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Brainster's Blog — The Morning After The media are doing their best to convince people that Obama had a big win. Don't buy it. Just looking at the two-party vote, Obama won by about six percentage points. That's a only a slightly larger margin of victory than Clinton in 1992 and smaller than Clinton's margin in 1996, Bush Sr.'s margin in 1988, way smaller than Reagan's in 1984 and 1980, and Nixon's in 1972. Predictably, liberals are claiming this represents an embrace of liberalism. These guys--and the others who are counseling Barack Obama and the ...
America the liberal
Cold Fury —
Like it or not, I think he’s got it right : Even before the final results, showing a Democratic sweep, were in, Washington’s pundits were declaring that nothing had really changed politically in the country. In a cover story labeled “America the Conservative,” Newsweek editor Jon Meacham warned that, “[s]hould Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal.” Meacham’s judgment was echoed by Peter Wehner, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “America remains, in the main, a center-right nation,” Wehner wrote in ...
Pinch Me!
Jules Crittenden —
... . I’d hardly call it that, but someone needs to explain to TP that the image Obama wants to project and what he actually is are two different things. The New Republic: America the Liberal … can Dems establish an enduring majority ? Good question. Never underestimate the ability of the Dems to act in their own worst interest, TNR. Also, ...
More On The Emerged Dem Majority
TalkLeft —
To follow up on this post, I want to point you to John Judis' terrific piece on the same subject. A flavor: This realignment is predicated on a change in political demography and geography. Groups that had been disproportionately Republican have become disproportionately Democratic; and red states like Virginia have become blue. But underlying these changes has been a shift in the nation's "fundamentals"--in the structure of society and industry, and in the way Americans think of family, job, and government. The country is definitely no longer ...
Maps
The Monkey Cage —
... Squint really, really hard and maybe you can help me understand what John Judis is talking about when he calls this election a “radical realignment” that “is predicated on a change in political demography and geography.” See also #5 in Andy’s ...
Elected liberals, govern liberally
pandagon.net - we are the public option —
... 3) The diversity of the Obama coalition, and the fact that they voted for him believing that he was a huge liberal. By Election Day, there wasn’t an Obama voter who wasn’t familiar with the accusations that he was a leftist, and while few of us believed it, most of us believed he is a liberal. And we voted for him anyway. And it’s a diverse cross-section of the country, as John B. Judis notes here. This is not about some small special interest, but a genuine show of the will of the people. ...
Truths and Myths about the 2008 Election, Part IV
The Monkey Cage —
4. THERE IS NO REALIGNMENT
This notion permeates post-election analysis. For example, there is the John Judis piece I noted earlier. This New York Times piece says: “In a striking measure of potential political realignment, the gap between self-described Democrats and Republicans has grown.” Since Election Day, 29 different news stories contain the words “realignment” and “election.”
The notion of “realignment” has become fairly amorphous. At times, journalists and ...
On The Realignment Question
Matthew Yglesias —
... There’s a debate afoot on the internet on the subject of whether the Democrats’ sweeps in 2006 and 2008 amount to a “realignment” in American politics. You can see John Judis argue the affirmative case, or else ...
