Overview:
Last week's most successful win for the Republican Party in modern political history is only barely tainted by the Democrats' refusal to give in. This is an unmitigated disaster for Democrats.
1) President George W. Bush racked up the largest vote total of any politician in the history of the world, earning 10% more votes than even Ronald Reagan's 54-million votes in 1984.
2) Republicans not only held the presidency in a time of war and economic turmoil, but they built on their Senate and House majorities and scored a net gain in Governorships. This is the first time the U.S. has reelected a Republican White House, House and Senate in the same year in over a century.
3) This confirms that the country is a conservative country and trusts Bush to finish the job he started in Iraq.
4) Sen. John Kerry (D.-Mass.) never added any positive energy to the intense anti-Bush energy on the left. Without a compelling candidate, the loud left-unable to hear the pulse of the country beyond its own fever swamps-lost out to the silent majority.
5) Republicans also scored a national victory with the defeat of Sen. Tom Daschle (D.-S.D.), the only incumbent senator to lose on Tuesday and the first Senate Minority leader ousted since 1952. This is a sharp rebuke to the Democratic Party's behavior as the minority.
6) With three consecutive losing elections, the Democrats are aimless. Going nowhere under the leadership of John Kerry, just as they did under Daschle, Al Gore, and Dick Gephardt, Democrats are left longing for a return to the days of Bill Clinton (D.), the last winner the party has had.
7) This election slowly advances the steady realignment of the nation along cultural grounds. This means wealthy cultural liberals joining the Democrats and working class conservatives hopping on the GOP wagon.
Social Issues:
The Republican sweep of 2004, like the gains in 2002, is based on the party's outreach to cultural conservatives of all social classes. This was the No. 1 issue cited by Bush supporters in exit polls.
1) Across the upper-Midwest, Bush hit the issues of abortion and homosexual marriage hard. He talked them up in his stump speeches, and his Catholic outreach programs littered church parking lots with leaflets on these topics. Bush's wins in Iowa and Ohio came thanks to these issues. In Ohio, Bush's relatively narrow victory was almost certainly made possible by the gay marriage ban on the ballot.
2) In fact, Bush's 10-million vote increase from 2000 is due to an increasingly motivated base. This base was driven by these social issues, brought to the fore by fierce battles over the court, and judicial advancement of homosexual marriage.
3) Early numbers suggest Republicans did a fair, but not stellar, job of winning over conservative Democrats outside of the South (where they had already started voting Republican). This will be the next front of the overarching political realignment, and it will move Catholic voters and the upper-Midwest into the GOP column.
4) By contrast, Kerry's attempt to discuss "values" and his faith was unconvincing and phony. His former career as an altar boy, for example, never cut it with Midwestern Catholics as an excuse for supporting partial-birth abortion. His rhetoric in the debates on how he would not allow his beliefs to affect his judgment was often undecipherable, ranging on the absurd.
5) The counterpart to the GOP pickup of cultural conservatives has been the drift of suburban, upper-middle class voters to the Democratic Party. This manifested itself in the involuntary retirement of Rep. Phil Crane (R-Ill.), the senior Republican in the House. The political makeup of Crane's suburban Chicago district simply shifted under his feet. His loss to pro-choice Melissa Bean (D.), who attacked him for being behind the times, was emblematic of this realignment. Also, State Sen. Allyson Schwartz (D.-Penn.), a favorite of pro-choice EMILY'S List, easily knocked off 2002 loser Melissa Brown (R.) in suburban Philadelphia.
6) All eleven ballot initiatives to bar homosexual marriage passed, most by overwhelming margins.
