Polity

. Volume 41, Number 3 . July 2009

r 2009 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/09 www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/

The 2008 Election and the Political Geography of the New Democratic Majority
David A. Hopkins University of California, Berkeley

Although the 2008 election brought partisan change to Washington, it also furthered a long-term trend of increasingly large and stable regional alignments in both presidential and congressional elections. The growing dominance of the Democratic Party in the Northeast and coastal West, especially within large metropolitan areas, has effectively countered Republican electoral strength in the South and interior West, reducing the number of highly competitive states. In House and Senate contests, Democratic gains across the North and West have produced an ideologically diverse majority party as well as a congressional Republican Party increasingly dominated by southern conservatives, raising serious questions about the future ability of the GOP to compete effectively in much of the nation. Polity (2009) 41, 368387. doi:10.1057/pol.2009.5; published online 11 May 2009

Keywords 2008 election; elections; political parties; campaigns; political geography; regionalism

David A. Hopkins is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on political parties and elections, with a particular interest in the political geography of the United States. He is the co-author, with Nelson W. Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky, of Presidential Elections: Strategies and Structures of American Politics, 12th edition. He can be reached at dhopkins@berkeley.edu. For many, the election of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois as the 44th president of the United States on November 4, 2008 represented the beginning of a new era in American politics. To the New York Times, Obamas victory amounted to a national catharsis,1 while the Boston Globe characterized it as
1. Adam Nagourney, Obama: Racial Barrier Falls in Decisive Victory, The New York Times, November 5, 2008, A1.

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precipitating an era of profound political and social realignment in America.2 International observers echoed this interpretation; the Times of London called the 2008 election a global political event that transformed [Americas] image in the world,3 while the Toronto Star editorialized that the U.S. ushered in a triple revolution spanning racial equality, political renewal and generational change.4 Change indeed served as the central theme of the Obama campaigna message further reinforced by the candidates grassroots organization, relative youth, and racial identity. In his victory speech, Obama argued that the results of the election demonstrated the American peoples hunger for an end to the bitter partisanship of the recent past, symbolized for him, as for so many others, by the conventional wisdom that a geographic fault line now divides the nation into politically warring regions of red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) territory. His election sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of . . . red states and blue states, Obama declared. We are and always will be the United States of America. This was a familiar theme for the new president-elect, whose keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the speech that first launched him into the national consciousness, contained a memorable passage denying the existence of fundamental political differences between red and blue America while dismissing pundits and spin masters who like to slice and dice our country. But while Obamas rhetoric might appeal to voters weary of partisan conflict in Washington, the actual results of the 2008 election confirmed the enduring presence of a significant regional rift in contemporary American politics. As states reported their vote returns on election night, the familiar pattern of Republican red and Democratic blue began to reappear on electoral college maps. Democratic dominance of the Northeast, urban Midwest, and Pacific Coast was countered by Republican success in the South and interior West. Television networks predicted outcomes in 27 states and the District of Columbia before the first state flipped from its 2004 alignmentOhio, carried by George W. Bush in the previous two elections, was projected by multiple media sources for Obama at about 9:20 pm Eastern Time, signaling a likely Democratic victory in the electoral college. Far from reordering the political map, the 2008 election results instead reflected a fairly even national shift toward the blue end of the political spectrum prompted by widespread public dissatisfaction with the performance of Bush

2. Scott Helman and Michael Kranish, Historic Victory, The Boston Globe, November 5, 2008, A1. 3. A Masterclass in Democracy, The Times (London), November 6, 2008, 2. 4. Barack Obamas Triumph of Hope, The Toronto Star, November 5, 2008, AA08.

