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March 27, 2007 | Democrats should give two cheers for George W. Bush. He and his political mastermind, Karl Rove, dreamed of achieving a permanent Republican majority. Instead, his disastrous presidency has dealt a devastating blow to the GOP, one from which it may not recover for many years.
That's the inescapable import of a major study of American voters' values and attitudes by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, released March 22. The study finds that voters have turned dramatically away from the GOP since Bush took office. Iraq, of course, is the single biggest reason for this. (A separate Pew poll, released on March 26, shows that 59 percent of Americans want their congressional representatives to support a bill calling for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq by August 2008, with only 33 percent opposed.) But even more troubling for Republican strategists is the fact that underlying attitudes and beliefs are trending against them. The study's implication is that the GOP, especially in its current far-right incarnation, was facing serious structural, long-term problems anyway, and that Bush delivered the coup de grâce.
To Democrats and left-leaning independents who were preparing to either commit suicide or move to Provence after the 2004 elections: Put down the gun and back away from the baguette. America may not be the Bush League, after all.
I asked Andrew Kohut, the Pew Center's director, if there was a single ray of hope for the GOP for 2008 in his group's report. He pointed out that if the poll showed Americans turning away from the GOP, they weren't very enthusiastic about the Democrats, either. In fact, he noted that "the favorable ratings for the Democratic Party really haven't improved that much since 1994." And he added that voters in presidential elections are heavily influenced by the qualities of individual candidates, not just party affiliation.
But aside from those rather feeble caveats, Kohut said the writing was on the wall for the GOP. "With the kind of discontent there is with this administration and national conditions, unless things change dramatically there's going to be a vote for change, not for continuity," Kohut said.
Particularly worrying for the GOP are the trend lines among independents, a swing group Republicans desperately need to hold. "The independents seem to be coming closer to the Democrats these days," Kohut said.
The most explosive statistic in the survey shows a mass exodus from the GOP -- a defection that can only be blamed on Bush and the Iraq war. In 2002, the number of people who identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning was the same as those who identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning: 43 percent. But today, 50 percent of the public identify as Democrats or leaning that way, while only 35 percent identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning. In other words, in just five years Democrats have gone from being tied with the Republicans to holding a 15 percent lead.
In historic terms, Kohut said this shift is quite large. He cautioned, "It's mostly the independents, and the independents can swing back the other way." But then he added, "But there are no indications in the short run that they will."
Considering that Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and Bush barely won in 2004, a shift of this size has vast ramifications. It's true that gerrymandering and the vagaries of the Electoral College give the Republicans a built-in head start. It also remains to be seen whether the Democratic political machine is capable of challenging the GOP juggernaut. And
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