San Diego Union-Tribune
By Robert J. Caldwell
November 7, 2004
The capsule summary of President Bush's re-election win Tuesday – 51 percent to 48 percent for Democrat John Kerry in the popular vote, 286 Electoral College votes to 252 – understates the magnitude of the Republicans' historic 2004 victory. The red-state, blue-state map, the even more revealing map of counties won by Bush and Kerry, Republican congressional gains and the GOP's vote totals in state after state reveal a political shift bordering on the Republican Party's long-sought goal of national realignment.
This is not to say that the headline measures of Bush's win are less than impressive. They are, in fact, very impressive.
In 2000, Bush lost the nationwide popular vote to Democrat Al Gore by about 500,000 votes. Bush won the presidency that year in the Electoral College on the strength of his 537-vote edge over Gore in Florida, and only after a month of recounts and a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Compare the 2000 squeaker to what happened in 2004.
This year, Bush beat Democrat John Kerry nationwide by 3.5 million votes in the largest voter turnout percentage since 1968. Bush carried hotly contested Florida by nearly 400,000 votes. No recounts this time. Of the 31 states Bush carried (to Kerry's 19), Republicans increased their vote totals over 2000 in every state but three. Ralph Nader, the spoiler for Democrats in 2000, was an electoral cipher this year. In no state won by Bush did the Nader vote make a difference.
Bush's 59.1 million votes was the highest total for a presidential candidate in American history. Bush's 51 percent of the national vote this year marked the first majority vote for president since Bush's father swamped Michael Dukakis in 1988. Bush's 59 million votes were 4 million more than Ronald Reagan won in the Gipper's landslide re-election victory of 1984. Bush became the first president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 to win re-election while adding to his party's majorities in the House and Senate.
Now look beyond these already impressive indices for the full measure of what Republicans won Tuesday.
From California's border to the Atlantic coast and from Canada to Mexico, the political map of the United States is awash in Republican red. A once dominant Democratic Party is now largely confined to three enclaves: the Northeast, a thin fringe along the Pacific coast and the upper Midwest (where shrinking majorities put the Democrats' hold there increasingly at risk). Almost everything else is Republican.
Excepting still-competitive Florida, the entire South is now solidly Republican. Every border state along the old North-South divide went heavily for Bush in 2004. Beyond the Mississippi, Bush and the GOP swept every farm, prairie and mountain state plus Texas, Arizona and New Mexico in the Southwest.
The congressional election returns reflected the Bush-led Republican tide. In Senate races, Republicans exceeded expectations by gaining a net four new seats, giving them a commanding 55-44 (one independent) Senate majority. Among the Republicans' Senate wins, Rep. John Thune beat Senate Minority Leader (and Bush nemesis) Tom Daschle in South Dakota. Daschle is the first Senate leader to be voted out of office since 1952.
Just a decade ago, nearly half of the 11 southern states' U.S. senators were Democrats. Tuesday's election means Republicans will now hold 18 of the 22 southern Senate seats plus all four from Kentucky and Oklahoma.
In the House of Representatives, Republicans added at least four seats to their current majority. That will give Republicans a 233-200 (with one independent and one race yet to be decided) majority in the new House. Republicans now begin their second decade as the majority party in the House. With the demographic center of the American population shifting steadily to the Sun Belt red states of the South and West, House Republicans now stand a good chance of maintaining their majority for a generation.
These are tectonic shifts in American politics.
That they were confirmed and extended this year in particular makes them all the more impressive.
George W. Bush waged his battle for re-election amid staggering adversity: A controversial war, slow recovery from an inherited economic recession, a distinctly hostile press and an unprecedented barrage of venom and vilification from a howling chorus featuring the likes of propagandist Michael Moore, billionaire George Soros, Bush-bashing 527 groups, Hollywood celebs and the liberal-left of the Democratic Party.
That Bush won anyway, and by a decisive margin, sends a sobering message to the national Democratic Party.
In the face of this sea of political troubles, Bush garnered 8.3 million more votes than he received in 2000. Karl Rove's assiduous work in the trenches expanded the Republican Party's electoral base by an election-winning 15 percent. The huge voter turnout everyone assumed would help Kerry win instead boosted Bush to victory.
A glance at the political demographics of that vote should alarm Democrats.
The sleeper issue in this election, all but ignored by the liberal mainstream press, was moral values. Nearly a quarter of those voting Tuesday told exit pollers that their paramount issue was moral values. Of those, 85 percent voted for Bush.
Bush won 55 percent of the Catholic vote, 45 percent of Hispanics, 65 percent of regular churchgoers, 61 percent of Protestants, 40 percent of union members, 54 percent of families with veterans and 54 percent of those with a high school education. The female gender gap that once helped Democrats is disappearing. Bush won 57 percent of married women and nearly half of all female voters, even as he beat Kerry among male voters, 53 percent to 46.
Registered voters are split about evenly as Republicans and Democrats but self-described conservatives outnumber liberals 2-1.
Honest Democrats admit that their party and the Massachusetts liberal they ran for president this year are out of step with mainstream America on fundamental issues of values and culture. Add Bush's clear advantages as a strong, credible commander in chief and the reasons for his re-election are apparent.
Democrats can draw the appropriate lessons or watch as the dominant Republican red across America's political map keeps spreading.
Caldwell, editor of Insight, can be reached via e-mail at robert.caldwell@ uniontrib.com
