In 2004, both Democrats and Republicans said the election was one of the most important in their lifetimes. The Democrats were completely united behind John Kerry, and the Republicans behind George W. Bush. The exit polls eventually showed that 89 percent of the Democrats voted for Kerry and 91 percent of Republicans voted for Bush. For the first time in anyone’s memory, the Democrats had almost as much money as the Republicans to wage a presidential campaign, and if we include the so-called 527 groups--organizations that did not fall under the campaign finance laws recently passed by Congress and extensively used by anti-Bush forces--there was actually more money supporting the Kerry campaign than the Bush campaign. With energized partisans on both sides, the parties were focused on getting out the vote--a traditional source of Democrat strength, especially in presidential contests. It was widely reported in the press before the election that the Democrats, including the 527 groups, had registered considerably more potential voters than the Republicans, and that their traditional voters were highly motivated to redress the loss in 2000, which the Democrats considered a stolen election in which Bush had actually been defeated.

Moreover, the issues and news environment in which the election was held seemed to favor the Democrats. By November 2004, polls showed that the country was deeply divided about the war in Iraq with around 50 percent saying the war had been a mistake. A majority thought the fight against the insurgency there was going badly. Although the economy had been growing since 2003, the number of jobs actually created (according to the Labor Department’s employer survey) was not keeping pace with the new entries into the workforce, and it looked as though Bush would be the first president since Herbert Hoover actually to have a net loss of jobs during his term in office. As it turned out, incidentally, by the end of December 2004, the economy had recouped all of the jobs lost in the dot-com collapse in 2001. Nevertheless, at the time of the election, it appeared that the battleground states--the states which a candidate had to win in order to gain a majority of electoral votes under the US electoral vote system (which I will discuss in a moment)--were still losing jobs. These included Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and other states in the US Midwest that were populous but still heavily dependent on the manufacturing activity that was gradually moving to China and other developing countries.

The Abu Ghraib scandal, spiking oil prices, the lack of flu vaccine, the failure to capture bin Laden, the contentious public hearings of the 9/11 Commission, statements by former government officials criticizing Bush’s failure to protect the country against attack and opposing his confrontational foreign policy, the failure to find WMD and the daily loss of American lives in Iraq, the film Fahrenheit 911 and literally dozens of books bashing Bush, his lack of military service, and his policies--all of which received sustained attention from a news media clearly hostile to Bush--must have created a sense for some voters that the Bush presidency was a failure and Bush himself was incompetent and dishonest.

Perhaps because of this, Bush’s approval rating in the Gallup poll, which most election analysts take as the key measure of a president’s electability, hovered around the mid-to-high 40s for all of 2004, and was 47 percent positive, 48 percent negative just before the election. His rating on handling the economy was slightly worse, 47 percent positive, 51 percent negative, and the Right track/Wrong track question--asking whether the country was on the right track or the wrong track--was consistently negative, and sometimes substantially so, right up to the election.

No president has ever won re-election with an approval rating under 50 percent, and Bush’s rating on handling the economy--traditionally the most sensitive issue for an incumbent president--boded ill for his re-election. The Right track/Wrong track numbers only confirmed a sour mood in the US. It was definitely not morning in America. Before the 2004 election, the pundits were asserting confidently that a presidential election is like a decision to extend the contract of an employee. If most people disapprove of a president’s performance in office, he will be turned out of office if his opponent can show that he (the opponent) is minimally capable. In at least arguably winning all three debates, Kerry certainly showed enough competence to meet this burden.

Finally, Bush campaigned almost exclusively in Republican areas and before handpicked Republican audiences. The press commentary on this was that the President was trying to shore up a fracturing base, while Kerry’s campaign had secured its base and was reaching out to moderates in order to widen his support.

As we will see, this was a misunderstanding of both the Bush strategy and political conditions in the country.

Although the head-to-head polls were close until election day, with some showing Kerry ahead, Bush won by over 3 million popular votes and with 286 electoral votes out of the 270 needed under the constitution for election. He gained in vote percentage over the 2000 election in 45 of the 50 states (losing vote percentage only in tiny Vermont).

