One of the most profound developments of the last two election cycles has been a reversal of the dynamic–prevalent since 1994–of a superior Republican ability to “control the map”–to win in small states with disproportionate political clout, and to win downballot contests outside their electoral base.
It’s sometimes hard to remember this, but until 2006 many Democrats were in a condition of unhappy resignation to a Republican congressional advantage born of geographical and demographic realities beyond their control. With “red states” outnumbering “blue states” three-to-two, how could Democrats, even in a country divided evenly in the national popular vote, ever hope to maintain a majority in the Senate, which awards all states two seats? The same reality, Democrats feared, would give Republicans a built-in advantage in control of state governments, and hence, congressional redistricting. Gerrymandering plus a more efficient distribution of Republican voters in House districts would, many concluded, make control of the U.S. House a perpetually uphill battle for the Donkey Party.
How have Democrats overcome these very real obstacles in the last two elections? There are really two answers: they’ve built a national popular vote majority that’s large enough to overcome any GOP bias in the structure of the electoral college, the Senate, the House and the states, and they’ve learned how to win in tough terrain, even as Republicans increasingly lost that ability.
In his National Journal column today, Ron Brownstein lays out the numbers in terms of the startling reversal of partisan fortune when it comes to Senate and House races in red and blue states:

Eighteen states might be considered the “true blue” states. These 18 (all of the Kerry 2004 states, except New Hampshire) have voted Democratic in each of the past five presidential elections. With this month’s defeat of Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., Republicans now hold only four of those 18 states’ 36 Senate seats. The number will shrink to three if Sen. Norm Coleman loses a recount to Democrat Al Franken in Minnesota.
Democrats, again, are moving in the opposite direction. Twenty-nine states voted for Bush both times. After 2004, Democrats held just 14 of the 58 Senate seats from those 29 states — a testament to Bush’s first-term success at energizing the conservative base. But with this week’s Alaska victory, Democrats since 2004 have captured eight more red-state Senate seats, giving them at least 22 overall (with another pickup possible in the Georgia runoff). Democrats now hold at least 38 percent of the Senate seats in the past decade’s red states, while Republicans hold just 11 percent of blue-state seats.
Republicans likewise end the Bush years retreating in blue congressional districts. In 2004, Kerry outpolled Bush in 180 districts. After the 2004 election, Republicans held 18 of those 180 Democratic-leaning seats. But after back-to-back losses, Republicans now hold just five.
Once again, Democrats are displaying much wider reach. In 2004, Bush outpolled Kerry in 255 congressional districts. After the 2004 election, Republicans controlled a commanding 213 of those 255 seats, leaving Democrats just 42. But after gains in 2006 and 2008, the Democratic total in those red districts has almost doubled — to 83. That means while Republicans control less than 3 percent of the congressional districts that voted for Kerry last time, Democrats hold nearly one-third of the districts that backed Bush.

These phenomena, says Brownstein, faithfully reflected earlier decisions by the GOP to seek to build a national majority by relentless base-tending supplementing by highly targeted outreach to selected swing voter categories. It didn’t work.

All of these trends expose the same dynamic: Democrats are effectively courting voters with diverse views, but the Republican capacity to appeal to voters beyond their party’s core coalition has collapsed.
Bush targeted most of his priorities toward the GOP base. And since 2005, he has faced overwhelming disapproval among independent voters and near-unanimous rejection from Democrats.
McCain, with his reputation for independence, was supposed to restore the GOP’s competitiveness among swing voters. But to win the GOP nomination, McCain embraced Bush’s core economic and foreign policies and then selected, in Sarah Palin, a running mate who waged the culture war with a zeal that made Bush and Karl Rove look squeamish.

