democratic National Convention. Colorado has not voted Democratic in a presidential election since 1992, but the party has been eyeing it since 2004 when John Kerry narrowly lost the state’s crucial nine electoral votes to George W. Bush.

That same year in Colorado, Ken Salazar was the only Democrat elected to the Senate from a red state. Two years later in 2006, Bill Ritter, Colorado’s Democratic candidate for governor, was elected in a rout.

Such successes served as a prelude to Colorado emerging as one of the 2008 presidential election’s decisive swing states-and one of a handful of erstwhile Republican strongholds that could conceivably shift to Barack Obama’s column.

Along with Colorado, where polls have shown him locked in a statistical tie with John McCain for the better portion of the race, Obama has remained competitive in Montana, Virginia, Indiana and—wait for it—North Dakota. He has been pegged as the favorite to claim victory in New Mexico.

One would be remiss to fail to acknowledge the influence of the Obama campaign’s so-called “50 state strategy.” And one would be doubly remiss to fail to credit Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, for introducing such a strategy in 2005, when he raised eyebrows for committing his party to making gains in the likes of Kansas and Mississippi.

Addressing a crowd of college students in Denver on the Friday preceding the convention, Dean attributed the strides made by Democrats in the aforementioned states to the much-ballyhooed “bottom-up” organization that is tailor-made for the voters he was addressing and was perfected by Obama during his campaign against Hillary Clinton.

“What we’ve done is create an organization that empowers young people,” said Dean. “Barack is your candidate; the Republican Party looks like 1950s television.”

All of this is, of course, true. The Obama campaign has been run like a well-oiled machine, while John McCain has been vexed with infighting and staff shakeups. Obama’s sweeping support among young people is, likewise, glaringly apparent. But both phenomena fail to explain the crux of the Democratic turnaround in states once taken for granted by Republicans.

Consider the makeup of the candidates who have flourished in the Mountain West: both Schweitzer and Tester are avid outdoorsmen who are vigilant defenders of the Second Amendment, and Ritter is pro-life. Wine-sipping, Volvo-driving liberal elitists these men aren’t. And while Western Democrats are characterized by moderation, they have also all embraced a “live and let live” philosophy that is endemic to the region.

This sentiment was best captured by my cabdriver as he gave me a ride to the Colorado Convention Center on Monday morning. He recalled Denver’s infamous decision to reject the 1976 Winter Olympics.

“We have a real libertarian streak here,” he said proudly.

That very libertarian sensibility has been on display in Montana, where both Governor Schweitzer and Senator Tester have routinely condemned the oft-maligned Patriot Act.

This criticism led Tester’s opponent, the longtime Republican Sen. Conrad Burns, to chastise the Democrat for being soft on terrorism. Tester countered this by pointing to the overwhelming opposition to the controversial counterterrorism Act in the Montana state legislature.

The 2004 election, when Democrats were pilloried for being foreign policy milquetoasts, seems like a distant memory. Of course, Republicans also overwhelmed Democrats by making a host of trivial but emotionally-charged social issues a central theme of the campaign. Gay marriage and flag burning alone may have derailed the former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle that year.

But Obama, the Jeremiah Wright tumult notwithstanding, is in the rare position of being a Democrat who’s ostensibly more comfortable discussing religion than his Republican opponent.

This was evidenced by Michelle Obama who, during her address on Monday night at the DNC, made a reference to “military families who say grace each night.”

True, McCain emerged as the victor of the quasi-debate hosted by the Pastor Rick Warner at the Saddleback Church; such a setting still amounts to a home court advantage for the Republican. Obama’s mere presence at the event was telling; would Kerry or Michael Dukakis have agreed to participate?

But invoking scripture isn’t the only detail that will resonate with the voters necessary to swing states from red to blue. Democrats, in virtually every respect, should be on the right side of the economic front.

Thomas Frank, the author who has long maintained that Democrats could win back the middle-class voters who have supported Republicans largely on the basis of social issues if they renewed their espousal to economic liberalism, emphasized this during a book signing in Denver.

“Barack Obama shouldn’t just say that the government failed you,” said Frank. “No, a philosophy failed you.”

North Dakotans can attest to this, as Sen. Byron Dorgan has ridden a populist message to three terms in the U.S. Senate.

Mark Warner, the former governor and Democratic senatorial candidate in Virginia, did his part at the convention. He alluded to China’s strong performance in the Olympics, both cosmetically and athletically, as a call for economic changes during the keynote address on Tuesday.

“The race is on, and if you watched the Olympics, you know China’s going for the gold,” said Warner. “You know, America has never been afraid of the future, and we shouldn’t start now.”

He was, of course, making an appeal to the very voters who have been on the wrong side of China’s meteoric rise—the same so-called “salt-of-the-earth” voters who have purportedly been reluctant to embrace Obama and will likely decide the election.

But the culture wars that defined the 2004 presidential election seem to be losing traction. We may be witnessing a convergence of sensibilities, as these crucial voters vacillate between their moral uncertainties and economic insecurities. This ambivalence may be preventing the run-away victory that many Democrats anticipated from their party’s nominee, but Obama’s appeal in states once considered safely Republican also underscores a significant shift in the electoral map.

As so many times before, the election will hinge upon a pocket of toss-up states. The only difference this time is that the number of those states has expanded, representing a new frontier for Democrats.