The Return of the Liberal Republican?

Caught up in Tuesday's wave may have been moderates and liberals running as Republicans. What does this mean for (1) the ability of the party to retain its cohesiveness within the House and (2) the chance that Democrats may be able to field competitive challengers to them in 2012?

Jaworski Learned From Obama Campaign

The Galveston County Daily News details Joe Jaworski's convincing victory in the Galveston Mayors race and notes that the campaign was run by a woman who learned campaigning from Obama's 2008 race. Heavy emphasis was placed on block walking and communication.

Local GOP Fight

A fight is brewing over who will chair the Harris County Republican Party.

Obama Coalition Expanding?

Maybe. The shift appears to be among blue-collar voters and business owners:

Especially notable is Obama's position among several high-status occupational groups not traditionally part of the Democratic coalition. Although the major lobbying groups for small business usually align with Republicans, the poll found that 58 percent of the self-employed approve of Obama's performance. He receives a 55 percent approval rating from "knowledge workers" -- college-educated professionals, such as engineers, consultants, and lawyers. Obama's approval stands at 53 percent among the swells in the corner office, the people who identified themselves as senior business managers. That's high for a Democrat.

Those positive early reviews underscore Obama's opportunity to build an unusually expansive electoral coalition. Arguably, the past generation's most important political trend has been the class inversion in the two parties' support. Since the 1960s, Republicans have gained enormous ground among blue-collar white voters, many of them conservative on cultural and national security issues, who once anchored the Democratic coalition. Since the 1980s, Democrats have advanced among well-educated and affluent voters who are fiscally moderate but lean left on the same social and foreign-policy issues that have moved blue-collar families toward the GOP.

In the 2008 election, Obama struggled with blue-collar whites but extended the Democratic inroads upscale. This new survey shows him improving his position since then with both camps and further loosening the Republican grip on well-off groups that soured on George W. Bush. But it also pinpoints where Obama's agenda could strain his ties to those upscale voters.

The Growing Democratic Coalition

Yet another article arguing that demographic changes advantage the Democratic Party:

To grasp how powerfully demographic change is reshaping the political landscape try this thought experiment about the 2008 election.

Start by considering the electorate's six broadest demographic groups -- white voters with at least a four-year college degree; white voters without a college degree; African-Americans; Hispanics; Asians; and other minorities.

Now posit that each of those groups voted for Barack Obama or John McCain in exactly the same proportions as it actually did. Then imagine that each group represented the share of the electorate that it did in 1992. If each of these groups voted as it did in 2008 but constituted the same share of the electorate as in 1992, McCain would have won. Comfortably.

That's because Obama's best groups are much larger today than in 1992. From 1992 to 2008, the share of the vote cast by African-Americans jumped from 8 percent to 13 percent. For
Hispanics the share soared from 2 percent to 9 percent; for Asians and other minorities combined, from 2 percent to 5 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of the vote cast by well-educated whites remained unchanged at 35 percent. The big losers were blue-collar whites -- those without college degrees -- whose share plummeted from 53 percent in 1992 to just 39 percent now.

That's a threat to the GOP because those culturally conservative, working-class whites are today its most reliable voters. McCain won 58 percent of them, and Obama just 40 percent.

Obama, by contrast, won 95 percent of African-Americans, 67 percent of Hispanics, 66 percent of other minorities, 62 percent of Asians, and 47 percent of college-educated whites. Apply those results to the 1992 share of the vote for all six groups, and McCain beats Obama, 50.2 percent to 47.9 percent.

The Democratic Coalition

After focusing on problems within the Republican Party, interesting observations are being made about tension within the Democratic Party. It all revolves around the passage of Proposition 8 in California which revoked the gay marriage decision by the California courts. Support for the proposition was heavy among African American voters, which suggests that two constituencies within the Democratic Party: the Gay community and the African American community may be at odds:

Last month, Proposition 8 passed, making gay marriage illegal in California, and the demographic that lent insult to injury was the state’s African-American voters.