In other words, the very fact that it was John McCain at the top of the GOP ticket this year is a testament to the failure of the “base-plus” strategies made so famous by Karl Rove. If anyone should have been able to expand the GOP base, it was the Arizonan, who entered the contest with a (perhaps undeserved) reputation for independence, particularly on issues like immigration reform and government ethics that were important to some of the same swing voter categories Rove had been lusting after.
Sure, you can, as some Republicans insist on doing, attribute all of these results to the mid-September financial collapse, but the same trends were very evident in 2006. The Democratic base is expanding, the Republican base is contracting, and unfortunately for the GOP, representatives of its residual base are totally in charge of the party now, more determined than ever to make it an ideologically coherent “clubhouse” (to use Brownstein’s term) instead of a big tent.
None of this guarantees Democratic success in the future, and 2010 still looms as a year when Democrats must face the voters as the unquestioned governing party in Washington for the first time since 1994. Those incredibly high “wrong track” numbers, unless they begin to shift, will eventually be a problem rather than an opportunity for Democrats. But we now have the clear example before us of the failure of a GOP strategy that so very recently looked compelling and perhaps invincible, based on a political map of the country that proved to be no more permanent than, I suspect, the one we see today.

As the number of Democratic U.S. Senators inches up towards the Big Goal of 60, and as Georgia inches towards a December 2 runoff between Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss and Democratic challenger Jim Martin, the sixty-four-thousand dollar question is how much President-elect Barack Obama is willing to invest of his personal political capital in this race.
You’d have to guess that this is a question being batted around within Team Obama, in whatever time they have left in the midst of running a transition, vetting and choosing a Cabinet, and watching the economy contract.
The argument against direct intervention in GA by Obama is that the last thing he needs right now is to become embroiled in a highly partisan election that would be interpreted as the first personal defeat of his soon-to-be presidency. It’s also possible a high-profile Obama presence in the race would produce a large turnout for white conservatives eager to give him an early black eye.
The argument for it is that a Republican win will be interpreted as a rebuke to him no matter what he does, and that direct involvement is the only way to give Martin a fighting chance.
Polls show Chambliss with a narrow lead over Martin, amidst warnings that it’s almost impossible to measure likelihood to vote in this kind of stand-alone runoff.
More ominously for Martin, there are reports that African-American participation in early voting for the runoff is down sharply during its first few days. You can certainly argue that nothing short of a highly visible intervention by Obama could convince African-Americans, who may feel their mission was accomplished on November 4, to come back to the polls for the runoff.
Both candidates are runnning ads that essentially agree the runoff is about who would help or hinder the new Obama administration. Obama campaign volunteers are apparently all over the state, along with A-list Obama surrogates like Bill Clinton and Al Gore (John McCain’s campaigned for Chambliss). So it’s not clear Obama has that much to lose by getting personally involved, aside from national sentiment that he ought to be focused on preparing to govern.
Late today Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post reported that Obama’s cut a new 60-second radio ad for Martin. We obviously don’t know if this is the president-elect’s last toe in the water of this campaign, or a prelude to a plunge.

The big transition news so far today is that Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a highly-regarded sitting governor who supported Barack Obama during the primary season, has apparently agreed to leave office to become Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Napolitano had been on the short list for Attorney General before Eric Holder’s designation for that position.
Personally, my first reaction to this news was surprise. To put it simply, DHS is a big fat mess: a poorly-designed deparment encompassing a vast array of missions, and suffering from considerable drift under indifferent Bush administration management. While Napolitano has been a highly visible governor on border issues like immigration and drug enforcement, there are big chunks of the department that deal with many other things, most notably anti-terrorism activities and emergency management. As you can read in Dana Goldstein’s fine profile of Napolitano earlier this year, she’s an extraordinarily competent person who won’t shirk from big challenges, but still, this one would be tough for anybody.
But if you think about it: is there any challenge harder than being a governor right now? Like most (soon to be virtually all) states, Arizona is facing a large, recession-driven budget shortfall, exacerbated by the fact that greater Phoenix has been especially hard-hit by the housing bubble collapse. The Arizona legislature is controlled by Republicans. Napolitano’s immediate prospects in Arizona were for two years of wall-to-wall grief, before being term-limited out of office in 2010.
Compared to that, even DHS probably looked interesting and managable.
Indeed, you have to wonder why just about every sitting Democratic governor isn’t burning up the phone lines to Washington seeking an Obama administration job. It’s a matter of leaping from the fire to the frying pan.