One interpretation that can be drawn from these events is that the Bush strategy--to win by appealing almost entirely to the Republican base--was successful. This, in turn, would imply that by 2004 the electorate contained enough Republicans, and independents who would vote Republican, to provide a winning margin. If so, it would be strong evidence that a realignment of US politics had already occurred--that the Republican Party had become the dominant political grouping in the United States. 

On the other hand, all elections occur in the context of a time. Candidates, issues and facts matter. You can never step into the same river twice. The Bush victory can also be interpreted as the result of the peculiar circumstances of the time--the post 9/11 period, with a war on and the fear of terrorism a constant presence, just as the 2000 election could be viewed as the accidental election of Bush on the rebound from the unpleasant personal elements of the Clinton presidency.

Which of these interpretations is most likely to be correct?

A number of arguments have been advanced to support the hypothesis that the Bush victory was the result only of the unusual circumstances at the time:

1. Objective conditions in the economy. A number of academic theorists, particularly Professor Ray C. Fair of Yale, have developed correlations between conditions in the US economy and what occurs in presidential elections. Thus, despite the fact that the polls showed great dissatisfaction with Bush’s stewardship of the economy, and with several other aspects of how the country was going at the time of the election, objective conditions in the United States--particularly whether the economy is growing or declining in the months before the election--are considered better predictors of the outcome for an incumbent president or party than the polls. Despite the dissatisfaction expressed in the polls, the US economy was expanding during 2004, and Professor Fair’s model, always a work in process, predicted that Bush would win. The trouble is, that the model predicted that Bush would get 57 percent of the vote, and the wide variance from reality shows that the model is not yet sophisticated enough to be a useful explanation of any particular outcome.

2. Bush as a wartime president. There is always a rally-around-the-flag factor for Americans in wartime, and perhaps also a reluctance to change horses in midstream. However, Bush’s ratings as a war leader did not reflect a great deal of this kind of support in the months before the election. The Gallup poll in October 2004 found the country evenly divided on whether the president had a “clear plan” for “handling the situation in Iraq,” and other polls found large majorities believing that Bush did not have a clear plan for rebuilding Iraq or bringing the situation there to a successful conclusion. Perhaps more important in assessing the wartime leader effect is to look at the issues that Americans thought were important at the time. According to the exit polls, Iraq (at 15%) ranked fourth in importance as an issue to those who voted, after Moral Values (22%), Economy/Jobs (20%), and Terrorism (19%). Moreover, a majority in the exit polls said things were going either “somewhat badly” or “very badly” in Iraq. Under these circumstances, it seems unlikely that Americans voted Bush back into office because of his wartime leadership.

3. Moral values and religion. After the election, a lot was made about the 22 percent of the voters in exit polls who cited moral values as the most important issue. Some Democrats (in despair) and Republicans (with delight) interpreted this result as a commentary on Bush’s “values” campaign, which never shied from confirming his belief in God, although not his Christianity or his evangelical beliefs (which he never mentioned in a public forum). Much too much has been made about this issue. It’s impossible to tell what voters meant by citing moral values. Many may have voted for Bush because of what’s generally called the coarsening of public discourse in the United States, while others may have voted for Kerry because of Abu Ghraib and associated human rights issues. In the exit polls only 8 percent attributed their support for Bush to his religious faith, while 9 percent said it was because he cares about people, 11 percent because he is honest and trustworthy, 17 percent because he is a strong leader, another 17 percent because he has a clear stand on the issues, and 24 percent because he will bring change. Although 81 percent of voters in the exit polls went to church either weekly (41%) or occasionally (40%), Kerry got 39 percent of those who attended church weekly, and Bush got 36 percent of those who never attended church.

