John McCain won the same percentage of the white vote as Ronald Reagan did in his landslide 1980 victory. The Republican campaign to alienate minority voters continues to pay dividends!
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2008 Election Map, Proportional To Electoral Votes (via)
Keep it up guys.
McCain won the South in November, but Obama swept the rest of the country by an even bigger margin. The same pattern holds now for House and Senate seats. Republicans may continue to win governorships in Democratic-leaning states, but in congressional and presidential elections the geographic divides are sizable.
Brownstein reeled off a list of statistics that all arrived at the same place: The South now accounts for a greater share of Republican strength than at virtually any time since the party’s founding. That base is too narrow, as even Republicans know.
Demographically, the forces at work have chipped away at what was once a GOP-leaning majority in the country. The most important is minorities’ rising share of the vote. Whites accounted for 76 percent of the overall electorate last November, down from 85 percent in 1988.
In the last election, there were more than 2 million additional African American voters, about 2 million more Hispanic voters and about a million more Asian American voters. All are groups in which Obama increased the Democratic share of the vote over 2004. Frey estimated that minority voters in nine states made the difference in Obama’s victory margin.
Considering the conservative-wide freakout over Obama’s election and the racially tinged attacks on Judge Sotomayor, the Republicans haven’t learned a thing from the last 10 years. There is always the possibility of Democratic complacency on these issues, and we saw some of that in 2004 when Kerry neglected the black vote until the very end, but somehow I think the current leader of the Democratic party will not make a similar lapse. Call it a hunch based on what he sees in front of the mirror every day.
The Republican party could again become a majority party, but the path for them would have to include being more inclusive to single women, blacks, hispanics, and gays. The issue of course is that strategy is equally likely to turn off large parts of their elderly white male base, as well as the xenophobic white males who are the elected officials on the Republican side.
I have finally found something to agree with Republicans on!
In thinking about the Republican Party’s troubles, consider this: One-third of Republicans now say they have an unfavorable opinion of their party.
There’s no such dyspepsia among Democrats. Just 4% have an unfavorable view of their party.
I decided to do some (elementary) number crunching to gauge the effect of the Fox News sponsored Tea Parties on the American consciousness.
Colin Powell
Meghan Mccain
Olympia Snowe
Susan Collins
Arlen Specter
Arnold Schwarzenegger
John McCain
Charlie Crist
Jon Huntsman
Hastings is reading some weirdo language in an amendment pushed for the hate crimes bill.
Veteran Republican Sen. Arlen Specter announced Tuesday that he is switching parties, a move would give Democrats a filibuster-proof 60 seats if Al Franken is seated in the Minnesota race.
“I have decided to run for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary,” the Pennsylvania senator said in a statement.
“I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans,” Specter said, adding that the “change in party affiliation does not mean that I will be a party-line voter any more for the Democrats that I have been for the Republicans.”
60. 60.
Couple thoughts: This is the second time in 10 years a senator has switched parties, both times from Republican to Democrat. What will labor do? Specter is against EFCA but Pat Toomey – formerly of Club for Growth – is probably even more anti-labor than Specter. Maybe they’ll sit it out.
Something happened in November of 2008 to make a change in these polls. Can anyone remind me what it is? I can’t think of it.
Apparently his work on the Clinton campaign was just the end point in a career packed tight with excrement. But he sure has made a lot of money at it (which speaks volumes about corporate and political America).
If this is real, its pretty nutty. And considering the sort of stuff the GOP talks about with a straight face nowadays (secession) its probably real as hell.
Democrat Al Franken’s lead in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race has grown to 312 votes now that hundreds of absentee ballots have been added to the counting.
A three-judge panel ruled that the rejected absentee ballots should be opened and counted after hearing weeks of testimony in a lawsuit brought by Republican Norm Coleman.
Franken led by 225 votes going into Tuesday’s count of those absentee ballots.
There is no serious Republican opposition to the President and the Democratic party. Oh, a Republican party exists, but its a clown-car sideshow, not a serious alternative. More evidence today of that from the laughable “alternative” budget they pushed out after last week’s windmill fiasco. The GOP plan calls for a Herbert Hoover style spending freeze. This was an asinine idea when John McCain pushed it last year, and it was disastrous when Herbert Hoover helped plunge America into the Great Depression.
