The previous low-water point for the Republicans in the House during the last fifty years was 1976, where they lost 4 more seats from the previous election to drop to 145 against the Democrat’s 290.

In the Senate, the most recent low point was the 32 seats the GOP held in 1964 in the aftermath of the Goldwater debacle.

The various articles that I’ve read show that the Republicans will have more seats to defend this year and in 2010. Led by a charismatic President Obama, much (although not all) of the mainstream press, Charles Barkley, and virtually all of the entertainment industry, can the Democrats get to a point where they are fielding close to 300 representatives and a filibuster-proof 70 senators? And if so, at what point does one-party hubris become a factor (ala Roosevelt’s attempt to neuter the Supreme Court by expanding it)? Or does the majority become almost permanent, like Mexico’s PRI in the 20th century or California’s Democratic legislature? And finally, if a supermajority comes into play in 2008, will it hold together and allow for national health care, swift withdrawals from Iraq and possibly Afghanistan, a comprehensive energy and global warming policy, hate crimes legislations, and the reinstatment and removal of right-wing commentators from the radio? Or will conservative elements within the Democractic party combine with the few remaining Republicans to thwart the Obama Administration’s legislation, as southern Democrats did to Roosevelt during his second term?

By the way, white democrats, if Obama is elected, who do you think he’s going to favor most if not all of the time? And if Hitlery Clinton is elected, how many white heterosexual males do you think SHE’S going to appoint to cabinet posts?

Um, what kind of odd bit of the identity politics world do you live in, exactly?

Tons. After all, the vast majority of people qualified for those jobs are white heterosexual males.

Now in a Republican presidency, we might have a few more white homosexual males…. cough Larry Craig… cough.

Hey, that’s “Jose Seis Paquetes” to you, bub!

This, I think, is the reason why the Southern Strategy was so damaging. It won a lot of short-term victories but has (I suppose like most other successful strategies), sown the seeds of its own destruction. My brother (who is quite the liberal, but definitely tempered by a decade of big city life in, until recently, not so nice neighborhoods) and I were talking about this the other day. I mentioned the famous quote of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan,

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

One of the things we both agreed on was that over the time from the 1950s to the 1980s, the culture really went through some major league shocks—civil rights and the end of Jim Crow being, I think, one of the absolute biggest—and, in a sense, lost its moorings. Much of the “Southern Strategy” was explicitly tapping the anxieties of that age. However, when you make a bargain with the devil, you will have to pay the bill eventually…. As messed up as a lot of things seem to be these days, many social indicators are moving in the right direction: divorce is becoming less common (at least among the middle and upper classes), teen pregnancy is down, a lot of crime is down, etc. There are upticks, of course, but overall things ARE moving away from the bad place we were in twenty years ago. Causality is very hard to impute here. (I am a firm believer that the term “cause” and observational data have very little to do with each other. ) But nonetheless, I do think that Moynihan was onto something important and that a new culture is emerging that can accommodate many of the changes that happened in the immediate post-World War II era. Such changes, however, are usually the work of years and decades, not instant results.

###Of course, the barely-stated premise of this article is that huge majorities of Hispanic and African-American voters will always vote Democratic. That may be true on the black side, but it’s much less likely for latinos. Say what you will, many Hispanics are socially conservative while being fiscally liberal.###

All I can say is, so far at least, pocketbook issues prove to much more salient for these populations than the social ones you mention, or so sayeth the survey data. The usual way that this sort of thing is examined is to ask subjects to rank-order policies in terms of most to least, or ask them to nominate their top three, etc. Latinos and Blacks are often quite socially conservative but put the social issues like gay marriage, etc., pretty low on the queue. In a sense, these are seen as “luxury” issues for them. (If you do not require people to make tradeoffs between issues, they often say everything is desirable, so the ranking is necessary.)

However—as previous waves of immigration have proved—over the course of a generation things like this do change as these groups move up into the middle class. The Republicans have benefited a great deal from the movement of the children of the immigrants of the first half of the 19th Century becoming middle class and, I would suspect, will benefit from the children of the 1980- wave becoming middle class.

###I’m truly amazed at the way politicians can ignore large groups of people. It’s all about numbers and percentages and what “blocks” they think they can swing.

And they wonder why we feel like our votes don’t count.###

It’s simply a matter of the institution. Single member districts lead this kind of thing because you tend to leave large groups within the population unrepresented. For example, let’s say that a given electoral district with three parties A, B and C had preference percentages A = 20%, B = 40% and C = 40%. You can bet that a candidate from party A will not win. Of course, the incentives might lead party B or C to court party A and try to make a 60/40 split, but there will inevitably be big chunks of party A’s supporters left out in the cold.

Of course, multimember districts have their own… peculiarities.