Swing State

Missourians are about to find out how those superdelegates were feeling early in March when the Obama and Clinton pooh-bahs kept calling them. Now it’ll be Obama and McCain courting us. We may only have 11 electoral votes, but I bet we’ll see more of Illinois’ favorite son than Illinois (with 24 votes) will.

And Obama has a plan to swing this state his way:

Obama strategists believe they have identified a gold mine of new and potentially decisive Democratic voters in at least five battleground states.

In Florida alone, more than half a million black registered voters stayed home in 2004. Hundreds of thousands more blacks are eligible to vote but are not registered. And campaign analysts have identified similar potential in North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri and Ohio.

Implementing that plan will require a deft touch, though, lest he appear to be exploiting race. Here’s part of the subtle approach he’s employing:

The Illinois senator, for example, has opposed monetary reparations for descendants of slaves. And he has said he does not think his daughters should benefit from affirmative action because they have had a “pretty good deal,” while he has expressed openness to programs that could help disadvantaged whites, Hispanics and women.

A couple of other voting blocs Obama will focus on are all voters under 35 and ex-convicts. (In Florida, Republican governor, Charlie Crist, just signed a new rule that would allow about 115,000 felons who have completed their sentences to be eligible to register to vote. The majority of them will be black and likely to vote for … guess who.)

Missouri is no flyover this year. And never fear that Obama staffers will be pulling out a month before the election the way Kerry’s people did in ’04. Ain’t gonna happen.

The pictures are both on flickr from Obama registration drives: the first in Broward County, the second in Lebanon (MO?).