Anything in there about DINO's and RINO's, like the Dixiecrats and the RINO's in the Philly Burbs?  I'd wonder what those numbers are and how it affects the picture.

I think that the growing trend in third party support is good, because it shows that people are utterly pissed at the two parties.  I don't know if a third party is the answer, but I am glad that people are clearly giving the two parties the finger, so maybe they will wake up one day soon and, I don't know, start representing the people.

(I took comfort all last summer in Ruy's assurance that, historically, undecideds break against incumbents. Didn't work out that way.)

I ain't no statistician with time to review these arguments. And, frankly, I don't have the nerve to do it. The thought of losing net Senate seats in '06 is so bleak as to be insupportable.

I think there are two ways to look at today's situation:

• The existing political dynamic which has prevailed over the last 25 years or so. By that standard, we are in deep, deep trouble. The Thugs have an iron grip on the structure of politics and, when you add their media control and their distortion of the vote at the polls, it's almost impossible to see a way back to the light.

• The possibility of the long standing political dynamic fraturing and reforming in a radical way. If that happens, then projections to the future based on the recent past are useless.

Well, actually, I think '04 started to show the emergence of new patterns. Take for instance Bush defying election strategies by ignoring the middle and feeding his rabid base throughout the whole election. That seemed fatally wrong, but it worked.

And now it is working in reverse. Bush has gone to the extreme end of the political spectrum, and it isn't playing well.

Then there is Dean building the grassroots. That's an entire dimension that simply did not previously exist.

Then there is reality: Iraq. The debt. The economy. People losing their pensions. Etc.

A reaction is, I think, building that could blow conventional, past-based thinking out of the water. That's where my hope lies.

Which is all a way of saying, I am not particularly interested in technical analysis of polls and political structure. If the political technocrats have a grip on reality, then we are all doomed anyway.

And I just keep hoping that the People rise up and demand a new political structure. That's our only hope.

Funny, I thought that McGovern lost 49 of 50 states in 1972 and his nomination was the precursor to the abandonment of the Democratic party of millions of ethnic Catholic voters in the North and southern white Democrats in the south.  We have never really recovered from it.

The way he treated the "regular Democratic" nominees from Mayor Daley's state of Illinois, his embraces of what Richard Nixon called "amnesty, acid and abortion" gave the Democratic party an image of sexual immorality and hedonism that persists in many quarters to this day.  Only a Watergate scandal and Ford's pardon of Nixon enabled Jimmy Carter to win in 1976, and only a Republican-lite phony named Bill Clinton, aided by Ross Perot's splitting millions of conservative voters off from George Bush, enabled  Democratic victories in 1992 and 1996.

The "McGovern model" may work to give Democrats very narrow margins in the popular vote, which the Republicans then steal through their control of the election machinery and process in most of the states, but it falls short of the Electoral College majority needed to elect a president.

Maybe the reason for the increased turnout in non-battleground states was the Rove/Bush policy of constantly and consistently playing to their base for the whole four years.  Traditional campaigns play to the base up until the beginning of Ocyober and then switch to battlegrounsd states.  Bush started earlier and Kerry and the Dems never got going there.  Quite possibly, the media focus on red vs. blue states and battleground vs. safe states may have had a depressing effect on Democrats in the blue states.

Reagan did not prove that deficits don't matter.  He did prove that the way to win (at least for GOPers) does not have to lie to appeal to the center.

Other points in the article proved that such efforts as easy absentee ballots and same day registration had a small but positive effect on turnout.  We should push making voting easier wherever we have control.  One blue state (although not controlled by the Dems at the state level) that could be "reformed" is New York.  It makes qualifying candidates for primaries exceedingly difficult and fanatically prunes out its voter registration lists.  Both tactics are downers and NY has one of the lower turnout rates of any blue state.

In summary, the biggest "fraud" of all was that 78 million people of voting age in this country did not participate.

To ignore the cultural issues, as you imply, by suggesting an economic populist revolt will produce a new Democratic electoral majority in itself, is inadequate.  Millions of voters voted against their economic interests in 2004 because of cultural issues.  This just did not start in 2004, it really started in 1972 when cultural issues first established resonance across Middle America.

The nomination of a moderate "born-again" southerner named Jimmy Carter against mainstream Republican named Gerald Ford in 1976 temporarily diffused the situation that year, but in 1980 the triumph of Reagan's social conservatism in the Republican party speeded the consolidation of culturally conservative formerly Democratic voters into the Republican coalition.  (The Reagan Democrats.)

The Democratic ticket went on to lose 3 elections in a row, only to be rescued by the Republican-lite Bill Clinton and helped by Ross Perot's splitting the conservative vote.

We have not had a populist Democratic president since LBJ, and we will not get one unless we deal with the cultural issues.

While I agree a Northern-Western coalition could come about-because cultural liberalism is greater in those states-it is still a risky strategy.  There are lots of cultural conservatives in the North and the West as well.

We don't need to let the Religious Right into the Democratic party. That is not what I am suggesting.  We just need to stop letting the Republicans take the mantle of God and patriotism and protectors of us in the war on terror.  We have to deal with this.

To wait for an economic recession is not the answer.  We already are close to Third-world economic stratification in this country, which in previous years would have produced that "revolt" you are so eagerly awaiting.  However, due to the corporate media dumbing down the masses, along with the Bread and Circuses going on in the media, (Reality TV), the masses are disinformed couch potatoes.  

The loss of loyalty to the community-the church, the school, the labor unions- has been replaced with the "Me First" creed so emblematic of the Baby Boomers and their children.  No wonder we have a Republican trifecta in charge of the country.  A nation that does not care about its poor, and a population of the poor to dulled by Media Bread and Circuses  to realize its being shafted, will invariably elect a Republican majority.

I am saying we need to address these issues and not let the Republican Party take God and Country and Family away from us.

In times past, people went to church on Sundays for worship services. They did not go to watch movies, sip cappucinnos at the coffee bar, or babysit their children.  

The Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, and the older Baptist evangelical churches encouraged their members to help the needy in the community and do volunteer work in the community.  Their support was crucial for the labor movement.

Nowadays, the non-denominational megachurches offer almost all the amenities of a shopping mall, catering to their self-absorbed affluent suburban members desire to "punch their tickets for Jesus" on their way out the door.  They may be absorbed in their suburban megachurch, but don't know the names of their neighbors 2 houses down.

It is a shame.

Forgive me for the rants as well.  It is a dreary Friday.  Not much good news.  Sick of hearing about Michael Jackson.  I guess the media considers this circus more important than our boys getting killed in Iraq, along with tens of thousands of innoncent Iraqis.  Buy the corporate media is benefitting big time from Bush's tax cuts, so expect more of the same.