The Democrats choose Charlotte for 2012 convention

So the Democrats have selected Charlotte, North Carolina as the site of their 2012 convention. Not exactly a leading American city. And not really a Democratic city in numbers or spirit. It was the locus, in the 1970s, of the country's most bitter school desegregation battle. Even today it houses the Nascar Hall of Fame. So what's that about?

Being competitive in the Sun Belt. Hoping that Obama might win North Carolina again. Signaling that the D's are ready to compete everywhere (the R's already chose Tampa). Having their convention in a city that doesn't even have one union hotel. Oops, that probably wasn't one of the talking points.

(Just so you know, traditionally, campaigning Democrats have cared about staying in union hotels, while Republicans have not. I guess those days are now officially over, although it seems strange to me because unions, for all their flaws and problems, are still the party's most reliable money and door-knocking source. Obama himself, like many presidents and presidential candidates, might duck the issue by staying in some rich person's massive house.)

Can Obama possibly win North Carolina again? First of all, I doubt there's much correlation between convention location and victory. I do think that Denver as the D's location in '08 helped at the margins; remember how, all those people who packed Mile High Stadium for the big speech, David Plouffe sent them all out knocking on doors that fall? That probably helped.

But this time...on the margins if at all. Obama won NC by .4% in 2008 in very aberrantly friendly circumstances: McCain's silly campaign, the half-termer, the economic crisis. The natural inclination is to think that things will return to "normal" there, which means: Republican.

But I'm not so sure. Here's an interesting set of numbers. I assumed Obama won NC by really pumping up the black vote. But if you look at CNN exit poll numbers, you see that African Americans made up 23% of the overall vote in the state in 2008. After seeing this I went to 2004 as a point of comparison, and it turns out that the black vote in 2004 was higher: 26% of the total vote.

How do you explain this? Well, I'd suspect that a whole lot of white voters turned out to vote against the black guy, thus depressing the black number. Will they turn out in such numbers again? Maybe, if the economy is terrible and we've had a terrorist attack or something.

But it's my guess that a decent chunk of these voters won't turn out. I call this the "sky didn't fall in" vote. That is, America elected a black president, and these voters didn't like this idea at all, but now they see that "the sky didn't fall in, Al Sharpton didn't become secretary of state, and life's okay, and now that he's not dancing with Pelosi anymore he seems better, and I always did sorta like the guy personally, and Republicans seem a little nutty, and what the hell."

I am not saying that these people will now vote for Obama. A few might. But that isn't what I mean. What I mean is, far fewer of them will be highly motivated to bother to drive to the polls to be sure to vote against him.

I think that dynamic could work to Obama's benefit in a lot of states. Unless of course the sky actually does fall in (economy, terrorism), in which case he'll be in big trouble. I could picture anything at this point, from his outperforming last time's gaudy 365 electoral votes (if things are going really well and the GOP puts up an unserious candidate, he might take Georgia, which he lost by five points in '08) to losing. But if you asked me for a number today, I would say about 312 electoral votes (270 needed to win).

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