What's most dispiriting about last night's loss (I am assuming here that John Kerry will lose Ohio, though I'd dearly love to be proven wrong) is that the Democrats did a lot of things right in this year's campaign. They nominated the strongest candidate in their primary field. They waged the smartest, best funded, and most effective ground campaign in their history. They were more unified than they've been since Lyndon Johnson's 1964 run against Barry Goldwater. And they got their clock cleaned.
The results bear an almost spooky resemblance to those of 2000 – as if the Iraqi War had never happened, as if George W. Bush wasn't the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose jobs on his watch, as if American had actually maintained its place in the family of nations. Instead, on Tuesday, we simply retook the cultural census of 2000, with the result that George W. Bush's one Northeastern state of that year (New Hampshire) moved into Kerry's column and, possibly, that Al Gore's two weakest 2000 states (New Mexico and Iowa) moved into Bush's. Only, the red states were redder this time than before.
The Democrats' America looks increasingly like a discontinuous ghetto – the Northeast, the Pacific Coast, the industrial and upper Midwest, minus (it seems) Ohio. These states are home to the interesting, and promising, demographic changes in the U.S. They are the focus of much Latino immigration, and it's to these states that college-educated young professionals tend to move. Unfortunately, though these developments may make blue states bluer but they also make red states redder. Ohio is a state where Latinos constitute under 4 percent of the population (the national figure is 13 percent), and it has a disproportionately large, and increasingly deunionized, white working class. The economy of this de-industrializing state may move Ohio leftward, but the demographics of this culturally conservative state push it rightward.
Back in the primary season, some Republicans argued that the strongest Democratic challenger would be Dick Gephardt – the one Democrat in the field who'd be hardest to culturally mau-mau. (They would, of course, have pilloried him as a Washington hack.) But for most Democrats, Gephardt had played a particularly reprehensible role in cutting a deal with Bush to support the war and had all the excitement of ossifying oatmeal.
But if elections are reduced to a cultural census, it's clear that for a while at least, the provincials will beat the cosmopolitans. That may argue for a Democrat, like Gephardt, who looks plausible saying Grace. But it also argues for a Democrat who can wage an economically populist campaign more adeptly than Kerry.
America has gone through periods where cultural issues have dominated presidential elections, as they did during the 1920s, when a largely Protestant America rejected the candidacies of Catholic Democrat Al Smith. It has gone through periods where economic polarities were the ones that mattered, as they did in the ‘30s with the advent of the Great Depression. George W. Bush has now waged two successful campaigns in which he culturally polarized the nation to his advantage. Democrats must find a way to do a little better on this polarized terrain, while working simultaneously to alter it fundamentally. Neither task will be at all easy, but they're what the Democrats need to do.
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
