Reply #124: I don't see these "facts" as particularly troublesome

[fishwax]

-97 out of the 100 fastest growing counties in the country went to Bush

I don't see how this is relevant. Everyone gets one vote a piece, no matter how fast the county they live in is growing. And most of these counties seem to be fast growing b/c they are farmland (very few people) being ceded to encroaching suburbs (latest waves of white flight). It just doesn't seem relevant.

-More people are registered Republicans than registered Democrats for the first time since the '20s.

I don't believe this statistic, and haven't seen any link supporting it yet.

-What was once the solid democratic south is now rapidly becoming the solid republican south.

It hasn't been the solid democratic south for a long time, so this is hardly old news. We know we can't ever lose more southern states then we did in 2000, when we still would have won the election had the votes been counted in Florida (which, sociologically, wasn't really part of the solid south). And we'd have won in 2004 with Ohio. Plus '04 actually brought signs of life in southern states, with Arkansas and others appearing close. We didn't win them, but the state parties seem to me to be stemming the tide that has been rolling twards the GOP since the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

-Democrats control 49.3% of state legislature seats; the first time that number has been below 50% since the depression.

This is disappointing, but look at it in the context of the historical change in the parties since the Depression. This number is entwined with point 3. We've lost state seats all across the south, but a good share of those democrats were extremely conservative, and the new numbers reflect more a change in party realignment than a change in ideology. In Oklahoma, for instance, the repubs took the state legislature this year. But, while the democrats had the state legislature for decades before that, it wasn't exactly a liberal state legislature.

In a way, I see that realignment as a good thing. Getting rid of the might-as-well-be-repubs in the party allows us to focus on issues that energize the remaining base, which means we can then expand instead of staving off defections.

For years, the DP was large and had many stragglers and outliers that the GOP could pick off to build their own base. This was the case with many of the southern dems, and that is why points 3 and 4 have happened. But now, the GOP is large and fractious, and there are many groups in the GOP that are ripe for picking by the Democratic Party, including secularists who are worried about the influence of the religious right, civil libertarians who, like their counterparts on the left, are concerned about the infringements of the Patriot Act and other aspects of the Bush Administration, and people who are concerned about the bush administration's expanding government through NCLB, etc. We don't have to kowtow to those people, but we can bring some of them in by focusing on issues we have in common. I think a lot of McCain's followers fall into this camp.