Posted by Morbo
Progressives have good reason to feel depressed about the outcome of the 2004 elections. President George W. Bush was reelected, and Republicans expanded their majorities in the House and Senate.
So is it time to put your head in the oven or flee to Canada? Or should you flee to Canada and put your head in an oven there?
Morbo says wait a few years.
Sunday’s Washington Post contains an article looking at the question of whether the election was a seismic shift or simply a tilt. Some political analysts say the election was indeed a historic shift and that the GOP will dominate for many years to come. Others are not so sure.
Morbo says consider this: Bush won with 51 percent — hardly a blowout. It’s true that Bush won more votes than any other candidate in history, but so what? Guess who got the second-highest vote total of any candidate in history? John F. Kerry.
Consider the kind of candidate Kerry was: Kerry is a sitting senator. Sitting senators are rarely elected president. Kerry is a liberal. Liberals don’t do well in national elections. Kerry is from the northeast. Democrats do better nationally with candidates from the South.
Kerry ran against an incumbent, during wartime, at a time when the nation was still licking psychic wounds from the most horrific terrorist attack in U.S. history. This incumbent was advised by a souless, integrity-free political operative who may be some sort of Satanic demon. This incarnation of pure evil, many believe, used surrogates to assert that Kerry, a decorated combat veteran and hero, was in fact a coward. Other surrogates made it clear that if voters failed to support Bush, terrorists would strike again, blowing up tow-headed toddlers, grandmothers, crossing guards, Dr. Phil, entire Girl Scout troops and several hundred fuzzy puppies (with names like “Huggums”). And oh, these operatives also had at their disposal more money than is known to exist in the universe. Kerry had a good bit less than that.
Yet despite all of this, Kerry nearly won. A switch of less than 200,000 votes in Ohio would have made him president elect.
As for the Senate seats, most were in the South. These days, the Republicans run very well in the South. It’s not surprising that they would pick up seats in that region.
Rather than focus on raw numbers, which don’t mean anything because the U.S. population has continued to rise and turnout was up this year, what we need to look at instead are voting patterns — which demographic and regional groups are voting for which party.
To be sure, there is some bad news for the Democrats. People in fast-growing outer suburbs favor the Republicans. Some analysts say the Hispanic vote is increasingly in play.
But anyone who takes this data and tries to extrapolate it to predict what America will look like politically in 30 or 40 years is playing a fool’s game. There are simply too many variables.
In 1920, Warren G. Harding was elected in a landslide, 61 percent to 35 percent. The Republicans held a 150-vote majority in the House and a 22-seat majority in the Senate. They believed they owned the country.
And for a while they did. The hapless, skirt-chasing Harding died in office, but his vice president, Calvin Coolidge, was elected in his own right in 1924, also by a landslide. Coolidge served a full term and then decided not to run again. But with the economy going great guns and big business triumphant, Republican Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928.
The economy was firing on all four cylinders, and the nation was at peace. People ignored Prohibition and partied with bathtub gin. Conspicuous consumption was the order of the day. It was morning in America, and Republican control seemed assured.
I think you know the rest of the story.
I am not saying that Democats should be complacent. Clearly, some new messages are need to win back middle-class voters who by all rights should not be supporting the GOP. But predictions that the Democratic Party will no longer exist in 20 years seem highly speculative and premature. The fact is, no one can look at the results from one election and predict the future. Not even those incredible psychics you run into at county fairs. (Those guys are fakes, by the way.)
Don’t put your head in the over just yet — in Canada or anyplace else. Stay tuned. We live in interesting times.