4. Terrorism. The ability to handle terrorism was the one issue on which Bush had a very substantial lead over Kerry in the polls throughout the campaign. In some cases, his margin was over 35 points. For this reason, in much of the commentary after the election, Bush’s victory was attributed to Americans’ fear of terrorism after 9/11. For example, the New York Review of Books of January 13, 2005, carried a long analysis by Mark Danner saying essentially that the voters of Florida had been frightened into voting for Bush. If this is true, the exit polls didn’t show it. It is true that Bush beat Kerry, 58-40 when the question was whom do you trust to handle terrorism. However, if fear of terrorism were truly a major factor in the minds of voters, it would have been the top issue, but it was not. The top issues were moral values and the economy. Finally, and probably most significant, of the 22 percent of the voters who said in the exit polls that they were “very worried” about terrorism, 56 percent of them voted for Kerry. Bush won among voters who said they were “somewhat worried” (53%), “not too worried” (19%) and “not at all worried” (5%).

5. Opposition to gay marriage. This was on the ballot as a state constitutional amendment in a number of states, some of which were important battleground or toss-up states. Constitutional amendments banning gay marriage passed in every state in which they were on the ballot, and by wide margins, but the presence of these initiatives did not seem to determine the outcome in individual states. Ohio and Oregon are good examples. Both were battleground states, where each candidate was thought to have a chance to win important electoral votes. Anti-gay marriage amendments passed handily in both states, but Bush carried Ohio and Kerry carried Oregon with a higher percentage of the vote than Bush got in Ohio.

6. Campaign funds and the quality of the campaigns. Candidates and campaigns can certainly make a decisive difference in an election, and after the 2004 election some Democrats blamed the Kerry campaign and the candidate himself for the loss. This seems too easy an explanation. The same things were said about Al Gore in 2000, when he also lost an election many Democrats thought he should have won easily. Kerry, as a northeastern Liberal, may have started with a deficit in a national campaign, but his status as a war hero and his clear grasp of national issues should have recouped some of this ground. It is true that Kerry never seemed to stir much emotional excitement in the Democratic base, but he really didn’t have to. The hatred of Bush was so strong among Democrats that they didn’t need much energizing to support their own ticket. There is evidence for this in the collapse of the Nader campaign, as virtually all Liberal voters returned to the Democratic line to vote for Kerry.

Kerry might not have run the perfect campaign, but no one ever does. Indeed, he won 16 percent more votes than Gore did in 2000. In the exit polls, 26 percent of the voters said they had been contacted by the Kerry campaign, while only 24 percent said they had been contacted by the Bush campaign. Finally, the Kerry campaign kept pace with the Bush campaign in fund-raising--no small feat given the fact that the Bush campaigns in both 2000 and 2004 set new fundraising records. In this campaign cycle, Bush raised almost $375 million and Kerry raised $346 million. But independent expenditures put the Democrat far ahead. There were $63 million in independent expenditures for Kerry, and $73 million in independent expenditures against Bush (George Soros alone is said to have spent $27 million to defeat Bush), while there were only $17 million in independent expenditures for Bush and $11.5 million spent independently against Kerry.

It seems apparent that none of these factors--or all of them together--can explain Bush’s win in 2004. They are either negative for Bush, or don’t reflect any particular advantage.

The fact remains, that in a year when the US was involved in an unpopular and controversial war, when job losses in an earlier recession had not been recovered, when the news on every front was relentlessly bad, when the Democrats were as united and energized as anyone has ever seen them, and had more money to spend than an incumbent Republican president, they still could not win. Indeed, by all conventional analysis, Bush should also have lost decisively in 2000, when he ran against an incumbent vice president at a time of unprecedented prosperity, and before most Americans had even heard of Osama bin Laden.

How could it be that in 2000 a virtually unknown challenger could beat an incumbent Vice President in a time of peace and unprecedented prosperity, but in 2004 a well-financed challenger with a united party behind him could not beat an incumbent president who was besieged by bad news on every front?

These two unusual elections, it seems to me, say something important about what is happening--or has already happened--politically in the United States. It may be that the relative closeness of Bush’s victories in both cases obscured the fact that major changes had occurred in the balance of the parties. A strong argument can be made that, since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, a majority in the US electorate has been moving gradually to the Republican Party. Thus, if true, the Bush victories in 2000 and 2004, despite highly adverse circumstances in each case, reflected rather than caused a gradual realignment of American politics that had been occurring over many years. This conclusion is strongly supported by the fact that in 2004 the Republicans won without “moving to the center” or broadening their appeal substantially beyond what they perceived as their own base.

