{"id":163,"date":"2004-11-03T16:27:22","date_gmt":"2004-11-03T21:27:22","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=163"},"modified":"2010-07-18T22:01:29","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T03:01:29","slug":"are-the-democrats-becoming-a-regional-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=163","title":{"rendered":"Are the Democrats becoming a regional party?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The 2004 elections are over.  Bush won, of course, but I want to focus on an interesting question raised by the red-state\/blue-state map of the outcome. It looks suspiciously as though the Democrats are  on their way to becoming a regional party.<\/p>\n<p>Specifically, a regional party of the urban Northeast and the West Coast metroplexes.  The state-by-state voting patterns since 1980, and especially in 2000 and 2004, point clearly in this direction.  The Democrats have lost the South, and they&#8217;re losing their grip on the Upper Midwest &mdash; Daschle&#8217;s loss to Thune and the size of Bush&#8217;s margin in Ohio are leading indicators.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve written a couple of previous blog essays on the hole the Democrats are in.  They have serious problems.  Ronald Reagan peeled away the (private-sector) union vote after 1980; today they&#8217;re losing the blacks over gay marriage and the Jews over Israel and the Terror War.  Their voter base is increasingly limited to public-employee unions and brie-nibbling urban elites &mdash; they&#8217;re no longer the party of the common man but of the DMV, Hollywood and the Upper West Side.<\/p>\n<p>The state-level election results reinforce this picture, and I predict that county-by-county numbers will make it even more obvious, especially when correlated with SES.  Add to this a serious structural problem, which is that their street-level cadres are largely drawn from a hard-left contingent that wants to pull their platform even further away from anything most Americans will vote for.<\/p>\n<p>This was very clear here in Malvern; even in this staid suburb the Democratic pollwatchers looked like Central Casting&#8217;s idea of a fringy radical, bushy-haired and besweatered and festooned with paranoid slogan buttons.  The DNC used to rely on unions to supply troops at campaign time; they can&#8217;t any more, so they have to lean on organizations like MoveOn.org and Democratic Underground.<\/p>\n<p>Even this they could survive if the mainstream media retained the ability to deliver the 15% swing for Democrats that Evan Thomas of Newsweek boasted of a few months back.  But the all-too-blatant partisanship of CBS and the New York Times actually backfired this time, most obviously when the bloggers caught Dan Rather trumping up an anti-Bush story on obviously-fake documents.  I think Instapundit is on to something when he says the longest-term result of this election will be the collapse of mainstream-media credibility.  With that will go one of the most effective weapons the Democrats have.<\/p>\n<p>A serious rethink of the Democratic platform is in order.  The smartest single move they could make is to try to peel off the single largest bloc of Republican-leaning voters &mdash; gun owners like me. Bill Clinton has pointed out that alienating the 50% of American households which own guns lost the Democrats the 1994 elections and has cost them critical swing votes in every national election since.<\/p>\n<p>The sane thing for the Democrats to do would be to go unreservedly pro-Second-Amendment.  Alas, I do not think they are a sane party any more.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: My prediction about the county-by-county numbers proved correct,<br \/>\naccording to USA Today&#8217;s<br \/>\n<a href='http:\/\/images.usatoday.com\/news\/politicselections\/elections2004\/_images\/2004countymap3.gif'>map<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 2004 elections are over. Bush won, of course, but I want to focus on an interesting question raised by the red-state\/blue-state map of the outcome. It looks suspiciously as though the Democrats are on their way to becoming a regional party. Specifically, a regional party of the urban Northeast and the West Coast metroplexes.&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=163\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Are the Democrats becoming a regional party?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2290,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions\/2290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}