There’s some serious heartburn slowly developing in certain precincts of the progressive blogosphere, and in Obamaland, about the character of high-level administration appointees so far. But it’s important to sort them out.
To hear some of the talk in the comment threads of blogs, the best way to get a high-ranking job under Obama is to have supported Hillary Clinton in the nomination contest this year. In fact, unless I am missing something, not a single senior White House staff appointment or (rumored) Cabinet pick has gone to anyone who endorsed Clinton, aside from the possibility that Clinton herself will become Secretary of State.
All these “Clintonistas” you are hearing about are people who served in Bill Clinton’s administration, and who either backed Obama this year, or remained conspicuously neutral. The latter category includes White House Chief of State Rahm Emanuel and transition chief John Podesta. Another “Clintonista” who’s been appointed, vice presidential chief of staff Ron Klain, actually supported Joe Biden’s presidential bid.
Indeed, some of the touchiest appointments involve former Clinton administration foreign policy officials who supported Obama, but who might not get along with the Secretary of State if her initials are HRC. That seems to be the case with the two top Obama campaign foreign policy advisors, Susan Rice and Gregory Craig. Rice’s position in the administration is on hold pending HRC’s decision about State, and Craig wound up being designated for the position of White House Counsel. Here’s the background from the New York Times:

Susan Rice, one of the earliest foreign policy advisers to sign on with Mr. Obama, also gets a new lease on life if Mrs. Clinton is out of the running for Secretary of State. Like Mr. Craig, Ms. Rice worked for the Clinton administration, handling Africa policy during the 1990s.
But the two of them formed a tag team to debunk Mrs. Clinton’s claim to foreign policy experience during the campaign.

The reality is that there’s only been one Democratic administration in Washington since 1980, and thus anyone with any executive-branch experience served in it. This has little or nothing to do with personal loyalty to the Clintons.
But that does point to the legitimate issue being raised by some in Obamaland: where are all the “outsiders” who were supposedly going to ride into Washington to clean out the Augean Stables?
It’s logical, of course, that Obama’s first appointments, particularly to the transition team and to his own putative White House Staff, would be people with experience in Washington, which means the Clinton administration. Later appointments will probably be more balanced. Still another factor is that Obama, unlike his two predecessors, was not a governor with a large retinue of state-level policy advisors accompanying him to Washington. For all the talk about Obama’s “Chicago Gang,” it’s pretty small compared to George W. Bush’s Texans and Bill Clinton’s Arkansans.
So those worried about the “Clintonian” or “insider” nature of the early appointments should probably wait a while before drawing any fixed conclusions.

Sarah Posner, author of the indispensible weekly American Prospect feature “The FundamentaList,” spendt a day hanging out in the hallways outside a meeting of the Council for National Policy, the shadowy umbrella group where Religious Right leaders often coordinate efforts with other elements of the conservative movement. She came back with all sorts of interesting experiences:

While the CNP was trying to look to the future last week, it seemed hopelessly enamored of its aging leaders. When I arrived to meet Warren Smith, the conservative evangelical activist and journalist who had invited me to chat, we ambled past anti-evolutionist Ken Ham, who was holding court to a small but rapt audience in the hallway; eyed Left Behind author and CNP co-founder Tim LaHaye, who was shuffling in and out of the “CNP Networking Room;” caught a glimpse of Rick Santorum, who since being booted out of his Senate seat has led the charge against “radical Islam” from his perch at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center; and spotted the religious right’s anti-feminism doyenne Phyllis Schlafly, 84, who had earlier that day delivered a speech to the CNP Youth Council on how to “find your place in the conservative movement.”

Posner talked Smith into giving her a sense of what was being said in CNP’s closed-door sessions:

“What I’m hearing is that there is no loyalty to the Republican Party,” said Smith, meaning no loyalty to the party as constituted but loyalty to one purged of insufficiently conservative members. “What Richard Viguerie talks about is not a third party but a third wave. Basically there needs to be a flowering of grass-roots conservative activism and local groups, local PACs. He’s basically saying you’ve got a Republican county commissioner in Buzzard’s Breath, Texas, and he’s not a conservative? Run a conservative against him.”

Well, that’s a new and refreshing conservative strategy, eh? But it’s certainly in accord with what’s being said and heard across much of the conservative movement: there’s nothing wrong with the GOP that a more consistently conservative message can’t fix.
What’s missing from the usual conservative talk, however, is the upbeat, we’re-the-wave-of-the-future sentiment so common prior to 2006. They know that they and the GOP are in serious trouble now, and there’s not much time for laughter.
The best bon mot in Posner’s column was this:

I wanted to ask [Tim] LaHaye if he thought the end-times would happen during Obama’s presidency, but when I circled back to where I had seen him, he was gone. Rapture, anyone?

