Talk Elections

Campaigning in Hawaii is quite easy for a gubernatorial candidate (or for another statewide office).
But what about incumbent congressmen? Or presidential caucus candidates? Or presidential nominees (if Hawaii were a swing state)?
Well, the last case is quite obsolete for Hawaii, as it is as blue as the ocean, which embraces the state.
But if Hawaii had, let's say, 10 electoral votes and if it were at least Minnesota-blue, would any presidential nominees fly there in order to campaign?
And what what about U.S. congressmen? They actually have only to campaign for their respective primaries. But how do they do this? And what if Hawaii were a swing state? Their challengers would have a leg-up on the incumbent.

Has a presidential nominee or a caucus candidate ever canvassed in Hawaii? I think even Obama visited "all 57 states" but neither Hawaii nor Alaska. LOL

Nixon visited every state during his 1960 campaign, this is often seen as contributing to his loss since he didn't focus enough on the swing states.

That must have been even more expensive back then. how much does it cost to travel and canvass there with the whole campaign crew?

Obama returned to Hawaii to be with his dying grandmother during the 2008 campaign, though this wasn't a campaign event.

Cheney thought Hawai’i was winnable for Bush. (http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Nov/01/ln/ln07p.html)

http://archives.starbulletin.com/2004/10/24/news/index2.html

http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Oct/23/ln/ln05p.html

Polls in hawaii showed that the two was going to be very close. Best guess on what happened was that in both of these polls there were high single percentage of undecideds that broke for kerry. Plus being an telephone poll at the time it missed lots of Kerry voters online. Plus Hawaii being 'traditionally democratic' had a large pool of base democrats that turned out on election day and allowed Kerry to win by a comfortable but embarrassing margin of high single digits considering the political history.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004//pages/results/states/HI/P/00/epolls.0.html

It's too far away if you don't live near a major air hub.  pbrower tried to warn us about this (https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=104956.msg2227105#msg2227105).

And how do the congressmen from Hawaii canvass in their home state? Do they get extra allowance?

How does Colleen Hanabusa campaign in Hawaii?
How often is she flying to her home state?
I guess once she wins the nomination for governor in August, she's gonna stay in Hawaii?

Well, the primary is right around the time they leave Washington for a month. She'd have a free month to campaign but I assume she'll be spending more time in HI bc they don't really have plans for the rest of the year.

This is very interesting

No.  I have a friend who worked as a scheduler/executive assistant for a Hawaiian congressman.  The member traveled to his district less frequently than other members of Congress, and Hawaiian congressmen rely much more heavily on their district staff than most others. 

Sorry but I gotta take the time here to quibble not with this statement, which I agree with,  rather your signature:


See this is interesting to me because your signature is comprised of three rather radical statements — radical in the sense that they are pretty far outside mainstream thought. This would imply that you yourself are to at least some extent a radical, and therefore are by your own logic a “bad person.”

Now I’m not saying I think you are a bad person because you are a radical (as someone who is not a radical, nor a fascist despite being liberal contrary to one of your other radical statements, I don’t see things or people as that black-and-white and find the statement to be logically dubious at best), but if we are to follow what you say in your own radical statement you must think of yourself as a bad person. That would suggest you are depressed and/or have low self-esteem. Please know that you are not alone and help is available to you if you seek it. If you ARE in fact mentally ill, embracing yourself and seeking help would seem to be the best course of action rather than such radical, fascist ideas as “erasing” you for your illness.

Well I think HI was winnable for Bush in 2004 but of course it would have been close. As we see in the CNN exit poll, 47 % of Hawaians approved Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq and Bush had a 49 % approval rating there.

I wonder if Cruz, since he is latino, would campaign in PR, should it become a state in 2024, should Trump lose, Cruz will be the nominee

Gingrich campaigned there in 2011, but it was a thinly veiled excuse to have his campaign pay for a wedding anniversary trip with his wife:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/08/gingrich-heads-hawaii-place-where-he-wants-retire/354241/

in the far far future when hawaii has 100 ec ans a swing state it will

Dick Cheney campaigned in Hawaii in 2004. Dubya only lost it by 9% that year.

Aloha State Has Become a Surprise Campaign Battleground

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-oct-30-na-hawaii30-story.html

Maybe Hawaii becomes a battleground if Tulsi runs as a Republican? lol

This really raises the question of how many "safe" states could be turned to be made competitive if the challenging party invested more in them.

I'm thinking 4? UT, AK, NM, HI.

Possibly a few more (the ND-to-KS stack?) if the Democrats go full populist (and if they do, that probably gives Republicans a chance to grab a bit of the northeast, maybe RI or something).

