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Does 2004 election mean new era of GOP control?

By John F. Harris
The Washington Post

STEVE DESLICH / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS President Bush is joined by members of Vice President Cheney's family, Vice President Cheney, first lady Laura Bush and his daughters Jenna and Barbara as he delivers his victory speech in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 3 after his re-election.

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As some partisan operatives and political scientists see it, Bush's re-election victory and simultaneous Republican gains in the House and Senate suggest that an era of divided government and rough parity between the major parties is giving way to an era of GOP dominance.

By this light, the Republican advantage on the most important issues of the day — the fight against terrorism most of all — and the party's uncontested control of the federal government leave it in a position to win long-term loyalty among key voter blocs and craft an enduring majority.

If so, 2004 would qualify as what academics call a "realignment election."

Among a core of political analysts, nearly every presidential victory is scrutinized for evidence of an incipient realignment: a shift in voter allegiances from one party to the other in ways that can shape politics far into the future.

Most predictions of realignments over the years have proved premature, and there are plenty of skeptics this time. These people argue that Bush's relatively narrow victory and the Republican victories in Congress should be taken at face value — a close election in a time of war that broke in favor of the incumbent party — and nothing more.

But if Republicans have indeed seized the upper hand in national politics in a fundamental way, the implication for Democrats is that radical changes in their electoral strategies, and even issue positions, are needed to become competitive again.

	AP Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager and incoming Republican Party chairman, pursued a strategy that put an emphasis on expanding the president's political base.

"Swing voters" vs. base

The post-election realignment debate is in some ways an echo of the debate among political analysts during the campaign about whether independent-minded "swing voters" still hold the key to electoral success, or whether politics has entered a new phase that places a greater premium on "the base" — building party loyalty and ensuring that these activists vote in higher percentages than the opposition loyalists.

Bush's campaign, run by Ken Mehlman, who Bush tapped after the election to be the next chairman of the Republican National Committee, pursued a strategy that put an emphasis on expanding the base, and it paid off.

This election was the first in which exit polls showed equal numbers of self-identified Republicans and Democrats — both at 37 percent — erasing what had been a decades-long edge for Democrats, 4 percent in 2000.

In addition to the House and Senate gains, Bush received a higher raw vote total than any candidate in history (Sen. John Kerry's total was second-highest) and was the first presidential candidate to break the 50 percent barrier since 1988. On a percentage basis, he improved his 2000 performance in 45 states, Bush strategist Matthew Dowd wrote in a post-election analysis.

Most significantly, in the view of people who suspect realignment, exit polls showed Bush cutting into Democratic advantages with some historically Democratic groups — especially Hispanics, who gave Bush 44 percent of their votes compared with 35 percent in 2000.

On the other hand, Kerry was able to stay competitive by increasing Democratic voter turnout. And exit polls showed that self-identified independents favored the Democrat — by dramatic margins in some of the most important battleground states. In Florida and Ohio, for instance, Kerry won independents by 18 points and 19 points, respectively.

Among political scholars, there is an entire academic subspecialty to the argument about realignments. The concept developed to describe long-term shifts, like the labor-driven, urban-dominated coalition that Franklin Roosevelt assembled during the New Deal, and helped Democrats dominate national politics for several decades.

More recently, the migration of Southern states from solidly Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican in presidential and most congressional elections is an oft-cited example of realignment.

A pre-eminent scholar of realignment is Walter Dean Burnham at the University of Texas at Austin, author 33 years ago of "Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics." He told the Weekly Standard magazine that long-term trends favoring Republicans among culturally conservative and hawkish voters came to full flower in 2004 and predicted, "if Republicans keep playing the religious card along with the terrorism card, this could last a long time."

Eight won, seven lost

On the other hand, Yale political scientist David Mayhew two years ago wrote a book calling the entire notion of realignments a fiction, at least at the presidential level. In the 15 presidential elections since World War II, he noted, the incumbent party has kept power eight times, and lost it seven times.

But some Democrats said it would be complacent for their party to simply wait on better candidates or better luck. "Republicans are going to do everything they can to maximize their current position of ascendancy, and they have a lot of levers with which to do that," said Howard Wolfson, a former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The GOP aim, Wolfson said, appears to be to use programs to build new constituencies. Social Security is an example. The program helped create generations of voters loyal to Democrats. Bush's plans to transform Social Security with individual investment accounts may weaken the program overall, Wolfson said, but may attract a generation of younger and more affluent voters to the GOP.

Mark Gersh, a leading elections analyst with the Democratic-supporting National Committee for an Effective Congress, said he does not believe a realignment has occurred, but does fear that the results highlight some serious structural problems for Democrats.

In addition to the higher number of Republican-leaning states, the Democrats are getting trounced in the outer suburbs. While these areas still produce relatively few votes, they are the fastest-growing areas of the country. A Los Angeles Times analysis found Bush won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties.

"If the Democrats don't do well" in places and with groups "that are growing faster than others," said Gersh, "they are going to be in trouble."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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