I haven’t had the focus for a proper, well-composed treatise on the subject and, besides, there’s just too much soul-searching post-election analysis to digest. So here, in no particular order, are my thought on the culture gap, value gap, electoral gap, whatever you want to diagnose as the issue.
1. Turns out gay marriage may not be the culprit of Democratic losses after all. I still stand by my Status War thesis. Even if the “moral values” were more than a code word for “against gay marriage,” they do suggest that a significant portion of the electorate chose the president on the basis of some perceived shared cultural stance, valuing that over “harder” policy issues like the specifics of war or the economy.
2. Before we go on and on about how the Red States are different from the Blue States, though, let’s look at one of those Blue States. Like Massachusetts. Compare 2000’s election returns with 2004’s.
2000 MA Popular Vote
Bush 32.5 %
Gore 59.8 %
Nader 6.4 %2004 MA Popular Vote
Bush 37.0 %
Kerry 62.1 %
By all rights, Kerry should have trounced Bush here, but he barely scraped more than Gore, and that’s without a six and a half percent Nader vote-drain. Before we go start studying why Red Staters really hate us, maybe we should look at the reason for much stronger Republican support this election. I suspect that David Brooks is right that “up to 9/11, this country was tied 49/ 49. Post-9/11… the 2002 election, this election, it’s 51/48, and that if you put an orthodox Republican against an orthodox Democrat, then you will get a 51/48 result if they run orthodox campaigns.”
3. By the same token, of course, Red Staters voted for Democrats, just in different proportions. Check out the now famous cartogram reflecting both population proportion of counties and the percentage of Republican or Democratic vote:
4. Go read South Knox Bubba’s Chamber of Commerce solution. We could use more humor like this and less anguished bandying about of gross overgeneralizations.
5. Any class-resentment rebuke of the Democrats is for sins of supporters visited upon the candidate. After all, as Matt Yglesias notes, “Interestingly, I never actually saw John Kerry or any other Democratic elected official condescend to these people [conservative Christians].” What’s coming out now - one suspects more now than during the election itself - are accumulated resentments against past slights of urban/Blue State classism - explicit and implicit, real and imagined - less by the Democrats than of “Democrat” as ideal-type. For that reason, the proposals Democrats have to change its public face will be hard to achieve, since it doesn’t involve easy things to change, like a candidate’s strategy, but rather require a broad coordination of individual attitudes.
6. Who exactly are all these faith-talking Red-State speaking Southern politicians whose careers are being held back by Northern-coastal delusion? Do they mean John Edwards? The one who got all the way to a VP nomination after less than one full term in the Senate precisely because he was a sweet-talking, folksy Southerner good on the stump? Remember, Super Tuesday could have stopped John Kerry in his nomination bid had fewer Southern Democrats cast votes for him.
7. Might not attempts to court Red State America, speak to its values, mainstream itself, etc. be compromised by the fact that everyone in the country has been reading/hearing about this nonstop for the last week? Will not any attempt now be read as shallow pandering?
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