Post Friday, January 03rd, 2003
A week after the November elections, Rob Brownstein wrote a wonderful piece in the liberal American Prospect analyzing the election results. Some of the key takeaways:
1. Democratic turnout was respectable. In fact, Democrats got more votes in most states than they had in 1998. However, Republican turnout was just much better.
But Democrats lost the election because Republicans turned out so strongly in the red states, and the red counties of the blue states. In Georgia, Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes ran up a larger margin in Atlanta than he did in his victorious 1998 race; overall, he won just 9,000 fewer votes in losing this time than he captured in winning last time. But his Republican opponent, Sonny Perdue, polled nearly 250,000 more votes than the 1998 GOP nominee. In the far distant suburbs of Atlanta – culturally conservative exurban counties like Douglas, Hall, Henry, Coweta and Forsyth – the Republican margin doubled, tripled or quadrupled from 1998. Following Bush’s pattern in 2000, the GOP scored big gains in rural areas, too.In many states, the Republican surge overwhelmed entirely respectable turnouts for Democrats. In losing the North Carolina Senate race last week, for instance, Democrat Erskine Bowles won 214 more votes than John Edwards did in winning a seat there in 1998. In Missouri, Jean Carnahan won more votes than her Republican colleague Christopher (Kit) Bond did in the 1998 mid-term election there. In Georgia, Democratic Sen. MaxCleland was crushed by more than 100,000 votes, but captured less than 4,000 fewer votes than the late Republican Sen. Paul Coverdell did when he won his seat in 1998. Bill McBride was flattened in the Florida governor’s race, but in losing, he polled only 60,000 fewer votes than Jeb Bush did when he was initially elected four years ago.
2. The suburbs are becoming more liberal because of social issues, but the exurbs are becoming more conservative.
The same trends were apparent in Republican Norm Coleman’s solid win over Walter Mondale in the Minnesota Senate race. Mondale held the twin cities and their immediate suburbs (though his margin slipped a bit from Paul Wellstone’s showing in 1996). But Mondale gave ground across the broad expanses of rural Minnesota: say in Otter Tail, which gave the GOP a 1,300 vote margin in 1996 and a nearly 4,100 vote advantage this time, or Beltrami where a 2,200 Democratic margin in 1996 slipped to just 200 votes this time. He lost even more ground in the exurban counties at the suburban fringe around Minneapolis and St. Paul. In these rapidly growing places – bursting with young parents eager to raise families far from the temptations of city life – Coleman ran up crushing margins: almost 12,000 votes in Carver, nearly 21,000 in Anoka, 28,000 in Dakota and 11,000 in Wright.
3. As others have noted, there is increasing ideological polarization between red states and blue states. This is good news for Republicans, since there are many more red states than blue.
The geography of this election also contributed to the Democratic caution. Most of the key races were fought on Bush-leaning turf in culturally conservative places. Of the 11 Senate races considered the most competitive, nine were in “red” states that Bush won in 2000; a disproportionate number of the competitive House seats were in rural or small-town districts that favored Bush. (Indeed almost all of the Republican House gains came in seats that Bush carried in 2000.) Through the fall, as grumbling over the mushiness of the Democratic message mounted in Washington, the universal response from top party strategists was that no candidate in any of these races would benefit from a more confrontational national posture on the tax cut or the war in Iraq; if anything they wanted national Democrats to hug Bush even more.This problem for Congressional Democrats isn’t going away any time soon. Al Gore may have won more votes than Bush in 2000, but Bush won more states – 30 in all. The House is divided almost exactly in half between seats in the red (218) and blue (217) states. But the Senate’s small-state bias gives the red states disproportionate influence there: Sixty of the 100 Senators are elected from red states. Democrats now hold just 18 of those 60 seats (19 if Mary Landrieu wins her run-off in Louisiana next month).