That this is a plausible scenario, I think, becomes clear from the electoral map on my right, which shows the results of the 2004 election by county. The county is the basic unit of government in the US. Cities can include a number of counties, and in that case--such as New York City, which includes five counties--take over many of the administrative responsibilities of the counties. But outside of the cities most people are subject to county government, and there are over 3150 counties in the United States. You are all familiar with the red and blue breakdown of party preferences--Republicans red and Democrats blue. But in most renderings, it is red and blue states that are shown, not the counties within the states. The more fine-grained presentation by counties shows that the state-level map can be a bit misleading.

What the county-level map shows is that the places most people in Europe are familiar with in the US--New York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco--are blue, but by and large the balance of the US is red. Exceptions are some of the Mexican-descent areas of the Southwest and the majority black counties across the South. In terms of geographical area, New York and California are red states.

The vast red areas are where Bush won the election. According to this map, Bush won 2,140 counties with more than 55 percent of the vote (dark red), and 402 counties with between 50 and 55 percent of the vote. Kerry, on the other hand, won only 292 counties with more than 55 percent of the vote and 259 with less.

The red state/blue state picture is misleading because the real division is not between red states and blue states, but between the large metropolitan areas (i.e., the large cities and their close-in suburbs) and the rest of the country. According to exit polling, Bush won the elections of 2000 and 2004 by winning with wide margins in the outer suburbs, small towns and rural areas, while holding his own or improving his vote in the cities and suburbs. Compared to 2000, Bush gained 10 percentage points in support in urban areas and 3 percent in suburban communities. However, this was not the key to his victory, because Kerry gained even more in these areas.

Bush, it turns out, did particularly well in what are called exurban areas--distant suburbs of the major cities populated by young families. These are the fastest growing counties in the United States, and Bush won 97 out of the 100 fastest growing counties in this fast-growing group, taking 60 percent or more of the vote in 70 of them, and 70 percent or more of the vote in 40 of those. If there was genius in the Republican campaign in 2004, it was in realizing that there may be a Republican majority in the country, and that many of the voters that make up this majority could be found in large numbers in the middle-class suburbs far outside the central cities.

This brings us to what all this might mean for the future--whether there is a realignment of American politics in prospect, or--more intriguing--whether such a realignment has already occurred. What historians mean by a realignment is a major change in political allegiances that installs a new party or governing coalition in power for a significant period of time, such as a generation. A realigning election does not have to involve a convulsive or massive change, and frequently is only visible in retrospect. Most students of politics agree that the election of 1896 was a realigning election. It installed the Republicans as the principal governing party in the US until 1932--a string of presidencies only interrupted by Woodrow Wilson’s victories in 1912 and 1916.

Yet McKinley won in 1896 with only 51 percent of the popular vote. What this seems to show is that in the absence of a cataclysm of some kind, a realignment becomes apparent through a series of elections and is identifiable clearly only in hindsight when the pattern becomes clear. It is thus perfectly possible that the realignment scholars have been looking for has already occurred. It was not a cataclysmic, dramatic event, but a gradual move toward the Republican Party since the collapse of the New Deal coalition in the late 1960s.

How did this happen, and why?

I’d like to begin the analysis with a few telling statistics from the recent past. The Harris poll has been keeping track of party identification since at least the 1970s, and the data shows the following: In the 1970s, the Democrats had a lead over the Republicans of 21 points. In the 80s this dropped to 11 points. In the 90s, it was 7 points, and in the 2000s so far it is 5 points. The most recent Harris poll, out this week, shows the Democrats at 34 percent and the Republicans at 31. In 2004, when Gallup looked at the party identification of 34,000 individuals they had interviewed, they found that 34 percent called themselves Republicans and the same percentage identified themselves as Democrats. When the independents were pressed to state a preference, it came out 48 percent Democrats and 45 percent Republicans. Other polls, when independents have been pressed to state a preference, have found a dead heat at 45 percent each. Finally, the exit polls from the 2004 election showed a tie in turnout, with each party at 37 percent. Whether it’s a tie or the Democrats are slightly ahead, this seems to reflect enormous growth for the Republicans since the 1970s.

