President Obama seems to have fallen for the red states. The president’s travel itinerary so far in 2015 reads like that of a Republican, not the Democratic commander in chief.
Following his State of the Union address in January, Obama left Washington to travel first to Idaho and Kansas, states that are among the least receptive to his progressive policy prescriptions.
Now Obama is heading to South Carolina on Friday, Alabama on Saturday and Georgia on Tuesday, a trio of stops in the heart of the conservative-friendly Deep South.
It’s a striking change for a president who often campaigned on the idea that the divide between red and blue states was overblown, but who generally avoided taking Air Force One to Republican bastions.
With his last election behind him, however, the White House sees an opportunity for Obama to make inroads in red-leaning areas without having to worry about how such a trip would affect his own political fortunes.
Some Republicans say Obama’s new fondness for conservative-leaning parts of America is not being matched by his actions.
“We in the South don’t get to see much of him; I’m glad he’s visiting,” former Republican Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told the Washington Examiner. “It would be nice if he actually governed in the way that he’s talking about. All his conduct since the midterms has actually gone in the other direction, if you’re talking about trying to take heed of the views of the states he’s visiting.”
Since November, Obama has taken executive action on issues ranging from immigration to Cuba. He also issued a record number of veto threats for the start of a new Congress.
Obama’s trek to Columbia, S.C., on Friday, where he will highlight his My Brother’s Keeper initiative to help young minority men, represents his first trip to the Palmetto State as president.
The other two states Obama has not visited since winning the White House are also heavily conservative: South Dakota and Utah.
The White House has said the president would like to travel to all 50 states before leaving office.
Obama will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bloody civil rights marches in Selma, Ala. on Saturday and hold an event and attend a Democratic fundraiser in Atlanta on Tuesday.
Still, the trips to red states have raised eyebrows. And Obama has sought to explain his reasons for the visits by invoking a theme that became a staple of his campaign-trail pitch in 2008.
“Whoever we are — whether we are Republican, or Democrat, or independent, or young or old, or black, white, gay, straight — we all share a common vision for our future,” the president said at an event in Idaho right after his State of the Union address this year. “We want a better country for your generation, and for your kids’ generation. And I want this country to be one that shows the world what we still know to be true — that we are not just a collection of red states and blue states; we are still the United States of America.”
There is another motivation behind Obama’s voyage into conservative territory: Democrats badly need to perform better in the South, for example, to erase Republican gains in Congress, state legislatures and governors’ mansions.
Since 2008, Democrats have lost control of 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats, 910 state legislative seats, 30 state legislative chambers and 11 gubernatorial posts.
“In order to win elections, the Democratic Party must reclaim voters that we’ve lost including white southern voters, excite key constituencies such as African American women and Latinas, and mobilize the broadest coalition of voters possible to not only recapture state houses but also Congress,” said a recent Democratic National Committee autopsy of what went wrong in 2014.
Yet political analysts said the Democratic Party would need more than a few trips by Obama to the Deep South to repair liberals’ standing with a voting bloc that has increasingly migrated to the GOP.
“He’s not preaching to the choir, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t think he would even get favorable reaction from local media,” said Charles Bullock, a political scientist and expert on southern politics at the University of Georgia. “But Obama likely views this as a long-term strategy. Democrats need to win more governors’ races to get a seat at the table when the [congressional] maps are being redrawn.”
