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TODAY IN TAP ONLINE. With the meeting-of-the-lefty-minds that's going on this week at Take Back America, we thought it was an appropriate time to highlight the cover story from our July/August issue, in which John Judis and Ruy Teixeira take stock of their "emerging Democratic majority" theory as it applies to the 2006 election -- and the '08 race.
Seeing 2006 as an anomaly, political analyst Michael Barone argued that population growth patterns favor Republican-leaning areas in the interior of the country rather than Democratic-leaning areas on the coasts.We take a different view: that this election signals the end of a fleeting Republican revival, prompted by the Bush administration's response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the return to political and demographic trends that were leading to a Democratic and center-left majority in the United States. In 2006 the turn to the Democrats went well beyond those offices directly concerned with the war in Iraq or affected by congressional scandals. While Democrats picked up 30 House seats and six Senate seats, they also won six governorships, netted 321 state legislative seats, and recaptured legislative chambers in eight states. That's the kind of sweep that Republicans enjoyed in 1994, which led to Republican control of Congress and of the nation's statehouses for the remainder of the decade.Read the whole thing here. (Elsewhere in our new issue, for subscribers only, we've got pieces by Robert Borosage on how conservatism failed Bush and pollster Stan Greenberg on what Democrats will face if they succeed in retaking the White House.)Also on the site today, Kay Steiger notes that, in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision gutting employers' right to sue for pay discrimination, Congress needs to step up and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. Plus, Scott Lemieux debunks the myth that pro-gay-rights decisions in the courts have produced a serious backlash.--The Editors