Politics in American history has traditionally been a two party deal, with conflicting visions of how the nation ought to work hammered out. But only one party is actually serious in these troubling times. The Democrats have come to play. The GOP is irrelevant by their own actions.
ALSO: Conservative bloggers like Erick Erickson are also jokes.
Patrick Ruffini writes another one of those “the left is screwing everything up, the right can capitalize on 
this with our silly nonsensical slogans and policy proposals” blog entries and winds up:
The right will be galvanized to action by the theft of the free enterprise system. What will the left be galvanized by?
Me: A competent and consistent well working government in the tradition of the American people.
One of the only reasons George W. Bush won the electoral college in 2000 (while losing the popular vote) was that the Democrat in office had done such a good job the American people figured that there was a limited amount of harm a conservative Republican president could do – we had surpluses for Christ’s sake – and even under those circumstances the Republican had to run as a “compassionate conservative” and not the fringe sort of Palin/Limbaugh conservative that the Republican base now thinks is a normal person. Seriously, how could you not look at the Republican leadership and prominent Republicans like Jindal, Palin, etc. and not laugh your ass off?
The Republican party is now in “crazy base world” and has no way out for the near term. Even if they knock off a few Dems in conservative districts next year, they’re likely to react to McCain’s loss by picking a diehard “savior” who’s likely to have the same sort of electoral luck when the Republicans tried that strategy in 1964 and when the Democrats tried the liberal version in 1972 and 1984.
Should that happen, 2016 is less likely to be 1968 or 1980 as they so badly want, but rather, its likely to be a 1940.
In the middle of all the auto industry news on Monday, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm was everywhere in the media. Sadly, most of what the Democrat said was nonsense. Gov. Granholm repeatedly praised outgoing GM CEO Rick Wagoner. Even worse, Gov Granholm assured us that the American auto industry was in the middle of a dramatic retooling for the new millenium.
It’s fine and dandy for the governor to cheer for the home team, but she shouldn’t do so at the expense of reality. The American auto industry has spent the last few decades fat, dumb, and happy. They allowed the Japanese to get ahead of them in the game, not due to some nefarious plot from the UAW but due to their own idiotic inertia.
The U.S. auto industry has felt it would have a license to print money with SUVs and the like, without a care in the world for the fuel efficiency and quality of their product. Their day of reckoning is here. GM and its ilk failed to go into the 21st century, and despite Gov. Granholm’s silliness, it will probably not survive in anything resembling the same form.
The NY-20 seat was supposed to be an easy, socially conservative pickup for the GOP. Now the President has endorsed Democrat Patrick Scott Murphy and put his campaign muscle behind him and Murphy’s now up in the polls.
A right-winger in academia, law professor Glenn Reynolds, links to a study about professors in college being overwhelmingly liberal. So what, I wonder. Conservatives act as if there’s a secret program to exclude conservatives from academic jobs. But there isn’t. It’s just most of the people who choose to go into that line of work are liberals. My guess is in the world of finance you’d find more conservatives than liberals, and not by any vast conspiracy. Then again, they’re probably not into tooting that horn so loudly right now.
This is not about the politics. David Limbaugh has written a column about Rush Limbaugh and it hits all the usual boilerplate junk about the right’s view of liberalism, but nowhere in the column does David Limbaugh acknowledge that he’s writing about his brother. He’s certainly not embarrassed by the affiliation (that’s the only reason he’s at the level in the con ecosphere he is) and he’s firmly on the far right, but he doesn’t once make the connection.
It’s just kind of weird.
(Link found via Glenn Reynolds, who seems to now be a Rush defender – a far cry from a few years ago when Reynolds made himself out to be some sort of independent libertarian – though some of us knew this a long time ago)
Pat Toomey is thinking of challenging Arlen Specter again. There might be enough conservative base rage to get it done, but a moderate-seeming incumbent like Specter is the GOP’s best chance to hold on to that seat, so… go Toomey!
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