This election season, I’ve found the polling site 538 invaluable, both as a source of electoral projections and as a corrective to whatever random poll Matt Drudge decides to unwarrantedly hype day-to-day. So, I wasn’t surprised to see an insightful article from 538’s Nate Silver turn up at The New Republic: “How the West Was Lost.”

Now, of course, that’s lost by the GOP. And I believe Nate is more on the Obama side of things. So, really maybe that should be how the West was won (at least from a left-leaning perspective)? Nonetheless, given that the GOP has alienated the region more than the Democrats have won it over, I suppose the title makes sense. And I’ll just stop talking about it.

Anyway…

Having written in my book about the changes in the Interior West, I’ve hardly been surprised this year to see the region emerge as the second battleground, after the more traditional battleground, the Midwest. And the Interior West is an important battleground, because as I’ve noted ad nauseum, even if McCain wins every other Bush 2004 state (cough), CO, NM, and NV alone would throw the election to the Democrats. And, behold, Obama leads in all three — comfortably in CO and NM, where he’s led all year, and narrowly in NV.

Silver notes a couple of the important reasons things have shaken out this way. Folks have been moving from both coasts to the Interior West at a steady clip, transplanting their blue selves into traditionally red states. And, more Hispanic voters are in these states every year (which is a “blue” trend, even if McCain has bucked his base on immigration).

What Silver leaves out is the religious factor. The Interior West has far fewer Evangelicals than the Republican Party’s solid southern states (around 30% in each of the Interior West states versus ~60-70% in the Southern ones). This has meant that Interior West voters are far less attached to today’s Republican Party than their southern counterparts. See, for instance, this chart from Pew, showing how various religious denominations have been behaving this election cycle. While Evangelicals seem to have been unaffected, politically, by the financial crisis, mainline Protestants have switched from advantage McCain by 10 points to advantage Obama by (currently) 5 points.

For all the talk about Florida, Ohio, and even Pennsylvania in these final days, this election was over as soon as McCain wasn’t able to hold onto the states in his own back yard.

How exactly did the “Maverick” lose the ability to hold on to his own back yard? Let’s just say it has something to do with the campaign he’s run. It’ll be time soon enough for post-election recriminations.

I can’t wait.