Will There Be A Realignment?
Andrew opened an interesting and important subject yesterday that I suspect will be one of the big topics in the mainstream media tomorrow: is the 2008 election a "realignment"?
The answer is that it could be, but we won't really know for several years.
I did my senior thesis on realigning elections. It has been a long time since my last year in college, but one of the things that has stayed with me since I did that research (and typed the paper on erasable bond using an IMB Selectric) is that you can't instantly label an election as a realignment. It may have the potential of being a relatively permanent change in some voters' preferences, but one election is not a trend.
To be a true realignment, the results of an election have to do two things: be repeated and continue down the ballot to local elections. Changing presidential preferences one time isn't enough; the realignment occurs when those same preferences are reflected in subsequent voting for Congress, governor, mayor, and other local offices. You know something big is happening when the votes for sheriff in a non-presidential election year shift the same way that the presidential vote shifted.
As Andrew reminded me yesterday, this is not unlike what happens in the world of economics. Many commentators rush to label a one quarter downturn in GDP as a recession. And they may be right. But the official definition requires that the negative growth be repeated for a second quarter so (as the debate from the past year has shown) we really won't know whether a recession has occurred until those results are repeated.
Does the 2008 election have the potential of being a realignment? Absolutely. All the signs are definitely there.
For example, it appears that many previously consistentlty red states may go blue this year. If that happens, it will be the political equivalent of a leading indicator.
It also appears as if there may be a big shift of women voters towards the Democrats. Again, that would be a leading indicator.
If the turnout by African-American voters is as high as itis now expected to be, that too could be taken as an indication that the election calculus has changed.
And if, as seems possible, the GOP goes through an extensive self examination after the 2008 election and comes out looking different and attracting different voters than the political party that existed before, that too could be a sign that the political world has changed substantially and more or less permanently.
But there will simply be no way to know immediately whether this is the result of current events such as the market and economic downturns, disatisfaction with George W. Bush, the charisma of Barack Obama, or something much larger and longer lasting.
We should know that four years from now, when two-thirds of the U.S. Senate, almost every governor and state legislator, virtually every mayor, and countless sheriffs, judges, and county commissioners have to run for election.
Until then, it will be fun speculating. But it will only be speculation.
