UPDATED SUMMARY

This is an update of a piece from last August. The election results demonstrate the serious, decade-long and continuing, decline of the national Democratic Party. This is never reported in the Mainstream Media, which are the megaphone for the powerful money/media axis of the party, primarily in New York and Los Angeles. One would hope for change, but the history of industries and companies in decline, like the Mainstram Media are, show that they keep doing the same wrong things — only ever louder, as we saw in this campaign cycle.

Overview

The election of 2004 was about whether there is any Democratic Party national majority left in the United States today. John Kerry was in many ways the generic Democratic candidate, and his loss tells us a great deal about the future prospects for his party as it is currently governed.

The Kerry candidacy

Let’s start by stating that John Kerry was the man for his time in this regard: unlike Howard Dean, for example, Kerry embodied in himself all the contradictory positions of today’s Democratic party — pro and anti war, and on down the list. In that way, despite his personality limitations as a standard bearer, he was the perfect Democratic presidential candidate. Hitchens nailed it in the NYT months ago:

[H]ow often have you met a self-described Kerry supporter?….The name Kerry is thus another tired synonym for ABB, or ”Anybody but Bush.” Shall we ”take America back” this November? In such a case, we would be taking it back to a fairly familiar version of Democratic consensualism.

The excitement the Democratic Party thus was of a general nature, taking back the country and so forth from those nasty, greedy Republicans, that “crooked bunch” in Kerry’s words. All Democrats with the inclination could project onto Kerry the policy positions they favored, because he favored them all — the blander he seemed in not favoring one policy too much over another, the more he was the perfect vehicle for the Democrats’ deepest desire that he be Anybody but Bush. This is precisely why Kerry did as well as he did on November 2.

The Most Important Map in politics: the Democrat media and money megaphone

It therefore was no surprise that the Democrats were as jazzed as they were, despite the candidate’s bland personality and delivery. The Democrat’s media megaphone in NYC, LA and DC was cranked up to ear-splitting maximum volume with their Anybody but Bush daily criticisms of the President, often on totally contradictory grounds. My favorite map in all of politics illustrates the extraodrinarily small and concentrated geographic sources of this powerful critical noise. (Please take the time to follow the link to the full-size map to fully appreciate this most important point.) The map shows that there are huge Democratic fundraising majorities in NYC, LA, and DC — the major media, government, and fashionable dinner party centers — and that the rest of the country is red, or pale blue.

Many of the very rich and influential Democratic money, media, and government people in New York, Los Angeles and the District know each other and socialize with each other. They remain under the impression that they are setting an informational and political agenda for the American people. The money/media map influences less and less of the country, however, as these electoral results show:

And, worse than that for the megaphoned elites, this map by county shows even further the relatively microscopic geographic areas where their influence has produced an electoral majority:

Hat tips: Captain’s Quarters and Sean Hannity.

The loudness of the megaphone has obscured the Democrats’ decline

The Democrat trends have not been good for the last decade. As I posted two years ago, in an article by Sam Smith in the Progressive Review, the trends were bad even before the 2002 election. In the last decade, there was:

the disintegration of the Democratic Party itself. An analysis I did in 1998 found that during Clinton’s administration, the Democrats had lost:

- 48 seats in the House
- 8 seats in the Senate
- 11 governorships
- 1,254 state legislative seats
- Control of 9 legislatures

In addition 439 elected Democrats had joined the Republican Party while only 3 Republican officeholders had gone the other way. While Democrats had been losing state legislative seats on the state level for 25 years, the loss during the Clinton years was striking. In 1992, the Democrats controlled 17 more state legislatures than the Republicans. After November 2000, the Republicans controlled one more than the Democrats. It was the first time since 1954 that the GOP had controlled more state legislatures than the Democrats (they tied in 1968). Among other things, this gave the Republicans more control over redistricting. In fact, no Democratic president since the 19th century suffered such an electoral disintegration of his party as did Clinton.

This disastrous decline of the Democratic Party has continued in 2004, with continuing losses in the House and Senate as well. Thus, from 1994 on, the Democrats have suffered a decline unprecedented in modern political history. They have lost the House, the Senate, the Presdiency twice, the majority of governorships and state houses, and soon, a good chunk of the Supreme Court and the judiciary — and yet this enormous, relentless, systematic, predictable and continuing decline has been treated by the Mainstream Media as a series of unrelated aberrations instead of the largest political story of this generation.

Democrat electoral college problems for 2004 predicted months ago, but not reported by the MSM

John McIntyre of RealClearPolitics, had this nailed back in August. It’s turned out to be 100% accurate:

From an electoral college standpoint, the race is somewhat easy to analyze because most states are going to follow the Bush-Gore 2000 results. Because of reapportionment, this year if all states stayed the same Bush’s total would rise to 278 from 271 and Kerry’s number would fall to 260 from Al Gore’s total of 267. (Late clarification: Officially Gore received 266 electoral votes, because of one abstention form the District if Columbia.) So the question for the Democrats is how does Kerry get to 270? Let’s stipulate up front that if Kerry wins wins either Florida or Ohio Bush is more than likely finished. But if we leave aside Florida and Ohio for a second and assume they stay in the Bush column, suddenly Kerry’s path to 270 becomes very difficult.

The path to 270 electoral votes was particularly unclear because the way that the Democratic party has chosen to configure itself on social and cultural issues has eliminated the entire South, and other culturally conservative states, from being in play for them. It should have been apparent that the Democratic Party, under its current policy views, had an upper limit of about 252 electoral votes and declining from there, but sometimes these lessons require bitter experience to take root.

Conclusion: The Mainstream Media ignore the Democrat decline

There is currently no national Democratic Party majority in the United States. That is the precise lesson and legacy of the campaign of the perfect Democrat “Anybody but Bush” candidate, John Kerry. It thus appears that a prediction I made two years ago regarding the 2002 election results about the importance of the New Media has been borne out, and this was before SwiftBoatVets, Rathergate, deep QaQaa and all the rest.

Throughout the history of capitalism, it has been the case that most companies do not change when change threatens the corporate culture. They continue to do what they do the way they do it, even when that becomes unpopular. They often try to mask their decline (discussed here) by bringing greater intensity to their efforts, and by trying to get governmental curbs imposed on their compeition, as the Mainstream Media have done.. They create a market opportunity by doing so, and eventually some entrepreneur or other company comes along to exploit the unfulfilled demand. Indeed, as this space has discussed at length, Rush Limbaugh created the entire industry of the New Media out of this insight. So, now that there is a significant Bush win in November, I do not expect much soul-searching at the Times, the Post, CNN or the alphabet networks. They will be puzzled and outraged, and look for dirty tricks, the limitations of Kerry as a candidate, or some other convenient excuse as the explantion — even as their readerships and viewerships continue their steady, relentless decline (discussed here). After all, everyone they know in New York, Los Angeles and Washington continues to say they vote Democratic.

In that regard, it appears fair to note that Evan Thomas of Newsweek and his colleagues probably delivered their promised 15 points to the Kerry campaign through their ignoring the major stories — such as SwiftBoatVets — referred to above. One can hope for an improvement in their behavior — but don’t hold your breath.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004 at 8:38 am and is filed under General, New Media, Red Shift. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.