If I were a Republican--a long leap of imagination--how worried would I be about my party's prospects?
The tide comes in, and the tide goes out, and maybe I would think that the Dems, in the immediate afterglow of electoral success, were excessively giddy about the Republicans' demise. But I think I'd worry that the patient's case was more serious. It's not just 2008, after all: the Dems are now on a winning streak, and history teaches that the voters do not often deliver body blows to the same party in consecutive contests. It's almost axiomatic that, after a presidential election, the winner's party loses seats in the next congressional election; unambiguous disasters, such as the one suffered by the Dems in 1994, are generally followed by--well, that particular one was followed by the re-election of Bill Clinton in 1996.
In 2006, the Republicans lost 31 House seats and six Senate seats. Now they have lost more than twenty additional House seats, at least six more Senate seats, and the Presidency. In winning 365 electoral votes, Obama carried all the Kerry states by double-digit margins, and he easily prevailed in Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada as well. There is really no way for Republicans to say that, Yes, we lost, but a small shift of only such-and-such number of votes in these three states--no, they were thoroughly rejected by the voters, again.
I try to set my will against sentimentality and mark for myself the occasions when the temptation is strongest. So it was with one part of my mind that, on election night, I contemplated myself thinking with another part that McCain's crowd looked like America's past and the younger, browner Obama throng celebrating in Chicago's front yard more plausibly like its future. Judis and Texeira have crunched the numbers and conclude that the part of my mind I regard with suspicion is right. The Rs have a real problem and should be worried.
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