No, I don’t think there’s a lot of rapture in Religious Right politics these days.

One small but interesting phenomenon during the 2008 campaign season was the infighting that broke out at the flagship of conservative political opinion, National Review. To make a long story short, a couple of NR contributors, Kathleen Parker, and the founder’s son, Christopher Buckley, said some heretical things; the former called for the resignation of Sarah Palin from the GOP ticket, while the latter went over the brink and endorsed Barack Obama. Buckley simultaneously quit his NR column.
After the election, David Frum, another Palin-o-skeptic, and moreoever, an advocate of major reforms in the conservative message, announced he was shutting down his own NR-based blog.
In an after-action report on these developments for the New York Times the other day, Tim Arango assesses the damage, and quickly asserts that it was “the coarsening effect of the Internet on political discourse” that not only produced the defections from NR, but is threatening “its reputation for erudition.”
I know nothing about Tim Arango, but I’d have to guess he knows next to nothing about the history of the opinion-magazine world, where defections, purges, changes in managment, changes in ideology and strategy, and regular turnover in contributors, editors and publishers, has been more the norm than the exception. If anything, NR is relatively stable by those ancient standards. Two or three defections in the course of an election cycle that represented a huge crisis for the GOP and the conservative movement? Par for the course, I’d say.
But the specific claim that the internet is ruining National Review strikes me as simply fatuous. Arango is presumably referring to The Corner, NR’s unique group blog that is something of an inter-office water cooler where people connected to the magazine exchange views all day, every day. Arrows were indeed aimed at Parker, Buckley and Frum on The Corner this year, and to be sure, many opinions are expressed there that don’t quite live up to NR’s traditions of “erudition.”
But I’m with the American Prospect’s Dana Goldstein on this: the Corner is a valuable institution, and whatever conflicts it has engendered is attributable not to its form or its internet-based conveyance, but to the coarsening of conservative opinion generally at the end of the Bush Era. I’m personally fine with picking through obnoxious Corner posts in search of a witty or insightful gem from Ramesh Ponnuru, or a surprising concession to unorthodox political opinion by Rich Lowry. And if the atmosphere at the Corner encourages off-the-cuff comments that enrage me, it also encourages off-the-cuff comments that give me hope that conservatives aren’t all just drinking the koolaid and reinforcing each other’s prejudices. In general, the Corner exhibits a free-flowing style of conversation that’s only found in the comment threads of most blogs, left, right or center.
So spare me, Mr. Arango, for laments about how the internet is destroying yet another bastion of journalistic “erudition.” Back in its pre-digital days, NR published just as much obnoxious content as it does today, but without often letting us see the internal debates that were definitely going on under the surface. Maybe it’s lost some of its capacity for the deft use of latinates and arcane references to Oakeshott or Thomas Aquinas, but that’s something it will probably never recover now that William F. Buckey, Jr. is gone. For better or worse, NR is what it is, and the internet is a positive force in its present and future.

In a small but significant development that virtually no one would notice without the blogosphere, Chris Bowers is drawing attention to impending layoffs by the Democratic National Committee of 200 state-embedded field operatives. These operatives are the beating heart of Howard Dean’s famous 50-state-strategy. You can read Chris’ post yourself, but it seems the DNC assumed all along that the field staff would be terminated immediately after the election. And ironically, Chris’ contact at the DNC hastened to reassure him that they were trying to get the embeds jobs in Washington, as though the whole program were nothing more than a DC internship network.
That’s a distressing throwback to the past habit of thinking of state party organizations as nothing more than adjuncts to campaign organizations. Anyone who’s worked with state parties over the years, especially in smaller and/or “red” states, probably shares my impression that they were largely either completely moribund, or served as dumping-grounds for incompetent castoffs from specific campaigns or even from state governments. The idea of the 50-state-strategy, or so I thought, was to encourage steadier year-in-year-out state party infrastructures, staffed by professionals with a particular expertise in field organizing. You’d think this program should have represented a small down payment on a bigger investment in state parties, not a temporary experiment to be terminated the minute the votes were counted in this particular cycle.
I realize this issue is dwarfed in significance by the separate question of what happens to the large and well-trained Obama field organization. If that organization is ultimately folded into the DNC/state party apparatus, then the problem of state party infrastructure may be solved for the immediate future. But if it’s not, we may be back to square one.
In any event, it’s disappointing to see that Howard Dean’s signature initiative at the DNC may not outlast his personal tenure as chairman.

