January 25, 2004
THE EMERGING DEMOCRATIC MINORITY:
Not since the 1928 elections have the Republicans retained control of both Congress and the White House. Now that 76-year-old record may be about to fall: President Bush is looking stronger with the economy picking up, and Republicans seem likely not only to hold on to control of both houses of Congress but also to increase their numbers.
A GOP gerrymander of Democratic districts in Texas will probably add six to eight Republicans to the House. Every other big state is so heavily gerrymandered that no other major changes are likely. This means the GOP majority in the House is expected to grow by at least half a dozen seats.
The Rothenberg Political Report says that six Democratic Senate seats are in danger of falling to Republicans — five in the South — while only three GOP-held seats are similarly vulnerable. The Democratic minority will almost certainly have fewer seats in the next Congress than it has today.
How did we ever get to this: The nation's historic-majority Democratic Party reduced to a declining minority, and the second-banana Republicans suddenly running everything?
A good place to start is 1928, because U.S. politics seems to run in roughly 60-year cycles.
The most remarkable aspect of this realignment is that the Democrats seem intent on nominating a candidate who represents precisely the prior epoch. Are they just in denial?
MORE:
Labor's Iowa Implosion (Harold Meyerson, January 21, 2004, Washington Post)
It's nice to see that readers of the L.A. Times are receiving this splash of reality in their paper. Will it help them or will this be yet another year for Dems to be lulled by their media friends into believing their old ideas are popular?
My guess is that, once again, they'll be spending the day after the election looking like those google-eyed Frenchies did when Le Pen had a little success at the polls. THIS IS NOT HAPPENING!
Posted by: Jerome Howard at January 25, 2004 2:52 PMMeyerson's piece interests me because it confirms predictions that Peter Drucker made in a WSJ article around 1986. Drucker believed that the unions would decline as a political and economic power because:
1) They had ceased to be a social movement as they had been up to WWII and had become just another interest group. The last two generations of members have grown up in an environment where the political education didn't take place because it didn't resonate any more. It's hard to tell a person making $22/hour plus benefits that he's downtrodden. After awhile they stopped trying.
2) The greatest problem facing unions was demographic. Drucker predicted that as the unions' polical and economic power faded, the unions would have to screw their future to satisfy their present. That is that the union leadership would be forced to accede to the wishes of the older members to the detriment of their younger members in order to remain in office. I was part of UAW plant shutdown a few years ago and I can guarantee you that the most senior members got the best deal. It would have been interesting for those Bradley supporters to talk to some 30 year old UAW workers and heard what they had to say about their seniors.
Also as the union leadership has gotten caught up in leftist ideology instead of bread and butter issues they have forgotten that many union members are socially conservative. At our plant the most common bumper sticker in the parking lot was "Charlton Heston is MY President". The leadership wore their Gore buttons but I'm confident that there were a lot more Bush votes among the rank-and-file than anyone would care to admit.
Posted by: Jeff at January 25, 2004 3:32 PMAl Smith was a far better candidate as far as political ideology goes (in 1928 terms) than any of the likely 2004 Democratic nominees, so that doesn't help their cause a whole lot, either.
Posted by: John at January 25, 2004 3:33 PM