But does it? The last realigning election was the election of 1936, in the midst of the worst Depression ever experienced in the US, where Roosevelt won 61 percent of the vote and the Democrats swept the field in a huge landslide. The young adults of those years--a heavily Democratic cohort--have been gradually passing from the scene over the last 20 or 30 years. Their decline as a group could account for the rise of the Republicans as a percentage of all voters. The 20 year olds of 1936 would be 90 today, so few of the New Deal generation are still voting. Bush won today’s 65 and older generation--a different group who were children in the late Depression era--52 percent to 47 percent. So what may be happening is that as the New Deal generation disappears, the early 20th century configuration of the American electorate is coming back into focus.

This analysis is made more plausible by the remarkable--indeed uncanny--steadiness in the American electorate’s ideological self-identification. According to the Harris poll, in the 1970s, 32 percent of American adults considered themselves conservatives, 40 percent moderates, and 18 percent liberals. The percentages are virtually the same today, and haven’t varied by more than two points over the last 35 years. Unfortunately, we don’t have polling before the 1930s that can allow any firm conclusion, but this data suggests that, with the exception of the New Deal generation--created by the shock of the Depression--the division of the American electorate along ideological lines simply has not changed over a very long time.

There are two possible interpretations of these numbers--that the Republicans have just about reached their zenith at this point, which is rough parity with the Democrats, or that with the passing of the New Deal generation the country is returning to the pattern that existed before the realigning election of 1936. In that pattern, the Republicans were the dominant party, having won every election from 1896 until 1932, with the exception of Woodrow Wilson’s victories in 1914 and 1918. We won’t know the answer to this question for several more elections, if then, but the weight of the evidence at the moment is that the country has again entered a period of Republican dominance.

This seems to be true, despite the fact that the Democrats still hold a slight edge in party identification in the Harris and other polls. Actual turnout in US elections is well below the number of voters registered, and still further below the number of eligible voters. In 2004, the turnout was around 60 percent, one of the highest turnouts in many years. It appears that those who actually vote are more likely to vote Republican than the percentage of the voting age population who identify themselves either as Republicans or as independents who regularly vote Republican. Thus, the Republicans may have what might be called a working majority of the voting population.

This is demonstrated by several recent elections, all of which are consistent with the growing Republican support shown by the Harris and other polls. In 1994, for the first time in 40 years, the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, and have managed to hold control for 10 years. In the five elections since 1994, the total Republican vote for the House of Representatives has been higher than the Democratic vote, except in the Clinton presidential year of 1996. The Republicans took control of the Senate in 1994, and held it until 2001, when a single defection switched control of the chamber to the Democrats. The Republicans regained control again in 2002 and increased their Senate margin in 2004, in part by unseating the Senate Democratic leader in his home state of South Dakota and winning five Senate races in the South. For the first time in 80 years, the Republicans have firm control of the presidency and both Houses of Congress.

Moreover, because of a number of technical factors, and barring a cataclysmic event of some kind, this level of Republican control may continue well into the future--and if this is not an authentic realignment it may be functionally the same thing.

The first of these is the structure of the Electoral College. As most of you know, under the US Constitution, the president is elected by gaining a majority of electoral votes, not popular votes. Electoral votes are allocated among the US states roughly in accordance with their populations, by giving each state the number of votes that equals the number of its representatives in the House of Representatives, plus the state’s two Senators. There are a total of 538 electoral votes. Many of you will recall that George W. Bush won the 2000 election with the barest of electoral vote majorities--271 to 267--even though he lost the popular vote by about 500,000 votes.

In any event, as you can see from the map, the total electoral votes of the solid (deep) red states--those that Bush won with 55 percent of the vote or more--is 170. Other states that Bush won by less than 55 percent but have gone to the Republican candidate consistently over the last 30 years are an additional 37 for a total of 207 nearly certain electoral votes for a Republican candidate. The votes of the solid blue states total 63, and those that seem likely to go to a Democrat for the foreseeable future (including California in this category) total 98, for an aggregate of 161.

