Posted on 01/18/2004 7:35:06 PM PST by Texas_Dawg
It's the latest political cliche: this is a divided country. Or this is a polarized country. Or this, if you prefer, is a nation that has been split since the 2000 election between the heartland "red states" that supported George W. Bush and the Northeast and western "blues" (map, below) that went for Al Gore. Ipso facto, 2004 is going to be a really close election.
But wait. While the political cognoscenti have been frantically trying to handicap the Democrats--first in Iowa, and now busily recalibrating their prognostications for the New Hampshire primary--something quantifiable has actually been happening among voters. They're divided all right, but while Democrats have been openly attacking one another, Republicans have been making steady subterranean progress on Democratic turf--in statehouses, on the issues, among swing voters--all while solidifying their party. Combine that with the GOP's dominance in Congress and the national split starts teetering--toward Republicans. "Yes, the country is evenly divided," presidential pollster Matthew Dowd told me. "But there's a possession arrow in our direction."
How so? An extensive Gallup survey shows that 45.2 percent of voters lean toward the Democrats and 45.5 percent lean toward the Republicans. But the numbers don't tell the whole story. First, there's the extraordinary unity among Republicans when it comes to George W. Bush: They don't just like him; they love him. By some accounts, more than 90 percent of Republicans approve of the way President Bush is doing his job. When Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996, his approval rating among Democrats was 79 percent.
Yet the GOP advantage is more subtle. It's about cultivating the undecided. Republicans, by and large, agree with Bush on Iraq, fighting terrorism, and tax cuts. But recent GOP efforts to woo seniors with a prescription drug plan and Latinos with an immigration plan are truly base broadening. The Democrats, meanwhile, are deeply divided. According to a CBS News survey, a majority opposed the Iraq war, but 43 percent supported it. They're also split about the civil liberties issues involved in fighting the war against terror. With the Democratic presidential hopefuls spending so much time fighting over whether to repeal all or some of President Bush's tax cuts, is it any wonder their voters are divided on that, too?
Substantial inroads. All of which leads to the question: Are Republicans poaching on the Democratic base? Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman notes that the GOP has registered 500,000 more Republicans since the last election. Bush pollster Dowd argues that Republicans have made substantial inroads with Latinos and with white union voters who were once Democrats. Even Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg--who has a new book out called The Two Americas--admits that Democrats have lost their southern stronghold. But the fight isn't over. Who wins in a country evenly divided between married and unmarried voters (who vote differently)? Who wins in a country where a quarter of the voting population is minority? It's a new world out there, with one slight GOP advantage: While the Republicans are challenging the Democrats for their base, the Democrats have had no such success with Republicans. Married white men, evangelicals, and the wealthy are still happily Republican. "We are competing for their base," says Dowd, "but they're not competing for ours."
So it's no surprise that the Republicans are making some headway in Al Gore's blue states. When Newt Gingrich took over the House in 1994, he bragged about an imminent national Republican realignment. Didn't happen. Now Republicans are whispering about what a key strategist calls a "rolling alignment." The evidence: In 1992, 59 percent of state legislators were Democrats. Today, it's 49 percent. "The red states are getting redder," Mehlman is fond of saying, "and the blue states are turning purple." And what about Congress? No one is predicting a Democratic takeover anytime soon. "The Democrats' best hope is for divided government," Dowd says. "We'd like a unified one."
They're working on it.
The rout I do not doubt. Some policies executed on the way are troublesome.
Bidding for the center with liberal policy may make a larger party, but the right wing on which I sit will crumble from underneath. Y'all can have your liberal Republican Party. I'll find other vehicles for conservatism.
(BTW - If you wish to attack, please justify the $2,000,000,000,000.00 Medicare Drug Entitlement for Rich People. Otherwise, I'm ignoring you.)
You win those people to the GOP forcing the Dems to come further to the middle/right to get them back... the whole spectrum shifts to the right. This has been happening for a couple decades now since Reagan. Spending has gone up (so has the GDP) but taxes have gone down, business restrictions down, concealed carry gun laws spreading everywhere, abortion attitudes have shifted greatly to the right, etc, etc. The GOP is winning by being smart with the field they have been dealt. Being radical isolationists does nothing for anyone.
A move to take away a Democratic issue that will win voters to the GOP and ensure all the other conservative issues they support. Let me ask you... are you going to be paying more money this year from your paycheck for this hike? Or are you paying the federal government increasingly less money under GWB? If you are paying less, why do you care?
The Repubs now control the "farmk teams" of politics. The legislatures are the breading grounds for future state and federal officials. This is very good news.
Congressman Billybob
Can't be 90%. According to some disgruntled posters Bush has lost his conservative base over the immigration proposal.
Funny how you can lose a "base" that never voted for you in the first place.
LOL! Ain't that the truth.
You know I heard Gloria Borger saying the exact opposite of what her article here is saying just 2 weeks ago on Matthews' show. I wonder what made her suddenly realize that Republicans won congress and a majority of state and local seats for the past decade?
Dang! This is BIG! Think about how the constant barrage of propaganda from the NPR, NYT, and ABCNNBCBS has been unable to persuade even half the voters.
It doesn't stop there. We got the fringe loonies that are still trying to say the nation's doomed by immigration, foreign trade, and entitlement spending. Once again, MOST people know that the recovery was not jobless-- and that even if it were, our first priority is safeguarding the population from violent attack
I for one am elated to see that most people are able to ignore the loonies, and that's not easy considering how loud the loonies can be.
She is and remains an ignorant liberal. Is that redundant?
What I can do is change where my money goes. No party organization will get my campaign contributions until they repeal Drug Prescription Entitlement. I actually expect they will, around 2014 when it is clearly too expensive and seniors don't like it. In the mean time, Club For Growth is the only really fiscally conservative organization who isn't trying to spend my money like a drunken sailor.
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