Candidates who ignore the red in their states won't win

Four more years of Bush, no more Tom Daschle, 55-44 in the Senate, an even smaller minority in the House of Representatives. ... Any way you slice it, the recent election was a disaster for the Democrats. Nonetheless, there is a strong silver (or should I say blue?) lining to this election, which the Democrats, now in the process of licking their wounds and examining their strategy, should not ignore. I'm talking, of course, about the Prairie State.

Once considered a swing state, today Illinois can be safely placed in the Democrats' column as a blue state -- not just light blue, but solid blue. Yet before the arrival of Bill Clinton, the last time Illinois gave its electoral votes to a Democrat was when Lyndon Johnson, and perhaps not coincidentally, Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley, were in office. After that, Illinois went through nearly 30 years of Republican control: 26 years of Republican governors and nearly three decades of Republican control of the State Senate and State House of Representatives. Yet today, Illinois boasts two Democratic senators -- one of whom is the freshly elected Barack Obama. It also has a Democratic State Senate, a Democratic State House of Representatives and a Democratic governor in Rod Blagojevich. It is as solid a blue state as there can be.

How did this happen? True, a large part of the Democrats' success in Illinois can be traced to the licenses-for-bribes scandal, which brought down the former Republican governor, George Ryan. The Democrats successfully pinned the taint of scandal and corruption on an out-of-touch Republican Party, convinced the voters that it was time for change and performed a political coup d'etat.

But that is not all. The other factor in the Democrats' success in Illinois has been their ability to connect with the downstate center-right voters. Who are the downstate center-right voters? They are the sea of red that you see on the most recent electoral map of the United States. They are rural, small-town folk who vote on values and morals as much as they do on issues and policies. And in recent years, rather than just hoping to win Chicago and thereby win the state, Illinois Democrats running for statewide offices have reached out to, courted and, to a laudable degree, won the downstate vote.

Take, for example, Blagojevich and Obama.

When Blagojevich, my former U.S. House representative from the Chicago suburbs, ran for governor in a crowded field of upstate-Illinois Democratic contenders, he knew that in order to win the race, he'd have to look beyond the urban and suburban vote. So he went downstate and focused a majority of his time and energy campaigning among the downstate center-right voters. Many of them were so shocked that an upstate Democrat actually cared about what they think that, out of sheer curiosity, they listened to him.

Pictures of Blagojevich talking to Illinois farmers, listening to their concerns and otherwise "fighting for" them permeated the airwaves, and before any of his opponents could catch on, Blagojevich was ahead in the governor's race simply because of the downstate vote. On election night that year, with most of the upstate precincts reporting, Blagojevich looked like a sure loser -- until the downstate vote trickled in slowly and brought him over the top.

Obama did exactly the same thing. He spent more time getting his hands dirty downstate than he did up in Chicago. On Nov. 2, in an interview with Larry King, King asked Obama how he had done it; his answer, which I cannot quote verbatim, was as simple as it was practical. You go to the people, show them that you care about them and provide them with practical solutions to their everyday problems, without portraying yourself as omnipotent.

John Kerry, on the other hand, seems to have kept his hands clean of the sea of red that permeates this country. Whenever he campaigned in Pennsylvania, Ohio or any of the swing states, he came predominantly to large cities to talk to large urban crowds, hoping to win the states by courting their respective urban and suburban voters. As for the small-town, rural voters, their votes didn't matter; they were surely going to vote Republican, so why bother?

After this election, it's obvious that you have to bother. And it is not impossible; if Blagojevich and Obama could do it, so could have Kerry, had he tried. And that doesn't mean that Democrats have to stop being Democrats; Blagojevich and Obama are left-leaning liberals, but by targeting downstate voters, sharing their common concerns and, most importantly, showing them that they cared about them, they won their center-right votes.

If anything, this election has showed us that ours is a center-right country that certainly requires a center-right strategy. The task of the Democrats, then, is to replicate the Illinois success story all over the country.

Cezary Podkul is a junior Management and Philosophy major in Wharton and the College from Chicago, Ill. Cezary Salad appears on Mondays.

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