Generation Dem

Beyond the failure of Karl Rove, the momentous 2006 elections signaled the emergence of a younger, bluer America that could reshape politics for years to come.

By Sidney Blumenthal


Nov. 30, 2006 | The midterm elections of 2006 may be among the most momentous in two generations -- if their trends carry through the 2008 presidential election and beyond. These changes include a Democratic Congress that reflects a more politically cohesive national majority than any previous one; shifts of crucial constituencies that may represent a decisive repudiation of the Republican Party in its current incarnation; and the emergence of a younger generation that is overwhelmingly Democratic. In retrospect, it is conceivable that the 2006 results will be revealed to be just one movement of a rapidly swinging pendulum whose internal mechanism is a fickle electorate of no discernible loyalties or commitments but propelled by constant and uncontrollable moods of discontent. Or it may be that the long conservative ascendancy has merely encountered a slight stumbling block that will soon be overcome once the difficulties associated with Iraq are neatly squared away. Or it may be that the Democrats are as incorrigibly self-destructive as they were when the Republican era began. Or it may that the newly elected Democrats are really conservative Republicans operating under another party label. But these possibilities are not foretold by the 2006 results.

As in elections past, President Bush's chief strategist, Karl Rove, predicted that his fabled 72-hour get-out-the-vote mobilization would churn the Republicans to victory. In the end, he was not proved wrong that this effort managed to produce a large Republican turnout at the polls, as big as in the midterm elections of 2002, when the Republicans made stunning gains. White evangelicals, who constitute 35 percent of all Republican voters, massed for Republican candidates at levels close to those in 2004 -- this year's 72 percent was just 3 points off the prior 75 percent. Once again, evangelicals, by a share of 59 percent, insisted that social issues such as gay marriage were "extremely important." Rove's problem was that only 29 percent of other voters shared that view and that the other side turned out in greater numbers. What he did was his unmaking.

The numbers are both conclusive and suggestive. Exit polls showed that the Democrats won the popular vote by 52 to 46 percent. Given that Bush won the popular vote by 3 points in 2004, this was a reversal of not 6 but 9 points. An analysis of the actual popular vote for the Senate, however, reveals an even greater Democratic margin of 55 to 42.4 percent. That number also coincidentally corresponds to the margin by which Democrats won women, the greatest margin since 1988. Yet Democrats won independents by an even bigger margin, 18 points, the greatest spread in House races in 25 years. The profile of independents on issue after issue now mostly resembles the profile of Democrats.

One of the largest shifts appeared among Hispanics, the group that Rove targeted most intensively for six years. In 2006, Hispanics went for the Democrats 69 to 30 percent, a 10-point increase in the spread from two years ago. Unpopular as Bush may be today, he has been the most accessible Republican to Hispanics ever, a Spanish speaker from a state with a large Hispanic population. Next time, in 2008, the Republicans do not have a potential candidate who can remotely approach Bush's appeal.

Democrats' gains among Hispanics paralleled and overlapped their gains among Roman Catholics, whom they carried by 55 percent, a 10-point increase over 2004, when Bush defeated liberal Catholic Sen. John Kerry in a campaign that enlisted conservative Catholic bishops as allies. Winning back Catholics was a feat exceeded by the gains among white Protestants, where Democrats captured 47 percent, a 14-point increase over 2004 and their greatest share since Bill Clinton won in 1992, achieving nearly a draw with Republicans. But the composition of the white Protestant vote this time is different. Clinton, a Southern Baptist, won a sizable percentage of evangelicals, though not a majority, in 1992 and 31 percent in 1996. The white Protestant vote that went Democratic in 2006 was largely mainline non-evangelical Protestant, previously aligned as traditional Republican. White Protestants' break with the GOP came in great part as a recoil from the overbearing evangelical influence.

While voters under 30 were the most favorable age group in 2004 for Kerry, casting 54 percent of their votes for him, Democratic House candidates in 2006 received 60 percent of their votes, compared with 38 percent for Republicans. Nationally, partisan identification breaks 38 percent Democratic to 35 percent Republican, but among those under age 30 the percentages are 43 to 31 in favor of Democrats. This pattern runs as strongly in the West as in the East, the Midwest and the Pacific states, a clear indication that the Western states are heading out of the Republican camp -- out of alliance with the deep South's Republican states and into coalition with the broad majority. In Wyoming and Arizona, where Republicans won elections for the House and Senate, the Democrats would have won by 16 and 15 points, respectively, if the elections had been conducted only among under-30s. In Montana, where Democrat Jon Tester won by 1 percentage point, fewer than 3,000 votes, his margin among under-30s, who were 17 percent of the electorate, was 12 points.

Bush has been the formative political experience for the youngest generation of voters, those 18 to 30. Studies of voting preferences show that the experience imprinted on a generation in its 20s largely determines its future political complexion. This generation is the most Democratic generation ever -- more Democratic than the youngest voting generations of the New Deal and the 1960s. In generational terms, their political alignment is also logical. As the children of the 1960s generation and the grandchildren of the New Deal generation, they have inherited those generations' political genes. The in-between, more conservative generations -- the so-called Silent Generation of the 1950s and their children -- are smaller in numbers and weaker in cultural and political influence.

Next page: The profound transformations going on in the states
Pages 1 2 3

[. . .]

African-Americans, meanwhile, were unmoved by any and all Republican overtures. Though the Republicans slated African-Americans as candidates for the governorships of Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as for the Senate in Maryland, not one of the Democrats running against them received less than 75 percent of the African-American vote. The campaign speeches of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made not the slightest impression. African-Americans remained the most discerning voters.

The strongest race run by any Republican did more than prove the rule of 2006. Arnold Schwarzenegger won reelection as governor of California by 17 percentage points by openly attacking President Bush, firing his Republican chief of staff and hiring a lesbian activist who had worked for his Democratic predecessor as a replacement, and adopting liberal positions across the board. As major figures from California often demonstrate, Schwarzenegger may represent the future of American politics but not the future of the Republican Party. Any Republican attempting this trick in another state would almost certainly be destroyed by the party's right wing. The sui generis character of an overwhelmingly popular Republican governor of California suggests how deviant the national party has become, even since Ronald Reagan.

Next page: Reagan's grin replaced Nixon's scowl, but the strategy was basically unaltered