Come January, three-quarters of Americans will be living in states with Democratic governors, including nine of the 10 biggest states and nine of the 10 richest ones.
This isn’t just a blue wave, or a repudiation of the president, or a cost-of-living revolt. It tells us something profound about the nature of the country and the spiritual life of our politics, where not just policy and ideology are hashed out but also the deeper meaning of everything from music and movies to fashion and food culture, educational attainment, economic opportunity, income inequality and much more besides.
For a long time, Americans thought of their country as decidedly right of center and irreconcilably polarized, divided by partisanship so intense that the conflict was sometimes compared to a civil war. But in the aftermath of an electoral rout, the map looks quite different. To put it bluntly, it all looks pretty deeply blue.
The reconfiguration of the political map by this blue tsunami probably isn’t permanent. I would guess Democrats will notch another victory in 2028, much as they did in 2008 after a huge midterm victory in 2006. But those races are obviously still up in the air, and these days it often seems that politics is balanced on a knife’s edge, with neither party capable of securing a significant advantage.
This is precisely what makes the scale of the romp so remarkable. By popular vote, Democrats seem to have notched the biggest victory any party has achieved in congressional elections in 50 years. In the new Congress, Democrats will have more House seats than Republicans have at any point since the Depression. If Scott Colom’s lead in Mississippi and Mary Peltola’s lead in Alaska both hold up, Democrats will have more Senate seats than Republicans have had at any point since 1930.
The state-level triumph is so broad — Democrats will now control a majority of legislative chambers, and have more trifectas than Republicans for the first time since 2009 — that Democrats could pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to bypass the Electoral College. And yet as a purely partisan matter that particular project seems much less pressing, suddenly, because there isn’t such an obvious Democratic disadvantage left to erase. Those swaths of the electoral map that used to look like Republican fortresses — the Old South, the Sun Belt and the Great Plains — are no longer red but purple. In some cases, just blue.
Source: www.nytimes.com
