Building the Winning Coalition in Space

Abstract

“In 2008 the presidential nominating campaigns were especially long and strange,” observed political scientist Barry Burden. The reason to call it “long and strange” for Burden was because “just about every prediction about the 2008 nominations was wrong.” Most importantly, the 2008 primaries forced scholars to “revise our understanding of ‘momentum.’”¹ If the voting sequence of the 2008 Democratic primaries did not lead to any favorable pattern, or momentum, over time for Barack Obama as shown in Chapter 5 of this book, what was the real reason behind his success in winning the nomination? To answer this question, this chapter provides a spatial, or contextual, analysis of the 2008 Democratic primaries.

The states are, at one and the same time, well-integrated parts of the overall American civil society and also separate civil societies in their own right with their own political system.

—Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States