They came to the polls in record numbers to support Barack Obama, and they brought with them a fiercely held and enduring antipathy toward homosexuality: 7 in 10 blacks voted in support of traditional marriage. Whether that was the game-changer or not is a question for near-constant debate. Many gay activists have begun quietly to suggest that had Hillary Clinton been the Democratic nominee, Prop 8 would not have passed.

This passage about the nature of party coalitions is worth note:

...there’s a big difference between coalition politics and rainbow party politics.

A coalition is composed of groups that may dislike — or even hate — one another, but who understand the shared political expediency of standing together. Rainbow party politics involve bringing together masses of people who are identified by being burdened by a particular grievance. Soon enough — in groups forged of such friable bonds, and almost always when matters of morality and lifestyle come into play — you will discover that one oppressed group does not necessarily support the goals of another oppressed group.

Which weakens the coalition, and makes it less effective. The trick for the Democrats is to make sure this tension does not turn into a split. Perhaps Republicans can lure one or the other to their tent. Frankly I'm not sure how. You?

GOP Should Not Kick Out Evangelicals

Rod Dreher counters critics who argue that the Republican Party should rely less on religiously based policies and minimize the role of evalgelicals in its affairs:

John McCain didn't get his clock cleaned because of his ardent advocacy for unborn life or his stout defense of traditional marriage — neither of which played anything but a bit part in the tragicomic McCain-Palin campaign.

No, McCain lost because the economy is collapsing on the watch of an unpopular Republican president, and he had no idea what to say about it. McCain lost because his party is incompetent. McCain lost because his choice of Sarah the Unready cast doubt about his judgment. And McCain lost because Barack Obama ran a great campaign.

Where is Jesus in any of that?

Besides, was it the religious right that conceived and executed the disastrous Iraq war? Did preachers deregulate Wall Street? Did evangelical leader James Dobson screw up the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response to Hurricane Katrina? Jack Abramoff — did he concoct his crooked lobbying schemes during long protest vigils outside abortion clinics? To be fair, religious conservatives didn't stand up to any of this. We own a share of the GOP's failure. But to scapegoat us for the Republican implosion is preposterous.

And Still More About Republicans

More commentary on the Republican realignment that wasn't and the essential components of the Obama Coalition. At the moment it seems that white college educated professionals have realigned from the Republican to Democratic Party. By joining the ranks of the young, black, Latino and secular, they helped Obama win the most impressive victory by a Democrat since 1964's Johnson landslide.

The author tells us:

Perhaps the most revealing post-election data on that question came from within the defeated McCain campaign. In an interview with Roger Simon of Politico, the Republican candidate's speechwriter and friend, Mark Salter, disclosed that in the campaign's own internal polling data, 60 percent of Americans regarded Obama as "liberal." The campaign thought that would be enough to defeat him, which is why it hammered on the "left-wing" themes.

Baiting the liberals didn't work this year. Disgusted with the Republican right, voters wanted something different and weren't afraid to look leftward. That is what "realignment" means.

At one time, the mere mention of the word "liberal" was enough to tar a candidate and make him or her unelectable. No more. This may be due to generational effects. Younger voters aren't turned off by liberalism. The strategy still works in Texas though, and may well for some time.

Texas Oh Texas

Two separate posts point out that Texas will have far less power beginning in January 2009 than it has enjoyed for most of the past decades.

One of the reasons for this is Tom Delay's redistricting scheme which focused on removing senior Democrats from office. These people would have been prime candidates for committee chairs when Democrats took control of Congress. Now there are few if any truly powerful Texans in elected office in Washington:

And while The Hammer’s redistricting crusade in 2003 certainly helped Texas Republicans at the time, it has come back to haunt the state under Democratic rule. If not for DeLay’s machinations, three Texas Democrats would likely be sitting pretty these days as chairmen of powerful House committees: former Reps. Jim Turner (Homeland Security), Martin Frost (Rules) and Charlie Stenholm (Agriculture).

Instead, they’re all now exes, living in Texas, having lost their elections in 2004.

Harris County Precint Level Analysis

Some interesting work by Charles Kuffner.

A Realignment?

I tend to think these claims are overblown, but here are pieces which together suggest that the Reagan Coalition has been substituted with an Obama Coalition.

