Free Republic

--snip-- President Bush's broad re-election victory and Republican gains across the country reflect the fact that through a structural realignment, the GOP has now become the majority party in the country. Noted political scientist Walter Dean Burnham, the nation's leading theorist on realignment, says the 2004 election "consolidates" what began in 1994 when Republicans shattered the 40-year Democratic grip on Congress and statehouses. Since then, the GOP has held its gains, adding to them in 2002 and 2004. --snip-- Republicans are also riding the crest of a "big tent" movement that threatens to leave an increasingly ossified Democratic Party behind....

No one watched the election returns Nov. 7 with more mixed emotions than Jim Hartman of Berkeley. That's because he was watching the race within the race: the one for control over the future of the Republican Party. Hartman is the former chairman of the Alameda County Republican Central Committee, as well as former vice chairman of the state party. For the past few years he's been locked in a power struggle with the party's right wing. It all started in the aftermath of Pat Robertson's unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988. His followers took over the...

Rep. Barbara Lee's Republican challenger this year is an online CEO, an energetic campaigner -- and also the daughter of the Nicaraguan Contras' late military commander, a heritage that has some East Bay liberals and human rights activists howling. Claudia Bermudez, 50, of Oakland, said she'll confront Lee on issues from homeland security to education. "I'm a businesswoman, I live here in the district -- I don't come as a Contra leader to come and overtake Berkeley." But she touts her father's legacy on her campaign Web site, saying she's "proud to carry on a tradition of political activism that...