McCain won Mississippi by 13 points (56-43). This is an improvement from 2004, where Bush defeated Kerry by 20 points. Anyway, what should Obama have done to at least make Mississippi competitive?
Mississippi and neighboring Alabama go hand in hand. There's only one election on record in which they did not vote for the same candidate. In 1840, Miss. voted for William Harrison (W-Ohio), who unseated the incumbent, Martin Van Buren (D-New York), in their rematch from the previous election. (Ala. was retained by Van Buren.)
Ala. carried in 2004 for George W. Bush by over 25.5 points and Miss. backed him by more than 19.5 percent. Considering their track record, Barack Obama would have needed more than double the 7.26% by which he beat John McCain. The 2004/2008 shift was D+9.73%. Obama would've needed closer to a shift of 19.73%, rendering McCain with a U.S. Popular Vote of 40% or 41%. And that still might not have been enough. Either it would've been good enough to carry Miss. by under 1 or 2 points and let McCain have Ala. by mid- or upper-single digits—or have that shift be closer to 24.73%, while making a deliberate and concerted effort to flip both states.
Had Obama done that, and succeeded, it would've delivered Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, South Carolina and—the three states McCain carried while Obama won the female vote—Georgia, Missouri, and Montana. Hell, Texas would've been gone, as would've McCain's home state of Arizona, along with Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
Had Barack Obama won the state of Mississippi in 2008, we would've seen the first 40 [-plus]-state landslide since the 1980s.
