Exactly. The populism of GOP wins them poor voters but they lose some rich people, especially intellectuals.

Well, no, it's fundamentalist versus mainline Christians. I go to church once a week or more but in a United Church of Christ congregation, not God's Own Rock of Fire Temple.

was the "attend church weekly: +5 for Dems."

In a year where basically every group moved at least +11 for Dems (men, whites, whatever), the avid churchgoers barely budged, relatively speaking.  The GOP still has a lock on them.

Not that I'm surprised, and not that they can't be convinced to stay home entirely, but it's interesting to see the numbers formally back up that hunch.  

This is our future. Always has been.

About the Jewish vote: if people aren't hard core AIPAC, they are getting that Israeli survival is only possible if somebody steps in and shuts down Israeli misbehavior. Don't know if that is possible, but it is the best hope for Israel.

Thanks for those numbers. Hmm. Interesting that the Catholics and Protestants have identical numbers, except for being "flipped" between parties.

I probably wasn't as clear as I meant to be in my initial post. What I meant was that just presenting the shifts doesn't provide a whole lot of clarity as to whether something transformational is happening or not. A 6-point change might be significant if it goes from 50-50 to 53-47, but not as significant if it goes from 1-99 to 4-96.

I don't know why the Jewish vote surprised you. Jews are overwhelmingly liberal. Traditionally only African Americans and Gays vote Democrat in higher number than Jews. Who do you think the Republicans are talking about when they say "Hollywood Liberal"... that's code for Jews.

Certain neo-cons may be noisy, but there are like 15 Jewish Senators and only 1 is a Republican (Arlen, hardly a flaming right-winger). Both Jewish Supreme Court Justices are liberal. For every Joe Lieberman (who is, after all, not even really a conservative), there's a Bernie Sanders, Socialist.

Most importantly, though, these election results show that non-whites and non-Christians are not voting Republican, and Jews may be mainly white, but they are not Christian. Remember last month when George Allen had to disavow his Jewish past in order to mollify his conservative Christian base? Why would we want to be associated with people like that?

Abosulutely right. Legal immigrants even Hispanic don't want illegal immigration. This wedge issue could be made into an opportunity by getting the Repubs into the extremist and nativist camp. Sane immigration legislation that does not demonize the non-whites is a smart idea.

Couple that with economic fairness and increasing opportunity for the lower income groups through better education and healthcare funding.

Strengthening the Hispanic, Asian-American and other immigrant groups vote only helps the Dems.

Fascinating and important analysis, BriVT.  Your argument and the scenario you lay out not only make sense, but have major implications re: the value of having the Dems take the lead on sensible and balanced immigration reform.  It would be sweetly ironic if the one issue where Bush seems to have a relatively sane perspective would be the one in which he helps insure that the Dems win in 2008 and beyond.

And on Chris' general point, it's worth noting that the choice Americans appeared to have made in this election not only bodes well for Democratic electoral prospects, but also for a bit more sanity in the country--and potentially the world.  As we've seen, the Republican cultural supremacists aren't just wrong and ignorant, they're also pretty dangerous when they control the reins of power.

For us to capture the loyalty of a group, they need to internalize a narrative (obviously, another buzz-phrase), that makes sense to them and ties them in their own minds to our political programs.

I have a feeling threat of imprisonment had more to do with the anti-Republican vote than any narrative Democrats can sell.  

With a little more careful nurturing of certain demographics

Selling narratives won't win votes. Pluralism that includes women, minorities, gays, non-Christians, the poor, wins votes.

If the previous comments didn't make sense, I was referring to what Chris said:

The true dagger came from Latinos who, to the tune of a shocking thirty points, shifted to Democrats more than any other demographic group in the country.

The operational spectrum isn't defined by themes, just by the questions I presented.  Whether one supports such spending or opposes it.

However, as you'll see if you read the blog post, "Conservatism As Identity Politics--Pt2: Hard Core Data", there's another spectrum, the ideological spectrum, which is more directly tied to values:

Ideological Spectrum (Statements presented with respondents asked to agree or disagree):

  1. The Federal Government is interfering too much in state and local matters.
   2. The government has gone too far in regulating business and interfering with the free enterprise system.
   3. Social problems here in this country could be solved more effectively if the government would only keep its hands off and let people in local communities handle their own problems in their own ways.
   4. Generally speaking, any able-bodied person who really wants to work in this country can find a job and earn a living.
   5. We should rely more in individual initiative and ability and not so much on governmental welfare programs.

Liberalism, like science, tends to stumble on its beliefs.  Sometimes you get a brilliant theorist who sees a whole new pattern that connects things beautifully together, and by God, the experimentalists go out and prove the theorist right.  But more often you get experimentalists trying everything they can think of, and the theorists sorting it out afterwards.

This is what happened with the New Deal.  There wasn't a grand theory behind it.  There were some competing tendencies, but no one really had a grand theory.  Even Keynsianism was only embraced after an attempt to get back to balanced budgets produced the recession of 1938.  It wasn't until the 1970s that John Rawls produced A Theory of Justice, the first systematic philosophical justification of the welfare state.  And not many talk radio hosts talk about Rawls, if you know what I mean.  So, in that sense, Free and Cantril are correct.

But, on the other hand, Lakoff is quite correct to say that liberals have a coherent set of moral values at the core of their philosophy, whether they're aware of them or not.  And it's quite telling, IMHO, that conservatives actually have to borrow and recycle old liberal narratives, with a perverse twist on them, in order to try to sell their wares.  No one's buying divine right of kings anymore.  So Bush sells his crusade in the name of "democracy," even as he rails against democracy in Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, or even here in the USA, when it turns against him.

In Whose Freedom?, Lakoff argues--quite correctly, IMHO--that freedom is inherently understood to mean progressive freedom, which is why conservatives talk about it so constantly: it's an effort on their part to redefine freedom in their own terms.  If people naturally accepted their definition, they wouldn't have to talk about it all the time.

There's a rough parallel in the content of ideological conservatism, as Hadley and Free define it.  It's not that liberals abandoned those ideas.  They simply discovered that they weren't enough by themselves.  Maybe they were at one time, maybe not.  But we do know that (1) they represented an advance over what came before--the system of feudal dependence and its historical parallels, such as the old guild-apprenticeship model, and (2) they have been superceeded by newer understanding.  We know now that free markets don't always self-regulate in beneficial ways.  We know that government involvement is necessary.  We don't want heavy-handed government, of course.  But government regulation is a hell of a lot better than the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age running everything, or Enron & it's buddies stealing $40 or 50 billion from the consumers of California.

This is what liberals haven't done a good job of communicating--that they're for both the liberal ideas of the 19th century past, so far as practicable, and for more recent liberal ideas of the 20th and 21st century, which we've discovered are necessary in order to acheive the same underlying goals that liberalism has had all along.