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and his fellow Republicans. Obama easily carried all 22 states5 won by either Al Gore in 2000 or John Kerry in 2004, adding seven states that voted twice for Bush: Indiana and Ohio in the industrial Midwest, Colorado and Nevada in the urban West, and the New South population centers of Florida, North Carolina, and Virginiaa significant but limited incursion into former Republican territory largely explained by his strong nationwide performance. Had the national pro-Democratic swing of 4.9 percent in the two-party popular vote between 2004 and 2008 occurred uniformly in each state, only the three closest states in the nation, all decided by a margin of less than 1 percent, would have voted differently in 2008: Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina. Although existing regional alignments remained intact, the 2008 election did bring about significant political change. In fact, when combined with the 2006 midterms, it represents one of the most notable reversals of partisan fortune in recent memory. Not long ago, one prominent electoral scholar could plausibly argue that the Republican Party [is] in its strongest position since Herbert Hoover was elected president in 1928,6 due to Republican control of the White House, seemingly durable majorities in both houses of Congress, and a similar numerical advantage among governorships and state legislatures. Net gains across the 2006 and 2008 elections of fourteen Senate seats,7 fifty-four House seats, seven governorships, and control of thirteen state legislative chambers provided the Democratic Party with larger majorities at all levels than the Republicans had held after 2004, while Obamas victory in the presidential contestwinning the popular vote over Republican nominee John McCain by 52.945.6 percent while receiving 68 percent of the electoral votewas similarly decisive, especially in comparison with George W. Bushs relatively narrow reelection four years before. While such dramatic transfers of political power often inspire speculation about the occurrence of an electoral realignment, evidence suggests that the 2008 election produced much more continuity than change in the geographic constituencies of the two major parties. In fact, the current era is among the most stable in this regard in American history, with consistent regional patterns of partisan support now apparent in both presidential and congressional elections. The ubiquitous discussion of red and blue states in todays popular

5. The District of Columbia, which casts three electoral votes, is considered a state for the purposes of this article unless specifically noted otherwise. 6. Gary C. Jacobson. Polarized Politics and the 2004 Congressional and Presidential Elections. Political Science Quarterly 120 (Summer 2005): 199218, at 199. 7. As of April 2009, the outcome of the 2008 U.S. Senate race in Minnesota, a narrow Democratic victory according to the official state canvass, has been formally contested by the Republican candidate. Figures in this article assume that the election is ultimately decided in favor of the Democrat.

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political analysis is occasionally simplistic or misguided, but reflects the extent to which contemporary partisan voting patterns increasingly follow geographic lines. The new Democratic majority is therefore built upon trends that stretch back twenty years or more. Over this time, the party has consolidated its electoral strength across much of the North and coastal West, drawing particularly loyal support from the residents of large metropolitan areas. The Democratic Partys establishment of a strong northern geographic base has counteracted the Republican ascendancy in the South during this period, though with substantially less notice from most political observers.

Geographic Polarization in Presidential Elections

The contemporary emergence of significant geographic variation in voting behavior has become conventional wisdom among many popular political observers since 2000, when the striking regional partisan alignments evident in that years electoral college mapDemocratic dominance of the Northeast, industrial Midwest, and Pacific Coast states bracketing an L-shaped area of Republican territory joining the South and interior Westfirst inspired journalists and pundits to coin the terms red states and blue states, referring to the colors used to denote Republican and Democratic victories, respectively, on election night telecasts. The presence of such stark apparent geographic differences in partisan preferences appeared to contradict prevailing assumptions that the U.S. was becoming more politically and culturally homogeneous, and immediately inspired a steady stream of enthusiastic amateur ethnography purporting to describe the salient characteristics distinguishing the denizens of red America from their blue-state counterparts (with the relative popularity of caffe latte and professional auto racing in a particular location deemed, by general consensus, to be a reliable indicator of its voting habits).8 The near-perfect replication of the 2000 electoral college results in 2004, despite four intervening years of eventful national politics, seemed to confirm the validity of the view that America was deeply and persistently divided along the redblue fault line.9 Several of the most dramatic assertions made by popularizers of the red-versus-blue thesis can, in fact, be easily debunked with empirical analysis. But some scholars have gone even further, arguing that the basic claim of increasing geographic conflict is itself a myth generated by the news media while dismissing the current political differences between Democratic and Republican
8. A typical exercise in this genre is David Brooks, One Nation, Slightly Divisible, The Atlantic Monthly, December 2001, 5365. 9. Only three states voted for different parties in the two elections (Iowa, New Hampshire, and New Mexico), the fewest since 1904 and 1908.

