I don't see it happening.
Very rarely does a presidential candidate in an open election beat the popular vote total of the President from the same party when he was seeking reelection.
Obama lost Arkansas by 23.69%, Kentucky by 22.69%, Louisiana by 17.21%, Missouri by 9.38%, Tennessee by 20.40% and West Virginia by 26.76% while still winning 332 electoral votes.
I don't think it's possible for a Democrat in four years (except for popular statewide office holders) to make up that ground, nor is the effort recommended.
Obama did have a massive turnaround in Hawaii from 2004 to 2008, but that's due to circumstances that aren't repeated here. After Bill Clinton, it's no longer all that special when a Democrat with ties to the state runs for national office.
Barack Obama is simply a horrible match for any of these states except perhaps Missouri. The appropriate comparison will be not so much to the constricted 2012 race with its narrow focus on a few key stats with most either decided or irrelevant but instead the more wide-open 2008 race.
State McGovern 1972 Obama 2008
AR 30.71 38.86
KY 34.77 41.15
LA 28.35 39.93
TN 29.75 41.73
WV 36.39 42.51
USA 37.52 52.87
To say that George McGovern was a horrible political fit for those five states in 1972 indicates the least of his problems in his troubled 1972 campaign; he was a bad match for the sensibilities of voters in all parts of the US. On the whole President Obama did adequately nationwide but catastrophically badly in those states. Jimmy Carter (really one of the weakest challengers to an incumbent President only to win) was a good-enough match for those states and won all of them.
More states -- both ways -- will be contested in 2016 than in 2012 in the Presidential election. Both Parties' nominees will see shakiness in support for the winner of 2012 and try to exploit those weaknesses. Both will have fresh messages for states that went too far one way or the other to be contested in 2008 and 2012. OK, Vermont is off limits for the Republican nominee and Wyoming is off limits to the Democratic nominee. Duh!
Republicans may have found how to appeal to the religious culture of the Mountain and Deep South, but they have not successfully solved the severe economic distress in those states.
Barring a huge breaking scandal (and current ones are pinpricks) one can expect the Democratic nominee of 2016 to practically inherit the Obama campaign intact. A campaign that can get a man with an African father elected has already proved its ability to do wonders.
All in all, I see only Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, and one Congressional district of Nebraska as reasonably-good chances for a Democratic pickup for Hillary. She has a better chance of picking up Texas than any of Arkansas (she has been away too long), Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, or West Virginia -- although those will all be closer than in 2008. Democrats could win West Virginia because of the strong unions in the coal and glass industries -- but the unions have been weakened severely as a political influence.
Or were there aspects of his personality (aloof) and background (black, urban) that made him less competitive than other Democratic candidates would have been?
There is also the possibility that it wasn't a zero-sum game, that Obama is stronger in some regions but that other nominees would be stronger elsewhere.
The conclusion I reached was that Barack Obama was a strong candidate, and that he did better than a sex-scandal free John Edwards would have done. There were some Southern Democrats who won't support a black guy from Chicago, but there were many people happy to vote for the first black President (who might otherwise have flipped a coin between a generic Republican and a generic Democrat), and some who saw him as a man uncorrupted by politics s usual. As we saw in 2012, there are some voters who only show up when Obama is on the ballot.
It will be interesting to see what happens. Did Obama do better in states with minorities because of his ethnicity or was it a sign of trending demographics. The mid-south might be a rapid trend of conservatism, but it could've also less Democrats voting for a black candidate.
Barack Obama won decisively -- twice. That should answer whether he was a good candidate. He won despite being black. Objective standards establish him as an above-average President -- but he did not win by much more (51.01% vs. 50.73%) in his re-election bid than did Dubya. By objective standards Dubya was a horrid President, although the bottom had yet to fall out.
Barack Obama did very well among middle-class blacks (not surprising), but also middle-class Asians and Hispanics. He is neither Asian nor Hispanic. Middle-class Asians and Hispanics had been drifting R. Perhaps middle-class Asians and Hispanics feared a right-wing Culture War, and Barack Obama posed no threat of such. Contrast poor Southern whites, until 2000 a reliable source of swing voters in close or nearly-close elections. The Hard Right won them in 2000 with Culture War issues and contempt for the American intelligentsia even without an appeal to race.
Is Barack Obama that ideologically different from Bill Clinton? In style -- of course. But there's more to it than that.
Let us contrast 2000 to 2012 in the five states that Clinton won twice, but Obama lost by 10% or more twice... and Georgia and Missouri.
STATE Gore Obama
2000 2012
AR 45.86% 36.88%
GA 42.98% 45.39%
KY 41.37% 37.80%
LA 44.88% 40.58%
MO 47.08% 44.30%
TN 47.28% 39.04%
WV 45.59% 35.53%
I'm throwing another state:
OK 38.43% 33.23%
Really, Georgia and Missouri don't fit with Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Obama barely lost both Georgia and Missouri in 2008. Barack Obama did far better in GA and MO than the other "Clinton but not Obama" states.
Al Gore in 2000 looks like a great match for those states in contrast to Barack Obama in 2012. Maybe had he campaigned more in Missouri and Tennessee in 2000, Gore would have won one of those states with a 3% shift of the vote and become the 43rd President. Trusting the brother of the Republican Presidential nominee to get an uncontrovertible count in the one state that ended up mattering was consummately naive.
The states have something in common -- large segments of the people descended from Scots-Irish settlers of the Middle-to-Southern Appalachians in the mid-18th century. Until the early 20th century mass migrations of Americans tended to be practically due west, topography allowing (which explains why San Francisco is a Yankee city even if it is as far south as Louisville). This is the anti-intellectual, xenophobic world of
Li'l Abner and
The Dukes of Hazard -- and far from seeing such characters as affronts, people in the Appalachians and Ozarks did not protest. This is where most of the country musicians have their roots. Religion? Heavily Southern Baptist.
All right, you say -- Missouri isn't really Southern north of the Missouri River, and Greater Atlanta has many Northern transplants. So you can explain why Barack Obama did better in those states. Louisiana is more Deep South (but northern Louisiana is more like Arkansas than like southern Louisiana).
The Hard Right has taken this area seriously while offending the sensibilities of much of the rest of America. But it has reshaped the political culture of these states to the detriment of anything to the Left of Agosto Pinochet.
Poll
