So I'm pretty down... made worse by the euphoria over Kerry's early (and seemingly sweeping) lead in the leaked exit polls. It is, of course, just an election, but right a move to Canada, or France, maybe even French Canada(!) seems enticing.
Just a few morsels for thought:
1. Kerry did extremely well in this election. He got more votes for president than anyone ever had before, breaking Reagan's heretofore unapproachable record from the '84 landslide. It's just that Bush did even better. He really did find Rove's 4 million evangelicals who sat out the last election and turned them out.
(As an aside, this is almost certainly why the exit polls almost uniformly favored Kerry. The polls are weighted based on a voter turnout model --- largely based on the Y2K turnout pattern --- and the model was wrong.)
I haven't done more than read quick summaries of the subindices on the exit polls, but Bush won largely because of first time voters who said "cultural values" were their #1 reason for supporting him. These voters were heavily concentrated in states --- like my new home state of Ohio --- with Gay Marriage initiatives on the ballot.
I'll hazard three (unprovable) guesses here: (a) if you had told the Kerry team on November first how many votes they were going to get they would have been pretty confident it was a winning number. (b) If the exit polls had asked the first time culturally conservative voters if the debates had affected their vote they would have resoundingly said no (i.e., it wasn't a question of whom they would support, it was weather they would turn out) And (c) this election was probably decided by the Massachusetts Supreme Court and their gay marriage ruling.
So any sense of "failure" on the part of the Democrats is mis-placed. They set their targets, met or exceeded them, and pulled higher raw numbers and a higher percent than any candidate they've fielded in 28 years. It's just the Republicans were a little bit better this time.
2. That being said, one really has to question whether the Democrats can be considered a nationally competitive party any more. They've largely disappeared in wide swaths of the country, and probably have less of an elective presence south of the Mason-Dixon line than the Whigs had in 1856 (I'll have to check this). Because of the disproportionate way the Senate is allocated, they're sentenced to minority status there for the foreseeable future. Because of gerrymandering and the powers of incumbency, the house is probably even farther out of reach. At the presidential level they're competitive --- for all the gnashing of teeth, it should be remembered that with a couple hundred thousand more votes in Ohio or Florida (just a couple tenths of a percent of the ballots cast) and we'd be talking about President Kerry --- but you have to question the longevity of a party that starts by ceding two of the three elective chambers of government.
Over and above the demographic disadvantages, I would argue the dems remain in need of a strong identity. This year they did well (just not well enough) by being the anti-Bush party, which is fine when you've got such a divisive administration to run against, but how does that carry over to '08 and beyond? For 20 years I've told my mother (a fairly senior Democratic politician) that her party was the political equivalent of the Balkans, a bunch of contentious interest groups with little to tie them together except occasionally joining for a common purpose.
3. The nation is now even more polarized than in 2000. The red states are redder, the blue bluer. There were 22 states in 2000 where the presidential vote was within 5%, there were only 11 this time. Moreover, there is a 25+ year trend of increased polarization at the local level (the number of competitive counties in the country has dropped to a third of what it was in '76) and while we'll have to wait for all the counts to come in, I'd be stunned if they didn't show a continuation.
It would be nice to think Bush will govern in a more centrist fashion (as several political columnists are predicting) but it seems unlikely. If he didn't do so after the close election of 2000, and then didn't do so after 9/11, it's hard to imagine it happening after a more decisive victory. As Bush himself would say, with him you know where he stands and what you get. Moreover, the millions of new evangelical voters are only going to pull the Republicans farther to the right, the "double edge" of needing to keep your base intact. Of course, time will tell the tale here, but I'm not optimistic.
One thing you forgot to say in here: We're Fucked We're Fucked We're Fucked!
That and "They're all around us."
2 things, then.
Posted by: BB | November 17, 2004 at 08:23 PM