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Percentage of Electoral Votes Cast by States Within Each Threshold of Deviation from the National Two-Party Popular Vote

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 Year +/- 10 Pct Points +/- 5 Pct Points +/- 3 Pct Points

Figure 1

The declining scope of competitition in presidential elections, 19722008.

states as minor and inconsequential, especially by historical standards.10 To what extent is the nation becoming more politically divided, if it is divided at all? One measure of geographic division is the extent to which electoral results within individual states differ from the national outcome. State-level variation in presidential elections is in fact growing over time, as revealed by Figure 1. As late as 1988, more than half of all electoral votes were cast by states whose two-party presidential vote differed from the national vote division by three percentage points or less; since George H. W. Bush won 54 percent of the national two-party vote in the 1988 presidential election, this category includes all states in which Bushs vote share ranged from 51 to 57 percent. Obama also won roughly 54 percent of the national two-party popular vote in 2008, but received between 51 and 57 percent in states casting just one-quarter of all electoral votes. As Figure 1 shows, this trend is consistent over time whether the threshold is three, five, or ten percentage points. By 2008, the average state differed from the national vote by 8.9 percentage pointsthe highest level since the election of 1940. Whether an individual state deviates from the national vote by three or five or ten percentage points might not seem consequential in the abstract. But the states

10. Morris P . Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005); Stephen Ansolabehere, Jonathan Rodden, and James M. Snyder Jr.,Purple America, Journal of Economic Perspectives 20 (Spring 2006): 97118.

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Democratic Base (112 EV) Competitive (278 EV) Republican Base (148 EV)

Figure 2

State alignments in the 1988 presidential election.

that closely mirror the national electorate are those that hold the balance of power in the electoral collegeand are therefore likely to be contested by presidential campaigns. The size of the electoral battleground depends on the amount of state-level variation in support for the two candidates; under the unit rule system of allocating electors, neither candidate has an incentive to invest resources in states that are considered safe for one side or the other. Figure 2 displays the states that fell within the three-point margin in the 1988 election. These states tended to be heavily targeted by both presidential candidates. Notably, this category included both California and Texasthe campaign of George H. W. Bush identified California, as well as other states now considered safely Democratic (such as Illinois and New Jersey), as must-win,11 while Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis selected Texas Senator Lloyd

11. Darshan J. Goux, Grading the Battleground: A New Measure of Presidential Campaign Activity in the States, Paper Presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA (August 2006).

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Democratic Base (212 EV) Competitive (137 EV) Republican Base (189 EV)

Figure 3

State alignments in the 2008 presidential election.

Bentsen as his running mate as part of a serious effort to contest a state that has since become dependably Republican. By 2008, only a quarter of the nation closely mirrored the national popular vote. Once again, as Figure 3 shows, the three-point range generally captures the states actively contested by both the Obama and McCain campaigns. The solidification of the Republican electoral advantage across most of the South, including Texas, is immediately apparent, reflecting the familiar progression of the regions secular realignment. Equally noteworthy, however, are countervailing trends elsewhere in the nation. Nearly all of the Northeast and Pacific Coast has become safely Democratic by 2008, including California, which Obama carried by 24 percentage points (the widest electoral margin in the state since 1936). While a number of states remain more purple than truly red or blue, the proportion of highly competitive states has declined markedly since 1988, leading to the emergence of a contemporary regional alignment in which an increasingly Democratic North and Pacific Coast balances a largely Republican South and interior West.

Percentage of States/Electoral Votes Won by the Same Party in All Five Elections

Percentage of States/Electoral Votes Won by the Same Party in All Five Elections
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State-level stability in presidential elections, 18802008. (Controlling for national party tides).
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State-level stability in presidential elections, 18802008.

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With little notice, American politics has entered an era of unusual stability in state-level presidential election outcomes. Figure 4 displays the proportion of states (and electoral votes cast by states) that consistently supported the same party for president during every five-election period since the end of Reconstruction. The 19922008 period is, by this metric, the most stable set of five consecutive elections during the entire timespan covered by the figure, easily outdistancing the five Roosevelt/Truman elections of 19321948 and even exceeding any five-election run during the 18801928 period, usually considered the apex of American sectionalism. Nearly 63 percent of states, casting 64 percent of all electoral votes, have voted consistently Democratic or Republican over the last five presidential elections, despite the ever-changing combinations of candidates, issues, and events shaping the electoral environment. Of course, it is possible that this state-level consistency primarily reflects relative national electoral stability; while short-term political forces delivered coast-to-coast landslide victories to the Democratic candidate in 1964 and to Republicans in 1972 and 1984, for example, pulling even normally safe party states into the column of the opposition, no comparable popular margins have occurred in more recent elections. But accounting for national electoral tides does not, in fact, contradict the findings above. Figure 5 is identical to Figure 4 except that the national partisan distribution of the vote is controlled for in each election; figures therefore represent the proportion of states (and electoral votes cast by states) that consistently voted more Democratic or more Republican than the national electorate in each five-election sequence. The era of dealignment in the 1960s and 1970s12 exhibits a great deal of election-to-election volatility in comparison with other historical periods, but state-level stability has risen steadily ever since, reaching a post-Reconstruction peak in 19922008. Three-quarters of all states, casting 79 percent of all electoral votes, remained consistently more Democratic or more Republican than the national outcome in each of the last five presidential elections. Figure 6 reveals that the combination of greater variation and stability at the state level has led to increased regional differentiation over the past ten presidential elections. A double-digit gap has emerged between the consistently Republican interior West and increasingly Republican South on one side and the comparatively Democratic Northeast and Pacific Coast on the other, with the Midwest remaining very slightly more Democratic than the nation as a whole. While southern realignment would render the rest of the nation more Democratic in comparison even if there were no true change, controlling for the national vote

