Reply #10: well, follow the trend

[Lexingtonian]

Clinton: 46 million voters in '92 43%
Clinton: 49 million voters in '96 49% (aberrant)
Gore: 52.5 million voters in '00 48.5%
Kerry: 59 million voters in '04 48.3% (mildly aberrant)

I don't even consider pre-1990 voting numbers to constitute a valid comparison. Perot split off the conservative Democrats and Gingrich-Dole-Bush made them Republican voters. They were there for the taking for Republicans since the late '60s, but for how the Nixon and Reagan crews behaved.

If you look at Carter's numbers, they're a very different electorate. Ford was a dead candidate- Carter was incredibly favored, but the 51% says most people voted for him as a lesser evil, really. It wasn't a strong win, politically speaking- it was a squeaker with a weak foundation. And if you look at the states he won it was the last hurrah of the Southern Democrats, of the FDR electorate. Which no longer exists- they're far into generational dieout and the small remnant has enough converts to make it majority Republican.

To be blunt, I think Democrats started out at the realignment of '68/'72 with a true base size of ~20%. Carter got it to around 30%. Clinton started with roughly 40%. The Right realized around the 40-45% mark (in the early Nineties) that they were starting to lose dominion- the culture and social order and economic privilege system was going to change- and since then we've had the Culture War polarization and the Right maximizing its efficiency and electorate.

One leg of your critique of the Emerging Democratic Majority doctrine is founded on the idea that present American society doesn't have a preexisting political bias. Well, historically it does and it's still present. It's toward the 'conservative' side, to the socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, political, corporate business, cultural/religious system, and a faux/dominant Anglosaxon monoculturalism all derived from the colonial system in which the Settlement/Conquest took place.

The other leg of your critique is that the Democratic Party doesn't 'stand for' something altogether clear, articulated, or definitive. That's a different and obviously lengthy discussion, but the electorate considers the distinction a definite one. Otherwise we wouldn't be having close, high turnout, elections.