The Blues

This article provides some chilling analysis of the election if you're a Democrat. Bottom line is that across the board--not just in red states--Democrats lost considerable ground from the 2000 campaign. The article is worth reading in its entirety, as is most of the writings published by the Weekly Standard.

Perhaps the best way to appreciate this change, however, is not to focus on Bush’s share of the vote, but instead to compare the percentage of the vote received by the Left Coalition of Gore-Nader in 2000 and Kerry-Nader in 2004. It is revealing to focus on this coalition, because it represents the real opposition to the Republican party. By this measure, if the electorate was as unchanged as many have suggested, the Kerry-Nader percentage of the vote in each state in 2004 should have equaled the Gore-Nader percentage in 2000.

But this was decidedly not the case. Although John Kerry received a larger share of the vote than Al Gore in 25 states, this masks the general decrease of the Left Coalition, which was often substantial. In only three states–most noticeably in Howard Dean’s Vermont, but slightly in South Dakota and Wyoming, where the Left is at its weakest–did the score of the Left Coalition clearly increase between 2000 and 2004. Take, as one of the most conspicuous examples, John Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts. Kerry slightly outpolled Al Gore. But this point is hardly as relevant since in 2000 Gore and Nader combined to receive 66 percent of the vote. Without Nader on the ballot in Massachusetts, Kerry was still only able to poll 62 percent–a notable decline, even with the added pull of a favorite son on the ballot. In New York, 64 percent of voters chose the Left coalition in 2000, while only 60 percent did so in 2004. There were instances of larger losses in other Blue states: Hawaii 8 points, Rhode Island 7 points, and in Connecticut and New Jersey 6 points each. Changes of this magnitude belie the notion of “stability” that [Harold] Meyerson and others have advanced.

THE DECLINE of the Left Coalition was not restricted to the Blue states. In 17 of the 31 Red states this year, it lost anywhere between 2 and 6 percentage points. Alabama, Nebraska, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Arizona, comprising 47 electoral votes, witnessed at least a 4 percent decline in Leftist support. Because Nader’s share in these states was generally small in both elections, these losses came almost entirely at the Democrats’ expense.