The other night we were
channel-surfing and hit upon the Miss America pageant. “What year
did women get the vote in the United States?” a contestant was
asked. The answer, according to the pageant judges, was 1920, when
the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified.
The correct answer is a little more complicated. Women began voting
in Wyoming Territory in 1869, and began voting in presidential
elections after Wyoming became a state in 1890. Women from the
Mountain West were voting for president long before the “official
date” of 1920. In Colorado, Utah and Idaho, women first voted in
the 1896 presidential election. Indeed, by 1920, Montana had
already elected the first woman — Jeannette Rankin — to
the U.S. Congress.
You don’t have to watch the Miss
America pageant to see how we get ignored here. Just watch the
short promos for what’s coming later. The announcement will
say something like “11:00 Eastern, 10:00 Central.” Once in a while
there will be an “8:00 Pacific.” But never a “9:00 Mountain.” Our
time zone doesn’t exist.
Our time zone is the
network equivalent of flyover territory. But in a presidential
election year, we might also ask: Is the Mountain Time Zone also a
political nonentity?
Thanks to the arithmetic of the
Electoral College, we do have more clout than our population
warrants. The extreme example of this imbalance comes from
comparing Wyoming, with about 500,000 residents in the 2000 census,
to California, with 34 million.
California gets 55
electoral votes, one for each of its 53 U.S. representatives, and
two for its two senators. Wyoming has only one representative, and
thus three electoral votes. Do the math, and each Wyoming electoral
vote stands for about 170,000 people, while each California
electoral vote stands for 618,000 people.
In other words,
a Wyoming voter has nearly four times as much influence on the
presidential election as a California voter. This extends, though
not to such an extreme, throughout the Mountain Time Zone.
Nationally, the average electoral vote stands for 526,000 people,
but here, only 437,000.
So, if the typical Mountain Time
voter has 20 percent more clout than the typical American voter,
why aren’t presidential candidates competing to accommodate
us, perhaps by promising an end to new user fees on public land or
catching up on deferred maintenance at our national parks?
For starters, that Electoral College arithmetic favors
states with small populations, but even so, we’re still
lightweights. The Mountain Time Zone has only 37 of the 535
electoral votes — less than 7 percent. Texas, alone, has 34, and
New York has 31.
This means that a candidate can get just
about as many votes from carrying one big state such as California,
and carrying that single state would not require the travel time
and multiplicity of media markets that campaigning across seven
states demands.
So we don’t offer much bang for the
buck. You won’t see the Bush campaign spending much in Texas
this year, even though it’s a big state with many electoral
votes. Bush could carry Texas even if he announced plans to raze
the Alamo because it was a threat to homeland security. The reverse
holds for Democratic strongholds like New York and California.
States need to be competitive to get attention. New
Mexico is the only Rocky Mountain state that a Democrat carried
last time around, and then by only 366 votes. Pollsters say Arizona
and Colorado might be competitive this year — and so both
Bush and Kerry are frequent visitors.
But you won’t
see much sign of either candidate elsewhere in the Red Zone West,
because Republicans are so dominant. In 2000, Bush got 60 percent
of the Montana vote, 68 percent in Utah and 71 percent in Idaho and
Wyoming. Noncompetitive states, especially ones with few electoral
votes, aren’t worth the trouble for either party’s
candidate.
That may explain America’s current
political geography. The Republican Party may have been founded by
New Englanders and Midwesterners, but it is today a Southern party,
stretching from Texas east to Virginia and Florida. The Democratic
Party has become a coastal party, especially if you count the Great
Lakes as a coast.
Here we all with all this public land
everyone has a stake in, and neither party has much to do with our
Mountain Time Zone, except to take it for granted, or else write it
off entirely. And in neither case are they going to pay much
attention to those of us on the ground in flyover country; their
real constituencies are elsewhere, just like the network audiences.
Ed Quillen is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
He publishes Colorado Central Magazine in Salida,
Colorado.
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