An Election Where Anything Is Possible

As the voters make their voices heard today, it is important to keep in mind past trends:

1) Five states in the deep South voted for Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican in 1964, the first time they had voted Republican since Reconstruction.
Those states were Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina. In 1968, those five voted for third party candidate George Wallace, and in 1972, they voted for Richard Nixon. In 1976, they voted for Democrat Jimmy Carter of Georgia.
Since then, however, only two of those five have voted Democratic at the presidential level-Georgia for Bill Clinton in 1992, and Louisiana for Bill Clinton in both 1992 and 1996.

2) Mississippi hasn't elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in the last 61 years.
That man was John Stennis, in 1947. Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove has a chance of unseating the Republican Senate incumbent, Roger Wicker, albeit a slim chance.

3) Seven states with 60 electoral votes have voted Democratic only once since 1964: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Barack Obama has a chance to carry either Colorado, North Carolina, or both. That would be a political shockwave.

4) Eleven states with 63 electoral votes have not voted Democratic at all since 1964: Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. As this election begins, Barack Obama is currently competitive in both Virginia and Indiana, which Pres. Bush carried in 2004 by margins of 8.2 and 20.7 percentage points, respectively.

Clearly, in this election season, the only guarantee is that nothing is guaranteed.