You’ve heard my evidence for why the Republicans are going to keep losing. Now here’s a few pages on why the Democrats are going to keep winning—and winning, and winning.
It’s mostly math. You’ve heard quite a bit about polling, and after seeing what the Republicans did with polls, I can see how that might seem like a fuzzy, subjective thing, so let’s walk through some hard numbers. Registration, turnout, and fund-raising figures all dictate that the Democrats are building a strong advantage over Republicans. (You really can’t underestimate the money. People lie about money, but money doesn’t lie.) Following the election, the numbers point to a Democratic realignment. In other words, the Democrats are going to keep winning big for a long time.
The map’s changing. Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina all voted Democratic. In 2004, voters divided between the two parties equally at the polls, but in 2008, exit polls showed a 7-point advantage in party identification for Democrats. More to the point, Democrats had a 19-point advantage among voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine. Pause for a moment and read that again. That’s right, a 19-point gap between the number of young people who called themselves Democrats and those who admitted to being Republicans. Before the Republicans try to dismiss it as a natural indiscretion of youth to vote for a Democrat a few times before they know better, you might want to remind them that in 2004 the Democrats had only a 2-point advantage in party identification.1
I’m not in the market to bore anyone by walking through each state’s registration and turnout patterns. Instead, I’ll offer some of the numbers that struck me back in June when I looked back through the primary.
Democrats’ gains were even clearer in the general election, when we could compare our side to Republicans. Democratic turnout was the highest in more than four decades everywhere but the South and the Southwest, where Democratic performance still hit a sixteen-year high. Democrats increased leads in the West, New England, and the mid-Atlantic states, and overtook the Republicans in the industrial Midwest and among farm states. Formerly unassailably solid Republican advantages in the South and mountain states shrank to unrecognizably slim margins.
For the specifics I’ll turn it over to Curtis Gans of American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate.
Democrats scored gains in every region of the nation. Their turnout in western states was 34.6 percent of eligibles, the highest since 1960; in the industrial Midwest (33.5 percent of eligibles), highest since 1964; in the farm Midwest (34.5), highest since 1964; in New England (42.9), highest ever; in mid-Atlantic states (34.4), highest since 1964; in mountain states (31.4), highest since 1964; in the Southwest, heavily skewed because of Texas’s disproportionately sized population in the region (21.8), highest since 1992; and in the South (26.3), the highest since 1992, the last election before the 1994 anti-Clinton midterm which tipped southern congressional supremacy to the GOP.
The Democrats also extended their leads in regions where they already had strength and narrowed the gap where they have been behind. In the West, where Democrats had been ahead 30.5 percentage points to 24.8 for the Republicans in 2004, the 2008 margin was 34.6 to 20.4. In New England, where the pro-Democratic margin was 30.7 to 19, the 2008 margin was 42.9 to 15.2. In the mid-Atlantic states, where the Democratic lead had been 27.5 to 23.8, it widened in 2008 to 34.4 to 21.4. In the industrial Midwest, a 2004 GOP lead of 30.8 to 29.3 turned into a Democratic lead of 33.5 to 26.8. The GOP’s 35.3 to 31.2 farm state advantage in 2004 turned into a Democratic advantage of 34.5 to 30.6.
In two regions which have been Republican strongholds, the Democrats substantially narrowed the gap. What had been a 28.8 to 20.1 percentage point advantage in the South narrowed to less than a percentage point (27.2 to 26.3). In the mountain states, what had been a 34.9 to 26.6 GOP advantage narrowed to 33.3 to 31.4.3
If you need some visuals to go along with the numbers, here they are: a packed stadium and an empty room. Obama literally filled stadiums while McCain couldn’t even fill a few hundred chairs. Just look at June, when Obama had a crowd of 75,000 at a single event in Oregon. Meanwhile, when McCain gave his big Change speech in New Orleans, which an observer might recognize as an attempt to resuscitate his “maverick” image after cozying up to Bush, only 600 people showed up.4
The cash tide has also turned. And it’s a huge turning point in American politics. Tiny donations, little checks from homemakers in Iowa and online donations from college students forgoing lattes have driven the biggest fund-raising numbers we’ve seen in U.S. political history. By June, as the Democratic primary was wrapping up, Obama had raised $265 million, three times as much as McCain, and had 1.5 million donors whose average contribution was less than $100.5 Obama continued to outstrip McCain even with the McCain campaign collecting $28,500 in checks from oil company executives.6 Ultimately, Obama raised $745 million to McCain’s $320 million, including $84 million from the public financing system. When the American people’s donations become as important as the corporate contributions, Democrats win. It’s that simple.