The Obama Realignment

Jerome Karabel offers six excellent reasons why Obama's victory looks like a realignment:

1. Young people flocked to Obama in unprecedented numbers, with those 18 to 29 preferring him to McCain by 66 to 32 percent
2. The rapidly growing Hispanic population is shifting decisively to the Democratic Party. Obama carried Hispanics by 66 to 32
3. Obama shattered the Red-Blue divide, winning such rapidly growing states as Florida, Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada
4. McCain's greatest strength was among those over 65, among whom he beat Obama by 53 to 45 percent. Over time, however, the ranks of this age group will grow thinner and thinner.
5. Obama did well among the swing voters whom the Democrats need to build a majority coalition, winning 52 percent of "independents" (who now comprise 29 percent of the electorate) and 60 percent of moderates.
6. Republicans have for some time been hemorrhaging support among the college-educated. This trend accelerated in 2008, with Obama winning 53 percent of college graduates.

Karabel cites two previous realignments: FDR in 1932 and Reagan in 1980. My only quibble is citing Reagan, who was never terribly popular because of his unpopular conservative policies. Instead of 1980, I would cite Nixon's victory in 1968 as the Republican realignment, because Nixon's "Southern Strategy" flipped the Dixiecrat South from Democratic to Republican and thereby transformed America's political map. 

Even though Democrats subsequently elected two Southerners, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both elections were flukes. Carter beat Ford largely because Ford pardoned Nixon for his Watergate crimes and because the economic hangover of the Vietnam War produced stagflation. Clinton beat Bush largely because Ross Perot took 20% of the vote and because of "the economy, stupid."

It took 40 years for Barack Obama to overcome Nixon's "Southern Strategy" by extending the Democratic coalition into the South (Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida), while also winning the Hispanic-trending Southwestern states (New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada). Now that Obama has a strong foothold in these states, there is good reason to believe Democrats will hold them until the next major realignment.

Update 1: Chris Bowers compares Obama's win to Dukakis's defeat in 1988 and credits three major changes: growth of the non-white population from 15% to 26%, growth of the non-Christian population from 10% to 22%, and the rise of the Internet, which was mostly limited to academia before the Web arrived in 1994.

These three broad social trends--the network neutral Internet, the increasing number of non-Christians in America, and the increasing number of non-whites in America (mainly Latinos)--were more responsible for the 2008 Democratic victories than any other factor. This includes the relative strengths of the two major candidates, the performance and strategic decisions of the campaigns, and even the pro-Democratic political environment caused by widespread disaffection with Republican governance. These demographic and media trends are the main reason non-southern Democratic nominees have once again become competitive in Presidential elections. Without them, all of our nominees who are not "good ol' boys" would end up suffering the same fate as Dukakis.

This article is not meant to denigrate the tremendous efforts of the millions of people who worked on behalf of the Obama campaign, or to argue that the result of the election was a demographic foregone conclusion. Rather, it is to argue that broad social and cultural trends are typically at the foundation of any election. Dukakis had a lot of smart people working for him, but the demographic and media landscapre of the country was very different. As such, we shouldn't get either too down on our past defeats, such as 1988, or too high on our current victories, such as 2008. We win or lose because of our position relative to these long-term trends, as much as any other reason.

To make Bowers' analysis "stick," it would have to be applied to the battleground states that Obama won. I think it would.

Of course the Internet isn't a demographic factor and cannot be localized by state. But one could argue that the arrival of the Internet as a transformative political force in 2008 is comparable to the arrival of TV as a transformative political force in 1968.

Most pundits like to credit 1960 as the first "TV" election, citing JFK's alleged victory over Nixon in their TV debate and Nixon's 5 pm shadow. But TV was much more of a force in 1968, when the country was visibly divided over Vietnam, including Chicago cops beating peace activists on TV outside the Democratic convention.

Similarly, most pundits like to credit 2000 as the first "Internet" election, citing John McCain's then-huge fundraising haul of $6 million after his upset victory over George Bush in the New Hampshire primary. But that money wasn't enough to overcome Bush's telephone smear campaign in South Carolina. Similarly, Howard Dean's amazing Internet fundraising and organizing in 2004 produced a massively disappointing 3rd-place finish in Iowa, which in turn produced the famous "Dean scream" that ended Dean's campaign.

It wasn't until 2008 that Barack Obama married Internet success with electoral success. Obama took the millions he raised online and invested them in field staff in the early primaries - Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. Obama's field-driven victory in Iowa transformed him from a long-shot to a finalist, and his continuing investment in "field" brought him victories in the later primaries and in the general election.