12. Martin P . Wattenberg, The Decline of American Political Parties, 19521996 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Walter Dean Burnham, The Reagan Heritage, in The Election of 1988: Reports and Interpretations, ed. Gerald M. Pomper (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1989), 133.

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Regional Deviation from National Two-Party Vote

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Regionalism in presidential elections, 19722008.

Note: Regional definitions are as follows: Northeast: Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont. Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin. South: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia. Interior West: Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming. Pacific Coast: California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington.

(as Figure 6 does) actually understates the extent to which Democratic support increased in the Northeast and Pacific Coast over this period while exaggerating the movement in the South toward the Republicans, since the overall fortunes of Democratic presidential candidates improved over time (averaging 44 percent of the two-party popular vote from 1972 to 1988 and 52 percent from 1992 to 2008). As a result, Barack Obamas 2008 presidential campaign could count on a dependable geographic base centered in the Northeast (with all states in the region except New Hampshire and Pennsylvania considered safe for the Democrats) and along the Pacific Coast, including Hawaii, plus his home state of Illinois: a total of one hundred and ninety electoral votes. This exceeds the number of electors ultimately won by McCain (one hundred and seventy-three), suggesting a structural advantage for Democrats in the electoral college, at least in 2008. However, Obamas overflowing war chest (and steady lead in public opinion polls throughout the home stretch of the campaign) allowed him the

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luxury of contesting normally Republican states such as North Carolina and Indiana that were not central to his electoral college strategy; absent this advantage, the two parties regional strongholds are of roughly equal size. Indeed, Obamas success in traditionally Republican territory was in fact fairly limited, despite some exaggerated press commentary to the contrary. Aside from carrying three states in the South by modest margins, he did not perform particularly well in the region, winning just 46 percent of the two-party votethe worst showing by a victorious Democratic presidential candidate in American history. Obama even failed to match Kerrys 2004 popular vote share in five southern states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia), where his race may well have been a salient factor. Likewise, although Democrats have often claimed in recent years to be gaining support in the interior West, Obamas success there was restricted to victories in three states (Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico) and a near-miss in Montana, all states carried by Bill Clinton in 1992, plus a single electoral vote from Nebraska. The rest of the region remained solidly Republican. At the same time, the 2008 election demonstrated that even a self-proclaimed maverick Republican now faces great difficulty in making significant inroads into Democratic areas. Despite claims early in the year that John McCains moderate, independent-minded reputation might allow the GOP to contest normally Democratic parts of the Northeast (such as New Jersey and Connecticut) and the Pacific Northwest, these states were in fact never seriously targeted by McCain strategists. Even Democratic-leaning but usually competitive states proved insufficiently promising to justify a significant investment of campaign resources; McCain pulled his organization out of Michigan in early October, a decision that prompted a great deal of press commentary about the perilous state of his candidacy. In the last weeks before the election, McCain identified Pennsylvania as the most vulnerable of the states won by Kerry four years before, but multiple public appearances and heavy television advertising failed to prevent a ten-point Obama victory in the state. The key to Obamas success in Pennsylvania, as in many other states, was his strong base of support among the residents of the nations largest metropolitan areas. A generation ago, the dependable Republican leanings of most populous suburbs tended to counteract the Democratic loyalties of central cities; as suburban areas grew in population, this trend promised to work to the long-term advantage of the Republican Party.13 Beginning with the Clinton elections in the 1990s, however, many suburbs, especially within large metropolitan areas outside the South, began to shift toward the Democrats in presidential voting; this
13. Kevin P . Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969); William Schneider, The Suburban Century Begins, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1992, 3344.

