Shocking, I know, but it appears that Barack Obama is not dividing the Democratic Party:
Barack Obama has done poorly in the Democratic primaries with women, Catholics and others who will be pivotal in this fall's presidential election. Yet early polling shows that with several of these groups, he's competitive when matched against Republican John McCain.
A look at voters who have been closely contested in recent presidential elections -- or veered from one party to the other, making them true swing groups -- shows a significant number have leaned toward Obama's rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the primaries. Besides women and Catholics, these include the elderly, the less educated and suburbanites, leading Clinton to argue that this makes her the Democrats' stronger candidate for the fall campaign.
Yet Obama's performance with these voters in the primaries doesn't necessarily mean he'd do poorly with them in the general election, assuming he nails down the last few convention delegates he needs to win the nomination.
Polls this month show the Illinois senator leading McCain among women, running even with him among Catholics and suburbanites and trailing him with people over age 65. Results vary by poll for those without college degrees. And though Obama trails decisively with a group that has shunned him against Clinton—whites who have not completed college—he's doing about the same with them as the past two Democratic presidential candidates.
That last bit, comparing Obama to Al Gore and John Kerry, caused Matt Yglesias to remark, "Gore and Kerry both lost narrowly, but they lost. On the other hand, though they both lost, they lost narrowly." Of course in the case of Gore, there's an enormous asterisk that needs to be attached to his loss, but I think the electoral maps of 2000 and 2004 reflect pretty accurately the state of each party's strength state-by-state in 2008. It is, in other words, a good baseline, and deviations from that baseline are wholly dependent on both large externalities and trends -- the GOP's decline, an unpopular war, a sour economy, a general bad mood in the country, etc. -- as well as the personality of the candidates and how they sell themselves to the public.
The latter factor could prove decisive. And in fact, the sheer pageantry of the presidential contest drowns out the bigger story of the Democratic electoral realignment, something Josh Marshall commented on over the weekend. He notes that Judis and Teixeira's The Emerging Democratic Majority is eerily prescient, and wonders whether what Democrats faced in the 2002 and 2004 elections wasn't merely the last gasp of conservative Republican dominance, just as the Democrats briefly capitalized on the fall of Nixon in the 1970s -- even as the country stood on the precipice of a conservative electoral realignment in 1980.
I think Marshall is on to something, and the numbers would seem to bear this out. The 2002 midterm elections were saturated with blood from 9/11 and the GOP exploited that national wound with little remorse. But looking at it in hindsight, all you see is a Senate that flipped from a 51-49 Democratic majority to a 51-49 Republican majority. In the House, the GOP expanded their majority by just eight seats. 2004 seems more realigning, with the GOP picking up four seats in the Senate. But virtually all of them were in the deep south, nothing more than the final purge of the old Southern Democrats from the Democratic party (including retirements). In the House, the GOP gained only 3 seats. The point of all this was that the GOP in the 21st century meagerly built upon their 1994 takeover of the House, narrowly held the presidency, while the Senate slowly realigned so its members were ideologically in sync with their states.
By contrast, 2006 saw Democrats pick up five Senate seats, and 31 in the House, reversing all GOP gains made over the previous decade. And for 2008, it's hardly irresponsible to predict a five seat gain in the Senate, and as many as twenty in the House. That's a realignment. But the presidential contests of 2000, 2004 and 2008 overshadowed this reality, briefly creating the illusion of long-term Republican dominance when really it was their apogee before the fall.
--Mori Dinauer