So the Republicans will start with a major electoral advantage. Their presidential candidate is only 63 electoral votes short of a victory. Winning three toss-up states, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, will do it, or as Bush did it in 2004, winning Florida, Ohio, Missouri and Iowa. The reason for this imbalance is constitutional. At the time the US constitution was framed, as a grand compromise between the big states and the small ones, two houses of Congress were created--one, the House of Representatives, based on population, and the other, the Senate, in which each state has two representatives and thus an equal voice. This structure, carried through in the Electoral College, gives the Republicans, which dominate the small states of the West, a big advantage in electing a president.

A second important technical advantage for the Republicans is the fact that incumbents in Congress have a much greater advantage today than they ever had in the past. Each year, especially in the House of Representatives, well over 90 percent of the incumbents running for office are re-elected. The Republicans now have a 30 seat advantage in the House. In the last election, there were something like 15 seats that were actually toss-ups; the rest were either held by incumbents or in solidly Republican or Democratic districts. Without an electoral cataclysm, it will be very difficult for the Democrats to gain control of the House of Representatives for some time. The same thing may be true in the Senate. Although incumbents in the Senate are not as secure as those in the House, as you can see from the map there are many more solidly Republican states than solidly Democratic ones. This means the Democrats will have a more difficult time electing a Senate majority over time.

A third technical factor is that the Republican areas of the country are growing faster than the Democratic areas. The states of the South and West are growing faster than the states of the East and Midwest, and within the states themselves the exurban or outlying suburbs--the red counties surrounding the blue metropolitan areas on the map--are growing faster than the cities and the close-in suburbs. Every 10 years, based on a new census required by the constitution, House seats and thus electoral votes are reapportioned among the states. In the last reapportionment, after the 2000 election, the states Bush carried in 2004 were allocated seven more electoral votes because of population growth during the 90s, and some of these electoral votes came from states carried by Kerry in 2004.

Accordingly, it seems likely that various technical factors having to do with the weighting of the electoral college, the difficulty of defeating incumbents in Congress, and the growth of populations in the red states will in the future give the Republicans an advantage over the Democrats that could help the Republicans--as though there had been a realignment--to dominate US politics for a generation or more.

But perhaps the most important reason for future Republican success is that the Party is much more in tune than the Democrats with the basic attitudes of the American electorate. In a book entitled What’s Wrong, published by the American Enterprise Institute several years ago, Everett Carll Ladd, one of the pioneers of American polling, and my colleague Karlyn Bowman collected polling data over 25 or 30 years ending in the late 1990s. These results do not vary considerably over time, and thus seem to reflect the fundamental views of Americans about themselves, their country, their government, and the institutions of society.

On a political level, according to these polls, a large majority of Americans believe that people have an obligation to take care of themselves, rather than have the government do it; that if government has a role it is to equip people to take care of themselves and take advantage of their opportunities; that government can be a force for good but frequently doesn’t achieve it; that government controls too much, does too much, and is wasteful and inefficient; and that on balance the best government is that which governs least. Americans also think big government is more of a threat to the country than big business or big labor; large majorities say they support smaller government with fewer services rather than larger government with more services.

Of course, this polling reflects Americans’ views in the abstract. When it comes to solving a particular societal problem at a particular time, Americans may see government as more likely to be effective than they do when they think about government in the abstract. For purposes of this lecture, these are all ideas that are strongly reflected in the Republican Party, especially since Reagan. And here the two parties differ quite fundamentally. Indeed, in the 2004 exit polls, voters were asked whether they thought government should do more to solve people’s problems. Forty-six percent said yes, and they went for Kerry by 66-33; 49 percent said no, and they went for Bush, 70-29.

As the exit poll on government’s role demonstrates, the central appeal of the Democratic Party is a more activist government. Its main interest groups--public employee unions, community action groups, environmental activists, consumer advocates and trial lawyers--depend for their success on the growth of the bureaucracy, government spending, and regulation. The Democrats are likely to come back into office when--because of an economic calamity or some other event that seems to require government intervention--the American people see a need for more government action. Right now, that is not the case, and until it is the Democrats are likely to remain a minority party.

