The Emerging Majority
CONTINETTI, MATTHEW
The Emerging Majority It’s not Republican. BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI Small changes can have dramatic consequences. The electorate shifted about 4 points toward the Democrats in between the 2004...
...The fi rst is 27 percent—President Bush’s approval rating in the national exit poll...
...It’s the fi rst time since 1976 that North Carolina has voted for a Democratic president...
...Only a third of Pennsylvania’s delegation will be Republican—about the same proportion as in New Jersey...
...BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI Small changes can have dramatic consequences...
...They are future-oriented...
...The second number is 93 percent...
...Bush won Nevada by 2 points in 2004...
...Obama will be president because he took states that Bush won in tight races four years ago...
...In Indiana the swing toward Obama was even more pronounced...
...Bush won Loudoun County by 12 points in 2004...
...Then there are the young...
...Republicans win when they build out from their rural base and gain support in the exurbs and suburbs...
...In a closely divided America, a swing of four votes in a hundred can mean a decisive victory...
...Voters under 30 turned out in only slightly higher numbers than they did in 2004, but they overwhelmingly backed Obama, 68 percent to 30...
...Obama’s achievement can be explained with a few numbers...
...Bush, the economy, and Obama’s personal and political appeal have pushed the nation toward the blue end of the political spectrum...
...Rural voters back the Republican party overwhelmingly...
...I think of places like Loudoun County, a northern Virginia exurb...
...Considering those numbers, the 2008 electoral map isn’t all that surprising...
...Unemployment is rising and consumption is falling...
...The two major surprises on our new map are North Carolina and Indiana...
...In 2008, Obama won Loudoun by 6 points...
...There’s the fi rst problem...
...That’s how Bush won in 2004...
...The fi nancial crisis is spilling over into the real economy of goods and services...
...Virginia’s electoral votes went for a Democrat for the fi rst time since 1964...
...Montana, where he lost by 2.5 points...
...The week before the election, the Commerce Department announced that consumer spending had dropped 3.1 percent...
...The GOP is doing only a little better in the mid-Atlantic...
...That’s the percentage of voters who gave the economy a negative rating in the exit poll...
...Obama made up all of that ground, eking out a victory of about a point...
...He won the Hispanic vote by a two-to-one margin...
...But I’d also make sure that President-elect Obama spends the next four years visiting North Carolina, Indiana, Virginia, Ohio, and Florida...
...Otherwise, Republicans better start praying for rain...
...But, for the most part, the shift is gradual and on the margins...
...But those who thought McCain would be another Bush broke overwhelmingly for Obama, 91 percent to 8. That’s a huge, damning margin...
...Pretty dismal...
...And the GOP was left a minority party...
...They supported Obama...
...In 2004, John Kerry won the Washington suburbs of Arlington, Alexandria, and Fairfax, but still lost the state to Bush, 45 to 54 percent...
...The next year, another Democrat, Tim Kaine, succeeded Warner...
...Where does this leave the Republicans...
...It’s on its own, no direction home...
...So are the Mountain West and the Pacific Coast...
...This year Obama erased that margin and won by a couple tenths of a point...
...When the next Congress convenes in 2009, there won’t be a single House Republican from New England...
...This year Obama won it by 4. Bush won Florida by 5 points in 2004...
...About two-thirds of Obama’s supporters are white and a third minorities...
...The GOP is like the central character in Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone...
...Overall, Obama may have lost the white vote (while still doing better than Kerry did), but in 2008 whites (not counting Hispanics, per Census convention) made up the smallest proportion of the electorate since the start of exit polling...
...That’s a big “if,” of course...
...And the year after that, voters replaced incumbent Republican senator George Allen with Democrat Jim Webb in a contest decided by just a few thousand votes...
...Bush won Colorado by 5 points in 2004...
...But those 4 points gave Obama the largest share of the vote since 1988, the best showing by a Democrat since 1964, the fi rst black president, the fi rst non-southern Democratic president since John F. Kennedy, and likely larger Democratic majorities in Congress than when President Clinton took offi ce in 1993...
...The electorate shifted about 4 points toward the Democrats in between the 2004 and 2008 elections—from 48.3 percent of the popular vote four years ago to 52.5 percent today...
...Bush won North Carolina by 12 points in 2004...
...Obama won it by a substantial margin—about 15 points...
...The GOP is increasingly confined to Appalachia, the South, and the Great Plains...
...The day before the election, the auto com panies announced that they had had their worst month in a quarter-century...
...Obama scored tremendous victories among minorities...
...In deep trouble...
...Obama’s victories in the West were impressive...
...This year Obama won it by 2.5 points...
...When you look at the ethnic composition of Obama’s coalition, you see that it’s kind of a mini-America...
...He won more than 90 percent of the black vote...
...The key is a successful fi rst term...
...Suburbs and exurbs are the most dynamic, fastest-growing places in the country...
...And I’d also make sure Obama visits Missouri, where at this writing it appears he barely lost...
...Consumer spending hadn’t fallen since 1991, and this year’s decline was the largest since 1980...
...Obama won it by 7. Bush won New Mexico by 1 point in 2004...
...The exurbs became volatile battlegrounds...
...There will be a single Republican in Maryland’s eight-man delegation...
...Bush won there by a huge margin of 22 points in 2004...
...If I were Obama strategist David Axelrod, I’d—well, I’d probably be exhausted right now...
...And these voters are trending Democratic...
...The Republican coalition, by contrast, is white, male, and old...
...In 2008 Virginia went totally blue...
...For the GOP to have a future, it has to reverse that 18point swing...
...But in Bush’s second term, things went awry...
...The poll found that voters were split on whether John McCain would continue Bush’s policies...
...When economic conditions are as bad as this, of course the party out of power is favored to win an election...
...No Democrat had won Indiana since 1964...
...There will be only three Republican congressmen in New York’s 29-member delegation in the next Congress...
...A successful Obama presidency could lock these voters into the Democratic column for a long, long time...
...Obama won it by about 13 points...
...He needs to deepen his support in all fi ve states...
...The Republicans are in demographic trouble...
...Disney World is Obama country...
...The most striking divide in 2008 is between rural voters and metropolitan voters...
...and Georgia, where he lost by 5.5 points...
...It’s the metropolitan voters, the voters who live in cities or suburbs or exurbs, who are growing...
...The problem is that there aren’t many of them—and there are fewer all the time...
...Virginia has been trending blue since 2001, when Mark Warner was elected governor...
...He won the Orlando suburbs by 20 points...
...And they were right to give the economy a negative rating...
...Matthew Continetti is associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Bush won Ohio by 2 points in 2004...
...It handed the Democrats as many as three more House seats, replaced retiring Republican senator John Warner with Mark Warner (no relation) by a vote of two-to-one, and swung for Obama by a margin of 5.5 points...
...The suburban voters abandoned the GOP for the Democrats...
...Obama won the Philadelphia suburbs, the Washington, D.C., suburbs, the Chicago suburbs in Illinois and Indiana, the Denver suburbs, the suburban counties that make up the Research Triangle in North Carolina, and many more...
...The Rust Belt is hostile territory, too...
...If Obama holds all the states he won this year and adds those three to his column in 2012, he’ll be reelected in a landslide...
...He won the Asian vote by a similar margin...
Vol. 14 • November 2008 • No. 9
