Expanding on my earlier piece, The New Southern Populism, one sign of a realignment is that one party starts winning elections in places where it is not supposed to win elections. Another sign is that candidates emerge that don’t fit neatly in the traditional mold of the party…and they begin winning primaries and elections. Yet another sign is that the same thing happens to the shrinking party, where new types of candidates emerge and start winning primaries. We are seeing all of these things happen in this election cycle.
In the South, Democrats are running to the left of the Blue Dogs on the war, on civil liberties, on the economy, and on federal spending. But they’re running to the right of the GOP on immigration. Meanwhile, out in Montana we are seeing Republican primary voters do strange things like ditching the establishment candidate for senate and opting for an 85 year old former Green Party candidate who supports universal health care and wants to abolish Congress and replace it with a parliament. Meanwhile, Ron Paul is launching a Campaign for Liberty to support candidates (mostly Republican) that share his isolationist and libertarian views. On the presidential level, we see former Clinton impeachment manager Bob Barr running as a Libertarian focusing strongly on an anti-war, pro-civil liberties platform.
More than anything specifically that the Democrats have down right, what we’re seeing is the direct result of the unraveling of the Republican coalition of big business and social conservatism. Social conservatives are not naturally pro-corporate free-traders and they are not automatically pro-war. They have little to nothing in common with John McCain, and they agree with Barack Obama and the Democrats enough on economic issues to warrent giving them a long, hard look.
It will take a little time for the two parties to resettle into new brands after this election. But I expect that when a new Republican Party emerges it will be on the backs of some renegade candidates that have found a new way to win in areas where Republicans traditionally do not win. In other words, they will be a mirror image of the New Southern Populists in the Democratic Party.
