The Charleston Gazette

GOP strategist Karl Rove once foresaw a "permanent Republican majority" in America. The party's burgeoning base encompassed the affluent elite - plus white fundamentalists mobilized by "God, guns and gays" - plus Dixie whites swayed by President Nixon's "Southern strategy" of subtle appeals to racism - and the like.
But last week's election jerked the rug from under that Rovian vision. Since Barack Obama's stunning victory, analysts scanning exit polls say a distinct tide is pulling America in the Democratic direction. (Astronomers find a "red shift" in light from receding stars, but a "blue shift" is happening in the U.S. electorate.)
White evangelicals still voted three-to-one Republican on Nov. 4 - and Alabama whites voted almost 90 percent "red" - but they were overwhelmed by an upsurge of diversity in the populace. Young voters, Hispanic voters, well-educated voters, urban voters, black voters, tolerant voters, etc., produced the Democratic floodtide.
"It's just straight-out demographics," political pundit Jon Margulis wrote. "...The people who voted for John McCain Tuesday were richer, whiter (meaning non-Hispanic whiter), more rural, more religious, and less educated. Oh, and older."
As aging voters die off, he concluded:
"For Republicans, the news only gets worse. Not only is the country becoming less white Anglo, it's becoming less rural and perhaps even less religious. ... Every year, the country gets more diverse, more metropolitan, more cosmopolitan, even a bit more secular. In the process, it gets less Republican."
The Christian Science Monitor said America is gaining a surge of under-30 voters who are "more ethnically diverse, secular, technologically adept, and Democratic."
Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson wrote Wednesday: "The election has left the Republican Party reeling, its base shrunk to those southern, plains and mountain west states where rural cultures still predominate. ... Republicans have grown weaker everywhere but the white rural south - the region that remains the least-educated and least-diverse."
Columnist Frank Rich wrote that the McCain campaign failed in its attempt to "turn Americans against one another in the name of 'patriotism.'" He said vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin bungled "her fierce embrace of the old Karl Rove wedge politics, the divisive pitting of the 'real America' against the secular 'other' America." Rich concluded:
"The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who's left? The only states where the GOP increased its percentage of the presidential vote were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas."
A Tuesday New York Times analysis said glaring racism among Southern whites is visible in the election results. "Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less-educated, and whiter," it said. The national paper quoted University of Maryland political scientist Thomas Schaller as saying Republicans "have become a Southernized party. They have completely marginalized themselves into a mostly regional party."
Earlier this year, a new book titled The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party contended that "the Republican Party has retreated into the Deep South and Rocky Mountains." It declared that President George W. Bush "has remade the Republican Party, turning it into a minority party as a consequence of his radicalism," meaning his favors to the rich and fundamentalists, his plunge into avoidable war, his deregulation of greedy Wall Street, and the like.
In Friday's Washington Post, GOP figure Christine Todd Whitman, co-chairman of the Republican Leadership Council, said her party has been "taken hostage by social fundamentalists, the people who base their votes on such social issues as abortion, gay rights and stem cell research." As a result, she said, moderate, mainstream Americans voted Democratic, having "rejected the politics of demonization and division."
Various other factors such as the economic crisis and the unpopular Iraq war - plus the brilliant, trust-inspiring eloquence of Democratic nominee Barack Obama - spurred last week's GOP defeat. Beyond those considerations, is rising diversity shifting the U.S. populace as a whole toward the Democratic Party? We hope so - but nobody can be sure until future election returns are counted.