Table 1 Presidential vote in the twenty largest metropolitan areas, 19882008

Metro area New York Los Angeles Chicago WashingtonBaltimore BostonProvidence San FranciscoSan Jose PhiladelphiaWilmington Detroit Dallas Miami Houston Atlanta Seattle Phoenix Minneapolis Cleveland San Diego St. Louis Denver Pittsburgh TOTAL: Twenty largest metro areas REST OF NATION 2000 population (in millions) 21.1 16.4 9.3 7.5 7.1 7.1 6.2 5.4 5.2 5.0 4.7 4.4 3.6 3.3 3.1 2.8 2.8 2.7 2.6 2.4 122.9 158.5 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 (20081988)

50 46 50 50 52 59 48 50 39 46 42 39 52 35 55 54 39 51 49 60 49 44

58 57 60 60 60 69 59 58 45 57 46 50 61 45 59 59 51 61 56 63 58 50

66 57 63 59 67 68 63 63 44 64 46 49 61 49 61 62 49 58 53 56 60 51

65 57 60 59 63 68 61 59 38 61 41 45 59 45 53 58 48 54 50 54 58 45

60 54 60 59 61 70 60 58 38 59 41 44 59 43 53 59 47 54 52 52 56 43

64 62 68 65 61 75 65 63 45 62 46 51 65 45 57 61 55 58 59 51 61 48

14 16 18 15 9 16 17 13 6 16 4 12 13 10 2 7 16 7 10 9 12 4

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Note: Figures represent Democratic percentage of the two-party presidential vote. Source: Compiled by author using federal Metropolitan Statistical Area and Combined Statistical Area definitions.

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tendency continued in 2000 and 2004. By 2008, Obama could count on lopsided electoral margins from most large population centers, representing not only the overwhelming Democratic preferences of city dwellers but the partys increasing popularity among suburbanites as well. As Table 1 shows, Obama received a majority of the vote in seventeen of the twenty largest metropolitan areas (all but metro Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix) and won over 60 percent of the vote in each of the eight most populous. These twenty metropolitan areas collectively contain 42 percent of the nations voters and constitute a majority of the electorate in a number of key states, often spilling across state boundaries. The 2008 election solidified Democratic electoral dominance of the metropolitan corridor composed of greater Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington that stretches from southern New Hampshire to northern Virginia, passing through eleven states casting a total of 123 electoral votes. Obama carried all eleven, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate since 1964 to win Virginia in large part due to his strength in the Washington suburbs. Lopsided victory margins in large metropolitan areas elsewhere helped to produce Obama victories in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, Washington, and California. As Table 1 indicates, Obamas strong 2008 showing was not a fluke; residents of large metropolitan areas have moved disproportionately toward the Democrats in presidential elections over the past twenty years. Obamas share of the two-party vote among these voters in 2008 exceeded that of Michael Dukakis in 1988 by 12 percentage points, compared to a four-point difference in the rest of the nation. On top of his generally overwhelming victories in central cities, Obama also received large electoral margins in key suburban counties, winning 64 percent of the vote in Westchester County, New York; 60 percent in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania; 54 percent in Macomb County, Michigan; and 61 percent in Fairfax County, Virginia, challenging the conventional view of suburbs as Republican strongholds. Obama even challenged GOP supremacy in the traditional conservative bastion of Orange County, California, losing there to John McCain by a slender two-point margin. The metro-level data presented in Table 1 are also notable for their relative consistency across the five elections from 1992 to 2008. Although substantial variation exists in the relative partisan leanings of different metropolitan areas, the two-party vote share seldom shifted more than a few percentage points from one election to the next. The low level of partisan change among states during this period is thus mirrored at the local level as well, further suggesting that contemporary elections are, by historical standards, unusually stable. Even the 2008 presidential electiona contest of unprecedented length and cost, featuring a unique collection of candidates (for both president and vice president) and conducted during a time of crisis both at home and

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abroadproduced an outcome that was, in fact, highly predictable: a mostly uniform national popular-vote shift of about five percentage points toward the Democrats in comparison with 2004, reflecting widespread dissatisfaction with the incumbent regime. Whatever change the 2008 election might have brought to American politics, the electoral coalitions of the two major parties remained largely intact. While the Republican ascendancy in the South over the past several decades has received a great deal of attention from scholars and popular commentators alike, the Democratic Party has, with substantially less notice, formed a durable majority across the North anchored at opposite ends by the Northeast and the Pacific Coast. This geographic coalition first emerged at the presidential level in 1992, but has more recently arisen in elections for the Senate and House of Representativesproviding another indication that regionalism has become a key characteristic of contemporary party politics.