Media Matters’ Paul Waldman suggests that Team Obama is determined to shift the ratio of “wonks to hacks” (to use Bruce Reed’s useful dichotomy of the two types of people you tend to get in high-ranking White House jobs) from the hack-heavy habits of the Bush White House, where Karl Rove was what passed for a policy intellectual.
Meanwhile, Dayo Olopade has a good summary of the vast amount of advice being hurled at the Obama transition operation by progressive think tanks, which have learned from conservatives how to hit the ground running when there is a change of administration.
I had a spasm of nostalgia while reading Olopade’s reference to the Progressive Policy Institute’s 1992 transition tome, Mandate for Change. This effort, to which I contributed a chapter on crime policy, was so unique at the time that it was translated into several languages, and was reportedly a best-seller in Japan for a while. This time around, there are so many books, pamphlets and memos coming out with suggestions for the Obama administration that you can’t stir ’em with a stick. And that’s a good thing.

As you probably have heard by now, Senate Democrats today voted by a considerable margin to let Joe Lieberman retain his chairmanship of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and thus secure his continued participation in the Senate Democratic Caucus. His “punishment” for endorsing John McCain for President, for campaigning for him, for speaking at the Republican National Convention, and for repeating and even amplifying GOP talking points against Barack Obama, was to give up his spot on the Environment and Public Works Committee, including chairmanship of a climate change subcommittee. Off-the-record (of course), Senate Democrats were saying that President-elect Barack Obama’s encouragement of tolerance for Lieberman was a key factor in their decision.
Since everyone in the chattering classes will have an opinion on this development, I will note my longstanding personal opposition (here, and most recently here) to anything like a free pass for Joe Lieberman’s apostasy. While I’ve never been a Lieberman-hater, I simply think he crossed a line that incredibly few sitting members of Congress in either party have ever crossed, and even fewer (you have to go all the way back to 1956 for an parallel) have crossed without losing their seniority entirely. And this line–you do not endorse the other party’s presidential candidate–represents the absolute irreducible minimum of what we must expect of federal elected officials who want to affiliate in any way with the Democratic Party. The refusal to apply this principle–not angrily, or vengefully, but resolutely–is not some sort of signal of a “Big Tent” party; indeed, it most offends moderate-to-conservative Democrats past and present who have respected this one simple rule, and somehow managed to avoid Republican presidential campaign rallies. Reimposing this rule in the future will be difficult, and we all may come to regret that.
As it happens, I wound up appearing this afternoon on the syndicated public radio program “To the Point,” with Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, and Jamie Kirchick of The New Republic, to discuss the Lieberman issue. I was rather lonely with my simple “minimum requirement to be a Democrat” argument, since Jane maintained that Lieberman’s poor handling of his committee chairmanship, not his endorsement of McCain, was the reason he should be relieved of his gavel. Meanwhile, Kirchick (generally an abrasive bait-the-left neocon zealot, and best I can tell, not any sort of Democrat) made the novel argument that having run against the Democratic nominee for the Senate in 2006, Lieberman had no obligation to support the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, on the theory, I suppose, that one act of apostasy justifies another. It had to make you wonder this: if John McCain had gotten his (apparent) wish, and Lieberman had been his running-mate and lost, would Senate Democrats still welcome him back into the fold? Are there any limits at all to the elastic definition of who can join the Democratic Caucus?
Well, whatever. While I remain upset at this decision to exempt Joe Lieberman from the most basic standards of party loyalty, I don’t plan to obsess about it; Senate Democrats, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party have much bigger fish to fry. There’s some private talk in progressive circles in the wake of this event that Lieberman might now become slavishly loyal to Senate Democrats, and particularly to Obama, understanding that he’s dodged the very bullet he fired by his support for McCain. Maybe it will all work out for the best. And perhaps the political value of a Christlike gesture from Obama, to the benefit of a politician so recently spurned by the dominant conservative wing of the GOP, outweighs its cost. But no one is required to be happy about it.