Barack Obama's victory on November 4 represented a major "regime change" in Washington, and also a historic accomplishment for Democrats, African-Americans, and, well, virtually everyone invested in the "audacity of hope."
But while his "change you can believe in" message succeeded in a "change election," the question remains, now that the votes are in: what really changed in this election?
On a couple of levels, the change was very obvious. By winning 53 percent of the total vote, Obama was the first Democratic nominee to win a popular vote majority since Jimmy Carter in 1976, and had the highest percentage for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. (Before that, you have to go all the way back to 1944, FDR's last campaign, to find a better -- and only marginally better--Democratic performance in terms of popular vote percentages).
Obama also changed the electoral map. He won all the states won by John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. He added to that the eternally frustrating battleground states of Florida and Ohio. He broke through in the supposedly lost South with wins in Virginia and North Carolina. He consolidated a new Democratic majority in the upper Midwest states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. And he redeemed the promise of Democratic opportunity in the western states of Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. On top of all that, he pulled off an upset in Indiana, a state won by George W. Bush in 2004 by 20 points.
Looking at the overall election through national exit polls, everything changed in terms of Democratic and Republican percentages, but relatively little changed in terms of the internal dynamics of the electorate.
Obama made at least small but significant gains over John Kerry's 2004 performance pretty much everywhere: with men (+5 percent) and women (ditto), with white men (+4) and with African-Americans (+7), and with college graduates (+3) and non-college graduates (+7). He did better than Kerry among self-identified liberals (+3), moderates (+6), and conservatives (+5).
You can go on and on through the exit polls with similar results. Obama did modestly, but significantly, better than Kerry among Catholics (+7), Protestants (+5), Jews (+4), and even evangelical/born-agains (+3) and weekly churchgoers (+4). One of the few groups in which Obama didn't improve on the Kerry percentages was self-identified Democrats (both got 89%), though Obama did improve among Republicans (+3) and independents (+3).
The two numbers that do jump off the page are Obama's improvements among Latinos (+13) and among voters under 30 (+12). But while these two categories of voters are enormously important for the future, neither represented a significantly larger share of the electorate as opposed to 2004.
And that brings us to the issue of what didn't change in 2008: the basic composition of the electorate. The ideological self-identification numbers are virtually identical from 2004 to 2008. The age distribution was remarkably similar. Aside from a predictable boost in the African-American percentage of the vote from 11 percent to 13 percent, the racial/ethnic breakdown didn't change much either. The party ID numbers changed from 37D/37R/26I to 39D/32R/29I. But despite some efforts of conservatives to claim a "hidden" or "discouraged" vote that wasn't tapped by McCain, these trends reflect well-documented changes in party registrations over the last two years.
So what do all these numbers mean in terms of the current and future prospects of the two parties?
The two big competing theories among progressives about the meaning of Election 2008 could be described as "realignment" or "reaction."
The former, best articulated by John Judis in The New Republic, is that Obama is consolidating a political realignment that's been underway, in fits and starts, since at least the mid-1990s. And without question, the Obama Coalition on Election Day does look a lot like the coalition predicted by Judis and Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority. But the latter theory, which warns that Obama's victory was mainly the product of a temporary hostility to Republicans that intensified with the financial collapse in September, has been well presented in the same magazine by Scott Winship.
The trouble is that the numbers from November 4 are consistent with both theories. There's no way to know what would have happened in the home stretch of the presidential campaign if the financial system hadn't gone crazy in mid-September. Some people think McCain was on his way to victory, while others (myself included) think the fundamentals and the strategic and tactical advantages of the Obama campaign would have produced a win in any event.
What virtually all Democrats would agree on, I suspect, is that the course of action taken by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress will ultimately determine whether November 4 represented real political change, or simply the opportunity to create such change. Either way, the chance to succeed or fail in a country demanding a new course of action is a change for the better for the Donkey Party.