Regionalism and Party Ideology in the U.S. Congress

Not long ago, it appeared as if the decline of the coattail effect and the increasing size of the incumbency advantage had significantly insulated Congress from the results of presidential elections. Republicans held the White House for 20 of 24 years between 1968 and 1992, while Democrats maintained control of the Senate for all but six of those years and the House of Representatives for the entire period. Even the forty-nine-state Nixon and Reagan landslides in 1972 and 1984 failed to threaten the Democrats hold on Congress. In recent years, however, congressional elections have seemed to mirror presidential-level outcomes more closely. While the persistence of large Democratic congressional majorities into the 1990s was in large part due to southern Democrats continued success in House and Senate elections even after the region had swung toward the GOP in presidential races, the Republican Revolution of 1994 substantially closed this gap. Likewise, the nationwide shift toward the Democrats that occurred in the 2006 midterm elections appeared to be particularly concentrated in the urban North, suggesting the presence of an increasing regional divide in the House and Senate. The 2008 congressional elections indeed closely tracked the presidential contest. Of the 35 Senate seats up for election in 2008, 28 were won by the party whose presidential candidate carried the state. Democrats gained 7 seats in states won by Obama (Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia); two-term incumbent Susan Collins of Maine was the only victorious Republican Senate candidate in a state voting Democratic in the presidential race. But Senate Republicans successfully retained 14 of 15 seats in states won by McCain, narrowly losing in Alaska only after incumbent senator Ted Stevens was convicted eight days before the election on seven felony counts

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of filing false disclosure forms. The strongly favorable national climate left Democrats holding a 5941 advantage in the Senate (including two independents affiliated with the party caucus)the largest margin of control by either party since the 19791980 Congress. House elections in 2008 produced a similar pattern. Democrats won 22 additional seats in states carried by Obama while Republicans made a net gain of one seat in McCain states. Democratic victories in previously Republican-held seats were particularly concentrated in large- and medium-size urban areas across the North and West, including Staten Island and Syracuse, New York; Erie, Pennsylvania; Cincinnati, Columbus, and Canton, Ohio; Battle Creek, Michigan; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Las Vegas, Nevada; and suburban New York, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit, and Chicago. The 257178 Democratic advantage in the House after the 2008 election exactly matched the partys margin of control just before the 1994 midterms, effectively reversing the gains made in the Republican Revolution. The most dramatic partisan shift over the past two congressional elections occurred in the Northeast. The 2006 election provided House Democrats with a 211 advantage among the six New England states; in 2008, the single remaining Republican, Christopher Shays of Connecticut, lost his bid for reelection, giving the Democratic Party an unprecedented monopoly from Maine to Connecticut. In neighboring New York, a House delegation in which the Democrats held just a five-seat edge, 1813, as recently as 2000 consisted after 2008 of 26 Democrats and only 3 Republicans.14 Additional gains in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland left House Democrats with 75 of 92 total House seats, or 82 percent, across the 11 northeastern states. In the Senate, Democrats gained two seats in the region in 2006 and one more in 2008, holding an overall 184 majority after the 2008 election. When combined with similar trends in presidential voting, these results threaten the continued viability of the northeastern Republican Partyat least in federal elections (although the fact that Democrats now also hold 8 of 11 governorships and majorities in 21 of 22 state legislative chambers suggests that Republican woes extend farther down the ballot). Figure 7 displays the partisan seat division in House elections since 1972 for each of the five regions of the United States. Mirroring the presidential election results presented earlier, the current regional alignment emerged in the early 1990s. The national pro-Republican shift in 1994 was particularly concentrated in the South and interior West; temporary gains by the Republican Party in the Northeast and Pacific Coast states were quickly reversed over subsequent elections.
14. New York lost two House seats after the 2000 national census.