Here is a sober piece from the National Journal, and something a bit more hysterical from P.J. O'Rourke.

From the former:

Barack Obama on Tuesday won the most decisive Democratic presidential victory in a generation largely by tapping into growing elements of American society: young people, Hispanics and other minorities, and white upper-middle-class professionals. That coalition of the ascendant -- combined with unprecedented margins among African-Americans -- powered Obama to a commanding victory over Republican John McCain, even though Obama achieved only modest and intermittent gains with the working-class white voters who provided the foundation of the Democratic coalition from Franklin D. Roosevelt's election in 1932 to Humphrey's defeat 36 years later.

"Obama is reimagining a Democratic coalition for the 21st century," says Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a Democratic group that studies electoral trends and tactics. "Democrats [are]... surging with all the ascending and growing parts of the electorate. He is building a coalition that Democrats could ride for 30 or 40 years, the way they rode the FDR coalition of the 1930s."

As witht he piece below, the author points out the problems that the Republican party is having in appealing to the cosmopolitan centers of the country as social concervatives become stronger in the party and help determine what positions it takes on hot button issues.

Whither the South?

After dominating politics for generations, the influnce of the South, or at least the Old South, is waning. It may well be on the way out.

The NYT tells us that the only counties that voted more Republican than Democrat in 2008 as compared with 2004 are in the South, especially the Appalacian South:

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas.

This is especially interesting: The Southern Strategy that helped the Republicans become a dominant party beginning in 1980 may be coming back to haunt the party since the souothern influence may be pulling the party too far to the right, making it uncompetitive nationally:

[This] could spell the end of the so-called Southern strategy, the doctrine that took shape under President Richard M. Nixon in which national elections were won by co-opting Southern whites on racial issues. And the Southernization of American politics — which reached its apogee in the 1990s when many Congressional leaders and President Bill Clinton were from the South — appears to have ended.

“I think that’s absolutely over,” said Thomas Schaller, a political scientist who argued prophetically that the Democrats could win national elections without the South.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have “become a Southernized party,” said Mr. Schaller, who teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “They have completely marginalized themselves to a mostly regional party,” he said, pointing out that nearly half of the current Republican House delegation is now Southern.

Merle Black, an expert on the region’s politics at Emory University in Atlanta, said the Republican Party went too far in appealing to the South, alienating voters elsewhere.
“They’ve maxed out on the South,” he said, which has “limited their appeal in the rest of the country.”

Only four years ago Republicans were talking about dominating the next generation of elections. Funny how things change.

Post Mortem

Here's a dialogue on Slate about where the Republican Party and/or the conservative movement should head following this election.

In recent years it has been very unusual for a party to suffer two significant back to back setbacks in national races. No incumbent democrat has been defeated in the U.S. Senate since 2004. That's a big deal.

What Went Wrong?

An overview of what happened to the McCain campaign.

Obama and the Youth Vote

Apparently it made the difference in the election:

Had the Democratic 18-29 vote stayed the same as 2004's already impressive percentage, Obama would have won by about 2 points, and would not have won 73 electoral votes from Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, or Indiana.

So, to clarify here: Obama's youth margin = 73 electoral votes. Without the economic crisis, this would have been the difference.

Initiatives 2008

Ballotpedia gives us a list of initiatives on the 2008 ballot across the country.

Every Vote Counts -- 2008 Edition

At the moment, Republicans hold a 75 - 74 lead over Democrats in the Texas House. 25 votes separate the two candidates in the last contested race.

The seat is HD 101 in east Dallas County.

Obama Wins

But you knew that already.

Here's the NYT's elections page with full details of the results for all national races.

Here's the Chron's elections page for all local races.

68% Turnout Expected in Texas

Of registered voters anyway.

Not on the Ballot in Texas

In case you weren't aware, here are three candidates for the president / vice president that were not on the ballot in Texas:

Green Party: Cynthia McKinney / Rosa Clemente
American Independent Party: Alan Keyes / Wiley S. Drake
Peace and Freedom Party: Ralph Nader / Matt Gonzalez