Last week I clicked over to Salon, where I read Sydney Blumenthal's op-ed piece on the election results. It was a singularly convincing take on the results, with a lot of numbers to back up what he was saying, that the country is trending blue, and yet I haven't seen anyone so much as peep about it. So I thought I'd peep. The first paragraph read to me, admittedly, like my own sense of reality, so I was suspicious of myself for liking it, and yet I thought I'd put this out there and ask, Did you read this? Does this reflect your own sense of what's going on? Is there perhaps more cause for hope, for real change, than we thought?
Nov. 30, 2006 | The midterm elections of 2006 may be among the most momentous in two generations -- if their trends carry through the 2008 presidential election and beyond. These changes include a Democratic Congress that reflects a more politically cohesive national majority than any previous one; shifts of crucial constituencies that may represent a decisive repudiation of the Republican Party in its current incarnation; and the emergence of a younger generation that is overwhelmingly Democratic. In retrospect, it is conceivable that the 2006 results will be revealed to be just one movement of a rapidly swinging pendulum whose internal mechanism is a fickle electorate of no discernible loyalties or commitments but propelled by constant and uncontrollable moods of discontent. Or it may be that the long conservative ascendancy has merely encountered a slight stumbling block that will soon be overcome once the difficulties associated with Iraq are neatly squared away. Or it may be that the Democrats are as incorrigibly self-destructive as they were when the Republican era began. Or it may that the newly elected Democrats are really conservative Republicans operating under another party label. But these possibilities are not foretold by the 2006 results.
At this point, I thought, yeah. I think this way. But tell me something that might convince someone who doesn't yet think this way. And then he did, his third paragraph down.
The numbers are both conclusive and suggestive. Exit polls showed that the Democrats won the popular vote by 52 to 46 percent. Given that Bush won the popular vote by 3 points in 2004, this was a reversal of not 6 but 9 points. An analysis of the actual popular vote for the Senate, however, reveals an even greater Democratic margin of 55 to 42.4 percent. That number also coincidentally corresponds to the margin by which Democrats won women, the greatest margin since 1988. Yet Democrats won independents by an even bigger margin, 18 points, the greatest spread in House races in 25 years. The profile of independents on issue after issue now mostly resembles the profile of Democrats.
One of the largest shifts appeared among Hispanics, the group that Rove targeted most intensively for six years. In 2006, Hispanics went for the Democrats 69 to 30 percent, a 10-point increase in the spread from two years ago. Unpopular as Bush may be today, he has been the most accessible Republican to Hispanics ever, a Spanish speaker from a state with a large Hispanic population. Next time, in 2008, the Republicans do not have a potential candidate who can remotely approach Bush's appeal.
Democrats' gains among Hispanics paralleled and overlapped their gains among Roman Catholics, whom they carried by 55 percent, a 10-point increase over 2004, when Bush defeated liberal Catholic Sen. John Kerry in a campaign that enlisted conservative Catholic bishops as allies. Winning back Catholics was a feat exceeded by the gains among white Protestants, where Democrats captured 47 percent, a 14-point increase over 2004 and their greatest share since Bill Clinton won in 1992, achieving nearly a draw with Republicans. But the composition of the white Protestant vote this time is different. Clinton, a Southern Baptist, won a sizable percentage of evangelicals, though not a majority, in 1992 and 31 percent in 1996. The white Protestant vote that went Democratic in 2006 was largely mainline non-evangelical Protestant, previously aligned as traditional Republican. White Protestants' break with the GOP came in great part as a recoil from the overbearing evangelical influence.
The rest of the article is over on Salon, here.