The one area where activist government is currently appreciated by the American people is foreign policy, and especially support for the military. The American people seem to doubt whether the Democrats are tough enough to protect the country. As Peter Beinart of The New Republic noted in an interview published in the New York Times Book Review section this past Sunday: “One cannot forget the central fact that the Democratic Party has lost every election since the 9/11 era, in which national security has been predominant. That is an enormous, enormous problem.”

Thus, one reason that the Republican Party may have become the dominant party in the United States is that its central appeal--for lower taxes, smaller government, more individual responsibility and a strong military in the post 9/11 era--is closer to the views of a majority of Americans about the role of government than are the positions of the Democratic Party.

Another thing that sets the two parties apart at the moment, and probably for the foreseeable future, is ideas. The Republicans have many ideas for reform and change--many with Bush’s “ownership society” idea as a theme--including personal accounts in social security, health savings accounts, financial deregulation, privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouragement of home ownership through government downpayment assistance, school vouchers, moving the tax system away from sole reliance on the income tax, reforming civil service rules to give managers more flexibility to hire and fire, and the encouragement of faith-based initiatives for helping the poor.

It is not an exaggeration, on the other hand, to say that the Democrats have virtually no new ideas. Despite the enormous changes that have occurred in the United States since the 1930s, they seem mired in defending the goals and institutions of the New Deal, enacted 70 years ago. Absent a major economic or similar calamity, it seems very unlikely that a party without a program for change could unseat a party that is offering change. It could happen, of course, but until the Democrats have something to say that sets them apart from the Republicans as agents for change, they are unlikely to be able to take back power.

The Democrats recognize this problem. Recently, a group formed a new think tank, specifically for the purpose of developing new ideas. But to do this the party will have to shake off the stranglehold of the interest groups that form its core.

An ominous sign for the Democratic Party is the possibility that its Liberal wing may break away to act independently in future elections. This will split the Party and separate it further from the moderate and conservative views of the American people. In the same New York Times Book Review interview, which was subtitled “Can the Democrats become a majority party again?” Katrina vanden Heuvel, an editor of the Liberal magazine The Nation, said: “One of the things that came out of this election, which is exciting, is that there’s the beginning of an independent infrastructure outside the Democratic Party, a kind of fusionist politics combining movement politics with electoral politics. I would build on that, building a farm team of new, Paul Wellstone-type leaders, developing messages and ideas.” Most Republicans, needless to say, will wish her well in this effort.

To conclude, then: that George W. Bush was elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2004--despite strongly adverse conditions in each case--suggests an underlying strength in the Republican vote. According to polls, the party allegiance of American voters has been shifting toward the Republicans since the 1960s, accelerating a bit in the Reagan era, and in the 90s this growing electoral support began to show up with a takeover of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Bush campaign exploited this trend by concentrating its effort in the Republican areas of the toss-up states, seldom reaching out to independents and Democrats in the cities and inner suburbs.

Attempts to explain the results of the 2004 election in terms of the peculiar conditions of the time--including fear of terrorism after 9/11--seem contradicted by polling and other data.

Certain technical factors, such as the structure of the Electoral College and the advantages of incumbency in Congress, promise to keep the Republicans in power for the foreseeable future, but in any event the central appeal of the Republican Party is closer to views of government’s role held by large majorities of the American people. Finally, Republicans today are the party of ideas and change, while the Democrats are reactive and defensive, seemingly unable to abandon or modify the goals and institutions of the New Deal. For the Democrats, the election of 2004 seems to be having centrifugal effect, causing the Liberal wing to consider independent action.

Together, these factors suggest either that a realignment has in fact occurred in American politics, or that a period of sustained Republican hegemony--the functional equivalent of a realignment--is ahead.

This does not mean, of course, that there will be no Democratic presidents in the foreseeable future. Events, issues and candidates are still more important than party identification, but as shown by the success of the Bush campaign in 2004, a majority party has the wind at its back.

Peter J. Wallison is a resident fellow at AEI.