Are the Democrats becoming a regional party?
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<p>UPDATE: My prediction about the county-by-county numbers proved correct,<br />
according to USA Today&#8217;s<br />
<a href='http://images.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/elections2004/_images/2004countymap3.gif'>map</a>.</p>