If Dems want to lose North Dakota by 20 rather than 40, they probably could do that rather easily. It's just going from that to actually winning that'd be the challenge. Most safe states are like that: if the other party put a LOT of effort in, it could cut the gap significantly, but it's not worth it because you're not going to win it anyway in the end.

It's too hot in HI in the Summer time. It's like Palm Springs, that's why they dont celebrate daylight savings time. Difference is that it rains, unlike the Desert in Summertime

Hawaii isn't going republican with the modern Republican party and it's tied to white grievances. Whites are a minority in Hawaii with multi-racial households being normal, they might not be lockstep democrats but they certainly will never vote republican today.

How clear was it which states were swing states and which weren't? It's not like they could extrapolate from 1956.

Also Hawaii was actually a swing state that year. It voted for Kennedy by less than a point. I can see how it has few enough electors that it doesn't make much sense to bother travelling that far.

It's an impossibly, due to fact it's too hot in the Summer time to campaign there, the only time you can campaign there is in Winter

I visited HI and I am used to Cali heat and you melt even in the shade

The hottest temperature ever in Honolulu is recorded at 95 F. Unsurprisingly, given a tropical island, the temperature is consistently warm with little spread between seasons or day and night. Seems like half the year is June in NJ and half the year in July in NJ lol. Going by the climate data it's actually very close to Princeton in June/July both in temp and humidity.

I still want to know how did Bush come within 9% of winning in 2004.

Hawaii has a pro-incumbent streak.

No one really considers Cruz a latino. He only identifies as an latino when it was conveinet for him, which has been several years.

Which U.S. state would you think has the highest recorded temperature, Hawaii or Alaska?
Alaska wins, by a nose. 100 °F in Fort Yukon on June 27, 1915, vs. 98 °F in Puunene (Maui) on July 14, 1957.

It was tied in the polls at the time

Is Hawaii that much hotter than Arizona and Nevada in the summer? I thought Phoenix hits 110 degrees in July-August?

No, It's usually in the upper 80's to around 90F in most of Hawaii during the Summer. The hottest recorded temperature in Hawaii was 100F.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Hawaii#Temperature

Interestingly, this was the first presidential election for both AK and HI (the last two states added to the Union), and both were quite competitive in 1960. As it turned out the 1960 election determined those states' political leanings. Ultimately, HI went narrowly Democratic (foreshadowing a legacy where it would become a rock-ribbed blue state) and AK went narrowly red (it'd vote Democratic only once, in 1964, thereafter).

Not too unreasonable. HI took a massive turn and shift to the left in 2008, shifting 36 points leftward (more than most counties did in 2020 and 2016). Since 2008 HI has shifted slowly rightward, but still, it's not nearly as competitive as it was in 2004. In 2008, HI went blue by 45.27%; in 2004, by 8.75%. In 2004, HI was a blue state just out of reach for the GOP no matter how well they did nationally, so it going Republican would've required a great night for Bush and Cheney, but wasn't impossible. Today, HI is one of the bluest states and one of the states and the core of the Democrats' electoral math (that is, HI is one of the most reliably blue states). But still, Cheney expecting HI to flip blue is like Biden expecting AK to flip in 2020 - not happening, though the state is still only Likely, not Safe, for the opposite party.

The moreover that Dubya was 4 percentage points away from winning Honolulu.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004//pages/results/states/HI/P/00/epolls.0.html

The moreover that Dubya's campaign raised more funds in the state of HI than John Kerry did. President George W. Bush raised $700,000 more than Senator Kerry#

https://www.campaignmoney.com/political/campaigns/george_w_bush.asp?cycle=04

https://www.campaignmoney.com/political/campaigns/john_f_kerry.asp?cycle=04

It was way more important for Dubya to win Ohio than in Hawaii which brought him over the top.

Well, Hawaii appointed electors for Nixon before they realized he didn't actually win. So it was definitely a swing state.

One of the reasons why Dubya performed the best among the voters aged 60 and older in HI is because most of them lived the memory of Pearl Harbor and by connecting it with the significance of 9/11 in which America lost more people than in Pearl Harbor it helped George W. Bush to keep the race somewhat competitive in HI where a poll before Election Day showed him leading Kerry by a percentage point

The moreover that even if Ralph Nader wasn’t on the ballot, a poll in HI showed that Nader got 4 % of the voting intentions while he got almost 6 % of the vote there in 2000. If Nader was on the ballot and got about that performance, perhaps that would have made HI more competitive