Yes, There Are Congressional Districts Where Obama Won Less Than 25% Of The Vote

Nathan Deal & Mac Thornberry- accurate reflections of 2 uber-reactionary districts

Indiana's Republican Establishment has never much liked 14 term Congressman Dan Burton. It has nothing to do with his political positions or ideological predilections. He's an extreme right wing maniac and always has been, just like Indiana's Republican Establishment. His personality, on the other hand, is grating and he doesn't share his graft with the state party. They made a move to unseat him last year and John McGoff almost beat him in the primary. This year McGoff plans to try again-- as do 3 other Republicans. I was reading about this at The Hill yesterday and the article ends disappointingly: "The candidate emerging from the Republican primary would be favored in the reliably red district."

How reliable, I wondered. Well, the PVI is R+20. That's reliable. No other district in Indiana is afflicted with as many Republicans. Burton wound up with 66% of the vote in November and McCain-- who lost the state-- racked up his biggest majorities in Burton's district (59%), just as Bush did in 2000 and 2004.

But since my head was all in a statistics way I decided to see what districts, nationally, were even more reactionary than IN-05. I saw that there were dozens of districts that gave Obama far less than the 40% he got there-- far less. In fact there are plenty of districts that gave Obama less than a third of their votes! And these were, for the most part, the hardcore KKK districts-- in some cases where Kerry actually did better than Obama. Let me profile a couple of the standouts, to get an idea about what Democrats are up against in some parts of the country (primarily in really backward parts of unreconstructed former slave-holding states).

Worst of all is Texas' mammoth 13th CD that stretches across most of the northern part of the state. Mac Thornberry is a right-wing extremist first elected in 1994. The PVI is a startling R+25 and the district is 74% white Anglo and about 18% Hispanic. Bush won with 74% in 2000 and after his first 4 years of misrule, he was rewarded with 78% in 2004. McCain did nearly as well in 2008 as Bush did in 2004-- 77%, his best performance in any of the crazed Texas districts . McCain did 55% statewide. Thornberry won with an even greater margin in the district than McCain did-- 78%.

Let me quote from the CQPolitics Alamanac's description of the district that manufactures all of our country's nuclear bombs:

The conservative 13th encompasses much of the Texas Panhandle, including the city of Amarillo, then extends east along the Oklahoma border to take in the South Plains and much of the Red River Valley. It juts south twice to add more agricultural territory as well as pick up Jones County's small portion of Abilene. The district takes in Wichita Falls and reaches east to haul in the western half of Cooke County, about 50 miles north of Fort Worth. Monstrous and mainly rural, the 14th includes all or part of 44 counties, 40 of which have a population of under 25,000.

...The 13th is one of the most Republican districts in Texas. The GOP excels in many of the rural small towns that dot the area, particularly around Amarillo. Ochiltree County, in the Panhandle, gave 92 percent of the vote to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Closer to blue-collar Wichita Falls, voters have traditionally favored Democrats at the local level, but even this area votes solidly Republican in state and national elections.

TX-13 is the bottom of the barrel for Texas and for America. But there are other districts that are almost as reactionary and almost as steeped in ignorance, fear, superstition, darkness, and gross bigotry. TX-11 is almost as bad. A west-central Texas backwater, it's got the same R+25 PVI, same kind of rubber stamp extremist loon Representative, in this case Mike Conaway, and a 24% vote for Obama. Texas shares the distinction for being the most reactionary and politically backward state in the U.S. with Georgia and it's there that we find another district that gave Obama less than a quarter of its votes, GA-09, in the rural northern part of the state where chicken processing is the #1 industry. The congressman is a backward yahoo, Nathan Deal, who was first elected as a Dixiecrat Dem in 1992 but quickly realized all the like-minded kooks were on the other side of the aisle, which he skipped over to as soon as the GOP won majority status in 1994. He has been an important cog in screwing up American health care and has worked diligently to wreck the organic food industry. Deal won re-election with 75% of the vote in November, the same that McCain took there. CQPolitics Almanac again:

Anchored by North Georgia mountains, the 9th runs across most of the state's northern border... The 9th's economy has long depended on poultry processing and carpet manufacturing industries rooted in Gainesville and Dalton. As Atlanta expands northward, a surge of new residents in the district's south has brought white-collar and service sector jobs to the 9th and has helped diversify the local economy. The southern portions of Forsyth and Hall counties host suburbs full of Republicans and housing subdivisions.

...The 9th has the state's smallest proportion of black residents (3 percent), although its Hispanic population is expanding due to job opportunities in both the poultry processing and carpet manufacturing industries. More than half the school children in Dalton and Gainesville are Hispanic.

Deal, of course, is a rabid xenophobe and a tireless union-buster. You know how I love talking about how the same kind of right-wing obstructionism that the GOP is currently throwing against Obama resulted in just 88 Republicans in the 1936 House (and 16 Republicans in the Senate)? If trends continue in that direction in 2010 and 2012, Mac Thornberry and Nathan Deal will be among that small number of Republicans returning to Congress, with nothing to fear when espousing the most radical right destructive nonsense that educated and discerning voters in most of the country wouldn't put up with for one term.

But I want to leave this post on a hopeful note. Below are the Republican congressmen in districts that Obama won in November. Some were very close calls and some were landslides. Each of these seats should be carefully targeted by Democrats, although I fear that the DCCC is more interested in-- and will spend all its money on-- retaining Republican-voting incumbents in red districts like Bobby Bright (AL), Parker Griffith (AL), Walt Minnick (ID), Travis Childers (MS), Chris Carney (PA):

CA-03- Dan Lungren
CA-24- Elton Gallegly
CA-25- Buck McKeon
CA-26- David Dreier
CA-44- Ken Calvert
CA-45- Mary Bono-Mack
CA-50- Brain Bilbray
DE-AL- Mike Castle
FL-10- Bill Young
FL-18- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
IA-04- Tom Latham
IL-06- Peter Roskam
IL-10- Mark Kirk
IL-13 Judy Biggert
IL-16- Don Manzullo
LA-02- Ahn Cao
MI-03- Vernon Ehlers
MI-04- Dave Camp
MI-06- Fred Upton
MI-08- Mike Rogers
MI-11- Thaddeus McCotter
MN-03- Erik Paulsen
NE-02- Lee Terry
NJ-02- Frank LoBiondo
NJ-07- Leonard Lance
NV-02- Dean Heller
NY-03- Peter King
NY-23 John McHugh
OH-12- Pat Tiberi
OH-14- Steve LaTourette
PA-06- Jim Gerlach
PA-15- Charles Dent
VA-04- Randy Forbes
VA-10- Frank Wolf
WA-08- Dave Reichert
WI-01- Paul Ryan
WI-06- Tom Petri