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100% Percentage of House Seats Held by Democrats 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992 Year 1996 2000 2004 2008 Northeast Midwest South Interior West Pacific Coast

Figure 7

Regionalism in the U.S. House, 19722008.

Although many analysts assume that the Republican electoral ascendancy in the South has proceeded relentlessly since Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Figure 7 demonstrates that the truth is substantially more complex. Not only did the South consistently elect the highest proportion of Democratic House members of any region until the early 1990s, but House Republicans have also failed to make additional gains since the 1996 election, stalling at about a 60 percent share of all southern seats. The success of the congressional Democratic Party at maintaining a viable moderate wing able to compete effectively in the South (and in the interior West, where Democrats have made an impressive comeback from holding just 15 percent of House seats in 1996 to a narrow majority after 2008) has allowed House Democrats to continue to outperform the partys presidential candidates in relatively conservative constituencies. The Blue Dog Coalition, an organization of centrist House Democrats mostly from the South and rural West, expanded to 47 members in the 20072008 Congress; though the groups tendency to deviate from liberal orthodoxy may frustrate Democratic congressional leaders, its members ability to win election in hostile partisan territory represents a key strategic advantage for the party. The moderate wing of the House Republican Party, by contrast, appears to be suffering a long-term declineand was particularly devastated by the results of the 2006 and 2008 elections. Many moderate Republicans representing competitive districts in the Northeast and Midwest fell victim to voter

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100% Percentage of Senate Seats Held by Democrats 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 Year Northeast Midwest South Interior West Pacific Coast

Figure 8

Regionalism in the U.S. Senate, 19722008. dissatisfaction with George W. Bush and the Republican congressional leadership; others retired, leaving their politically vulnerable seats open to capture by the opposition. Of the 58 members constituting the most ideologically moderate quarter of the House Republican conference in the 109th Congress of 20052006 (as measured by first-dimension DW-NOMINATE scores), just 27fewer than halfremained in the 111th Congress of 20092010.15 Thirteen were defeated by Democratic challengers in 2006 or 2008; two lost Republican primaries to more conservative rivals who were themselves defeated by Democratic candidates; and sixteen retired or sought higher office (of which eleven were succeeded by Democrats). In the 1980s and 1990s, the increasing number of southern Republicans in Congress moved the party toward the ideological right by bolstering the ranks of its conservative wing; these more recent electoral trends appear to have had a similar effect by subtracting moderate members from the Republican conference. The growth of regionalism in the years after 1992 is immediately apparent in Senate elections as well, as demonstrated by Figure 8. In fact, geographic variation is comparatively larger due to the larger constituencies and fewer number of seats in the upper chamber. Senate Republicans have proven more

15. DW-NOMINATE scores from www.voteview.com. For an explanation of the methodology used to calculate these scores, see Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Ideology and Congress (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007).

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successful than their House counterparts at capturing a consistent majority of seats in the South (holding 19 of 28 even after the Democratic gains of 2006 and 2008), while Democrats have steadily tightened their grip on the Northeast and Pacific Coast since the mid-1990s. As in the House, the moderate wing of the Senate Republican Party has become increasingly vulnerable to electoral challenge. Moderate incumbents Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and Norm Coleman of Minnesota all lost bids for reelection to liberal Democrats in 2006 or 2008. The results of the 2008 congressional elections mirrored the presidential contest, resulting in larger national Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives and a reinforcement of existing trends toward greater partisan regional differences in American politics. In the aftermath of the election, Democrats held two out of every three seats outside the South in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1936,16 having especially consolidated their electoral dominance in the Northeast and Pacific Coast at the expense of the increasingly vestigial moderate wing of the Republican Party. These losses rendered the overwhelmingly conservative southern contingent ever more dominant within the GOP; 46 percent of the partys members in both the House and the Senate now hail from the South. The new Democratic majority in Congress is more northern, more metropolitan, and possibly more liberal than ever before. Yet enough regionaland, therefore, ideologicaldiversity remains to complicate efforts by leaders to enforce party discipline. The still-vibrant moderate wing of the Democratic Party allows it to remain competitive in Republican-leaning areas of the nation, especially in the South and interior West, and has therefore provided it with larger House and Senate majorities in the new Congress than the Republicans held even at the peak of their power. However, this relatively wide range of constituencies may present a challenge to the new presidents more ambitious proposals, especially if public support begins to fade. (Only 46 senators are Democrats from states carried by Obama in the 2008 election.) In addition, the thinning ranks of moderate Republicans may make it more difficult for the administration to gain bipartisan support for its policy agenda. Congressional Republicans face a different challenge. While the 2006 and 2008 election results collectively represented in one sense a short-term (though significant) setback, the publics expression of disapproval of a president who is now out of office, the decline of moderate Republicanismand, with it, the partys ability to challenge Democratic electoral dominance of the Northeast, urban Midwest, and coastal Westhas been in progress for decades. It is not clear how a party now broadly identified with southern-style conservatism
16. The Republican Party briefly achieved the same feat following the 1952 election.

