Old red-blue map may be redrawn on Election Day

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WASHINGTON -- This year's unusual presidential election may toss out one more assumption: the old red-blue map that shows Democrats owning the two coasts, Republicans dominating the South and interior West, and a few battleground states picking the winner.As Sen. Barack Obama moves toward the Democratic nomination, analysts think he could be riding a wave, where a fresh face coupled with a deep desire among voters for change overwhelms traditional partisan geography, topples GOP strongholds and delivers a powerful new majority for Democrats.Yet after being written off last summer, Sen. John McCain emerged as the Republican best positioned to hold the White House for his party in a year when nearly everything is against him: an unpopular war, soaring gas prices, sinking home values and a Republican incumbent with poisonous approval ratings.Analysts point to last Tuesday's twin primaries in Oregon and Kentucky to show how McCain could beat the odds.The same day that Obama enthralled the young, educated voters of Oregon, he was thrashed in Kentucky, losing many counties by 85 percent and 90 percent margins."I was shaking my head when I looked at the Kentucky results," said David Paleologos, director of Boston's Suffolk University Political Research Center. "Single-digit numbers are something a fringe candidate gets. You put a Joe Smith, a placebo, on the ballot and they get 7 percent. ... The voters in Kentucky in our poll said they thought Barack Obama would be the next president, yet only 7 percent in some of these counties were voting for him."And these were Democrats. Parts of pivotal Ohio and Pennsylvania mirror or include Appalachia.The general election will operate very differently from the Democratic primaries, where Obama held his early lead by accumulating delegates based on his share of the vote, keeping the race tight even when he lost big states like California and Ohio to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the Electoral College, the winner of each state takes all its electoral votes. The aim is to reach 270 out of a total of 538."All things being equal, Obama is a decent bet to break 300, just because it's a very good year for Democrats," said Daron Shaw, a University of Texas professor who worked for Bush in 2000 and consulted for the Republican National Committee in 2004. Holding the blue states and winning Ohio could give him the presidency with one electoral vote to spare."But boy, if he loses Ohio and turns around and loses Pennsylvania," Shaw said, "then he's got a math problem."Yet Obama shows the potential to change the entire map for Democrats by energizing young voters and the upscale urbanites who increasingly make up the base of the Democratic Party.For all the current fascination with white blue-collar voters, they have been dwindling and drifting Republican for decades. "Among Democratic voters today, professionals and managers outnumber manual workers by a better than 2-to-1 margin," Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz wrote for the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.The GOP faces what Rep. Tom Davis, a retiring Virginia Republican and leading party strategist, called in a 28-page memo last week a "toxic" environment. "If we were a dog food, they'd take us off the shelf," the memo said. Democrats are outstripping Republicans in voter registrations, fundraising and turnout by large margins.Obama's strongest appeal is among cultural liberals, what Davis called the "granola belt" of college towns and arts and recreation centers like Taos, N.M., and the "Menlo Park/Central Park" crowd of urban sophisticates.Obama's weakness among the white working class could be offset, Davis said, by a soft economy and an electorate that is more diverse and urbanized than in 2004. And African Americans, who already vote overwhelmingly Democratic, could turn out in even higher numbers for his historic candidacy.The Davis memo pointed to exactly those voters to show where McCain should pounce."Exit polls in West Virginia showed that two-thirds of Clinton supporters were unwilling to commit to Obama in the fall -- and that's just among Democrats!" Davis wrote. "With an economy perceived to be failing, these voters should be easy prey to ANY Democrat, but they're not. Herein lies the key for the McCain campaign."The linchpin could be Latinos, the fastest growing voter bloc that went 40 percent for Bush in the last election. Since then, congressional Republicans have alienated many Latinos with harsh rhetoric and crackdowns on illegal immigration.McCain is better positioned with Latinos than any of his earlier GOP rivals, having co-authored with Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., a big immigration bill that would have offered illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. During the Republican primaries, he disavowed his own legislation, but in recent days has been back courting Latinos and the Republican business community with proposals to expand visas.(E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead(at)sfchronicle.com)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)