Is Wyoming the Reddest State? Or Just One of the Palest?

By Rone Tempest, WyoFile.com, 11-11-08

Charles Pelkey and Reese Jenniges, also of WyoFile.com, contributed to this story.

According to the presidential election results, Wyoming and Oklahoma shared the distinction of giving the highest percentage of votes to John McCain, at 65 percent and 66 percent respectively. Wyoming recorded the lowest percentage of support in the nation, at 33 percent, for Barack Obama.

Even Wyoming’s arch conservative neighbor Utah went slightly lighter on McCain, 63 percent and slightly heavier on Obama, 34 percent.

But does that make Wyoming the country’s reddest state? More troubling, is there a degree of racism in the Wyoming electorate?

No doubt there is some racism, or at least ethnocentrism, among Wyoming’s predominantly white electorate.

“I would like to say that it wasn’t a factor but I don’t think I can honestly say that,” said Michelle Sullivan, Obama Wyoming state campaign director. “It’s masked but I think that our insulation from other ethnicities here makes them more of the other.”

Margi Schroth, who owns the H F Bar Guest Ranch outside Buffalo said she has been concerned by the level of racism contained in Facebook traffic in her community following the election, including a site entitled “The South Will Rise Again.”

“I think it is an ignorance factor more than anything else,” Schroth said. “People here are scared of anything that’s ‘not me.’ “

A closer look at the election statistics shows that the absence of minority voters also contributed to Wyoming’s lopsided election results.

Wyoming’s white voters, in fact, supported Obama to a much greater degree than white voters in many other states, including Texas and most of the American South. The difference was that those states all had bigger minority populations to offset the white vote.

Despite his abysmal numbers in Wyoming, Obama actually outpolled John Kerry’s 2004 run. Obama pulled in 33 percent of Wyoming’s electorate, but Kerry scored only 29 percent.

That modest improvement, said University of Wyoming history professor Phil Roberts, reflected the excitement generated by the Obama campaign and the remarkable Obama campaign organization.

“Obama garners more success than Kerry because Obama’s people were more effective than Kerry’s in employing the fifty-state strategy,” Roberts said. “A stronger grassroots effort like that will have an impact on how Democrats are regarded in general.”

Nationally, Obama lost the white vote. According to New York Times exit polls, 55 percent of white Americans voted for McCain compared to 43 percent for Obama. That number actually marks an improvement over 2004, when George W. Bush outpolled Kerry among whites by margin of 58 percent to 41 percent.

The biggest difference, however, was seen among minority voters across the country. African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians—voted overwhelmingly for Obama. Obama captured a remarkable 95 percent of the black vote; 66 percent of the Hispanic vote and 62 percent of the Asian vote. Kerry, on the other hand, received 88 percent of the black vote, 53 percent of Hispanic voters and 56 percent of Asian voters. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States is 12.8 percent Black, 14.8 percent hispanic and 4.4 percent Asian.

In contrast, Wyoming is only 0.9 percent Black, .7 percent Asian and 6.9 percent Hispanic. Wyoming does have relatively large Native American population of 2.5 percent. Statistically, however, the state’s voting population is one of the palest in the land.

According to CNN exit polls, Wyoming whites voted 66 percent for McCain, 11 points above the national average and only one point above the state as a whole. Without a significant minority vote to balance that number, the state’s overall voting tally of 65 percent for McCain was virtually identical to the white vote.

However, in states with larger African American populations, it was a much different tale.

In Oklahoma, which has a black population of 7.8 percent, white voters went 71 percent for McCain. In Mississippi, which is 37.1 percent black, more than 88 percent of white voters backed McCain.

Obama did not carry a single county in the entire state of Oklahoma. Even Cleveland County, where the University of Oklahoma is located at Norman, went for McCain 62 percent-38 percent.

Two Wyoming counties, Teton County and Albany County, home of the University of Wyoming, went for Obama. In Cheyenne, the only city in the state with a established black population, voters from majority white state House Dist. 44 elected African American James Byrd, son of longtime legislator Liz Byrd.

Among White voters, at least eight states—Mississippi (88%), Alabama (88%), Louisiana (84%), Georgia (76%), Texas (73%), South Carolina (73%) and Arkansas (68%)—voted stronger for McCain than white voters in Wyoming. All of those states have significantly larger Black populations than Wyoming.

In its neighborhood, Wyoming finds itself almost statistically equal to Utah, where White voters also went 66% to McCain and Idaho, where whites voted 65% for McCain. Those three states—Wyoming, Idaho and Utah—also have the densest concentration of Mormon voters in the country.

Mormons constitute a generally conservative voting bloc, particularly on social issues At least one in nine voters in Wyoming is Mormon.

In Colorado and Montana, the latter with very similar demographics to Wyoming, white voters were much more supportive of Obama. McCain received only 48% from white voters in Colorado and 52% in Montana.

But both those states have strong Democratic Parties and have undergone a recent trend of electing Democrats to Congress. Both U.S. Senators in Montana, Jon Tester and Max Baucus, are Democrats. Baucus was reelected Tuesday by a 73% margin. Obama’s effort was also aided by the reelection of Montana’s popular Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer.

Colorado elected its second Democratic U.S. Senator, Mark Udall, to join fellow Democrat Ken Salazar in Washington.

Wyoming, meanwhile, watched as its only strong Democratic contender, U.S. House candidate Gary Trauner, lost by a ten point margin to Republican Cynthia Lummis.

The loss represents the continuation of 30 years of GOP domination of the state’s Congressional delegation that began with the 1978 retirement of the late Teno Roncalio. Two years earlier, Malcolm Wallop defeated two-term Democrat Gale McGee in a race for the U.S. Senate.

The change may be due in part to a shifting economic structure along the southern portion of the state. UW’s Roberts said traditional Democratic strongholds along the Union Pacific line were also home to the state’s strongest labor unions.

“Before 1964, in almost every case, the labor unions in Wyoming were heavily represented,” Roberts said. “With the transition from steam locomotives to diesels, you could close up union mines. The center strength of the party went into decline. It is exactly how you explain Sweetwater County.”

Conversely, most liberal support in Idaho and Utah comes from growing urban areas, like Boise and Salt Lake City. Those communities have attracted residents from other states and it appears that those new voters are slowly shifting voting trends. While Wyoming doesn’t have a comparably large urban center, new voters have made some difference in the state, said Roberts.

“The most amazing thing was taking a look at the party registration figures for the counties,” he said. “You see a rather significant increase in Democratic registration in every county, except for Campbell, which had a huge increase in Republican registration.”

Bemoaning his party’s loss in the House race, Democratic Gov. Dave Freudenthal, who endorsed Trauner, said Democratic candidates have been unable to convince Wyoming voters they can make a difference in Washington.

“So we really don’t have a two-party system,” he told Casper Star-Tribune reporter Jared Miller.

Roberts, however, said that Democrats still have a future in the Cowboy state.

“I am optimistic for the Democratic Party,” he said. “That period from 1994 onward when Mike Sullivan stepped down to run for senator, Kathy Karpan ran for governor and Bob Schuster ran for Representative and all lost.

“But since then until Gov. Dave’s election, that was the longest period of time where we didn’t have a Democrat in Congress or in the executive. The national party under the control of the Clinton crowd wrote Wyoming off and it carried on until Howard Dean became DNC chairman and really pushed the fifty-state strategy.”

This story was first published by WyoFile.com

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