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rebuilds a viable centrist wing even if it wishes to (which, to date, it has not). Although congressional Republicans will no doubt regain some of the territory lost in the previous two elections, and may well consolidate their strength in the conservative bastions of Appalachia, the Deep South, and the rural West, any path to renewed control of Congress, especially of the House, runs through the northern metropolitan electorates that have recently become noticeably hostile to the party brand.

Conclusion
The new Democratic electoral majority is anchored by the partys growing advantages in the nations largest metropolitan areas, which have allowed it to establish a dependable regional base within the Northeast and along the Pacific Coastas well as to compete effectively throughout the urban Midwest and in a few New South and Rocky Mountain states. Even the revolutionary Obama campaign formed an electoral coalition that, at least geographically, represents far more continuity than change. The same set of regional alignments has emerged in congressional elections as well, with increasing Democratic success in the Northeast in particular occurring at the expense of the moderate wing of a Republican Party now increasingly dominated by southern conservatives. Just four years ago, the notion that George W. Bush, under the direction of his chief political aide Karl Rove, had established a permanent Republican electoral majority was at least seriously pondered by a number of prominent political analysts. Such claims appear foolish in retrospect, of course, but the credence they were given at the time demonstrates the degree to which the Republican Party was widely believed to hold an unshakable advantage over the Democrats on the basis of what were in fact two very close presidential elections, one of which featured a Democratic victory in the popular vote, and historically modest margins of control in Congress. It is quite possible that the ubiquitous color-coded map of the 2000 (and 2004) electoral college results significantly distorted the actual relative strength of the parties in the eyes of observers who equated land area with population. A view of the U.S. not as closely divided, as the vote totals might indicate, but as containing a few liberal urban enclaves on the coastsBoston, Manhattan, San Franciscoon either side of a vast expanse of loyally conservative middle America became quite popular during the Bush years, even among Democrats who wrung their hands over their partys supposed inability to appeal to heartland voters.17
17. A viewpoint captured most prominently in Thomas Frank, Whats the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).

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The extent to which this attitude became conventional wisdom for many Republicans was revealed during the 2008 election in what became a recurrent premise of the McCain presidential campaign: the superiority of the small town over the metropolis. This theme emerged, perhaps out of necessity, as an attempt to defend vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin from charges that her pregubernatorial tenure as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (population 5,500) did not constitute adequate preparation for national office. Palins frequent invocation of the honesty, sincerity, and dignity of small-town residents contrasted with McCains stated disdain for elitists who live in our nations capital and New York City. A spokeswoman for the McCain campaign even suggested during a television interview that the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. were not real Virginia, a statement that took her questioner by such surprise that he offered her a chance to climb back off that ledge. This is a curious strategylarge population centers, after all, are where the votes are. Most Americans live in a metropolitan area of at least 1.5 million people; a small fraction of the nations population still resides in small towns. The central challenge facing the contemporary Republican Party is its decaying support among the residents of large metro areas outside the South, yet party leaders appear as yet reluctant to craft a message designed to target those voters. For the Democrats, the 2008 election results not only represented an unambiguous triumph but also demonstrated the limits of the partys appeal. Even in an unusually favorable political environment, most of the South and interior West remained resistant to the Obama candidacy and generally loyal to Republican candidates in down-ballot races. The new Democratic majority, though substantially larger than that held by the Republicans during the Bush years, still pales in comparison to the Roosevelt and Johnson landslides (and accompanying congressional margins) of the 1930s and 1960s, even as the extent of the challenges now facing the nations political leaders draws frequent comparison to those periods in American history. Despite the new presidents appeal to a sense of national unity and common purpose, these divisions will prove difficult to overcome.