Even though the results are just a few days old, it's already hard to keep track of the lessons from, and implications of, Tuesday's election. Here are some early thoughts, in no particular order:
The Republican Mandate: Perhaps the biggest surprise, at least if you believed the polling, is that the presidential race was actually never all that competitive. It's hard not to concede that President Bush and the Republicans have secured a mandate for much of their agenda in at least the next two years. Bush's considerable?though not overwhelming?margin of victory in the popular vote does not account for this entirely, but when you factor in his four million vote lead with the Republicans' success on other fronts, a pattern emerges. Bush did better in many red and blue states than he did in 2000, including substantial gains in some of the bluest states?New York, California, and New Jersey. The GOP increased its majorities in both houses of Congress, bolstered by wins in closely contested Senate races in South Dakota, Florida, and Louisiana. On the issue front, in eleven states, including the Kerry states of Michigan and Oregon, marriage was defined by a considerable majority of voters as between a man and a woman.
That the American electorate is largely centered just a bit to the right is no secret. But the real significance of the Republicans' win this year is that it came despite a number of convincing reasons to give President Bush the boot. If the Republican Party can win, in fairly convincing fashion, when things are not well, how can it possibly lose on a large scale when times are more stable? And so the real test of the Republican mandate is what happens in the next four years: if Iraq stabilizes, there is no major terrorist attack, and Bush manages to successfully advance a domestic agenda, it is difficult to foresee the Republicans' strength diminishing in the coming decade.
The Democratic Party: The Democratic Party remains as difficult to define post-election as it was pre-election, and the jubilation from a Kerry win would not have masked a party in the midst of a serious identity crisis. Short of reciting a laundry list of specific issues, no one knows exactly what Democrats stand for. Asked by Wolf Blitzer who the leader of the Democratic Party is, Chris Dodd replied on Wednesday that there "wasn't any one person here. There are various elements of our party...that need to be heard collectively."
And therein lies the problem. While tolerance and inclusiveness are the buzzwords of the day, such philosophies don't seem to translate well into electoral victories. It's not that a party can't include diverse groups?it's that such inclusiveness must be under the auspices of a broader, unifying message. Traditionally, the Republicans have figured this out: regardless of the independent factions that support Republicanism, everything has taken a backseat to the broader goals of smaller government, an aggressive foreign policy based on the advancement of liberal values, and a firm belief that politics and morals aren't as easily separated as many liberals would like them to be.
Many are predicting that the Democrats will now enter a period of "soul searching" to determine "what went wrong" and how to "better connect" with more socially conservative voters. This process of soul searching actually began in the primaries, when Democrats' hearts were clearly with the energetic Howard Dean. But as Tim Cavanaugh points out, their minds?and their votes?were with John Kerry. While Dean lost his bid, he had an enormous effect on the election by exposing just how elastic the Democratic establishment candidates were in their positions. The verdict of the primary season was that, when faced with a critical election, the Democratic Party could not agree on a single, streamlined message to present to the American voter?except, of course, that Bush had to go. But that's a platitude, not a platform.
"Values" voters: There seem to be two reactions to the so-called "values" voters who tipped the election for Bush. One is that they're mostly idiots, voting against their economic self-interest and for all the wrong reasons, an argument advanced in veiled terms by New York Times columnists Tom Friedman yesterday and Nicholas Kristof on Tuesday. The other, more tempered reaction is "how do we connect to these voters?", a question raised by a number of Democratic leaders already.
These voters are not idiots; they are willing to forsake material gain provided by the power of government if such gain means neglecting their stance on moral issues. In short, they'd rather lead the right life, as they see it, than the comfortable life. And the Democrats' questions are well-founded, for as it stands, the party has no mechanism to deal with these voters. It has no leaders that identify with them (Joe Lieberman probably comes closest), and the party's intelligentsia believes so strongly in secularism that it is hard to see substantial changes in policy positions.