A Real Realignment: The "Emerging Republican Minority"

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: A Real Realignment
By Harold Meyerson
Friday, November 7, 2008; Page A19

....When Ronald Reagan won the presidency, his electoral college majorities were anchored by the three major Sunbelt states -- California, Florida and Texas. On Tuesday, the Democrats, bolstered in large part by the Latino vote, captured two out of three, and one could imagine even Texas -- where 63 percent of Latinos backed Obama -- moving into the Democratic column after several more elections.

The Latino surge is just one element of the Democratic realignment. Six years ago, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued in their book "The Emerging Democratic Majority" that the political transformation of professionals -- among the most Republican of voting blocs during the Eisenhower era, and today among the most Democratic -- was a decisive factor in pushing the nation toward the Democratic Party, as was the steady Democratic drift of female voters. In an article published on the New Republic's Web site Wednesday, Judis noted that Obama carried all of the 19 states with the highest percentage of voters who have an advanced degree. Obama's strength in such Southern states as Virginia and North Carolina is partly the result of increased African American turnout, but it is also a consequence of the large numbers of highly educated professionals who've moved to those states over the past two decades.

The final element of this realignment is the shift in public sentiment toward governmental activism -- a shift in good measure occasioned by our long-term economic decline and short-term economic collapse. Tuesday's exit polls showed that 51 percent of Americans believed government "should do more" than it is -- a reversal of the Reagan-era majorities that believed government should do less. (Latinos are the demographic group most supportive of an activist government.)

Republicans stumble from Tuesday's contest, then, in worse shape than they've been in decades. They suffered major House losses in the Northeast, losing multiple seats in New York, as well as one apiece in Pennsylvania and Connecticut (their last seat in New England). Next year, they will hold just three of the 51 House seats in all of New England and New York. Their strongholds are increasingly confined to the Plains and those Southern and Mountain West states where rural areas predominate.

Indeed, eight years after Karl Rove stormed into Washington proclaiming that he would create a 21st-century version of the Republican realignment that emerged from William McKinley's victory over William Jennings Bryan in 1896, today's emerging Republican minority looks confined to Bryan's base in America's rural backwaters. The future in American politics belongs to the party that can win a more racially diverse, better educated, more metropolitan electorate. It belongs to Barack Obama's Democrats.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/06/AR2008110602571.html?nav=most_emailed

[MidwestTransplant]

1. Emerging? Seems like it emerged.

[movonne]

2. Very good article...

[jacksonian]

3. Bush Sr. used to copy all of his political speechmaking

from William Jennings Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech - "Now, others would say..., but I say..." etc.

Looks like the rethugs took the elder Bush's channeling Bryan literally.