Just four years ago, a flood of books and essays hit newsstands and shelves, all diagnosing what went wrong with the Democratic Party and how to fix it. A cottage industry emerged, of which my own book was a small part.
What a difference a few years makes.
After the 2006 midterm and 2008 presidential election cycles, a new set of analyses is emergent, asking the same question but of the other major party: What's wrong with the Republicans?
In those back-to-back cycles, the Republicans have lost not only the White House but also a dozen U.S. senators and more than 50 House seats, seven net governorships and hundreds of state legislative seats. (Senate contests in Alaska, Minnesota and Georgia, plus a few House races, are yet to be determined.)
The new Republican minority stands at just above 40 percent across the board. Presuming it loses the Alaska Senate seat and holds the ones in Minnesota and Georgia, the GOP will be down to 43 senators, about 44 percent of House seats and 21 governors (42 percent). In the 2004 cycle, the national two-party registration split was even, but by 2008, the Democrats boasted a 7-point advantage, 39 to 32.
Considering all that, Sen. John McCain's capture of 46 percent of the national popular vote while running against the drag of a highly unpopular incumbent president - and facing a talented, well-funded candidate leading a more organized, unified and motivated party - doesn't look so bad.
But the Republicans have reduced themselves to a regionalized party, one based in the former Confederacy with pockets of support in the Plains states and Mountain West. Since 2004, they have hemorrhaged support on the coasts. The Democrats now hold 88 percent of Senate seats and 82 percent of House seats in the Northeast, and almost two-thirds of congressional seats in the 13 states of the far West.
As I forecast in Whistling Past Dixie, the Republicans had better be careful or they will be relegated to the fate of dominating the South but little else. Though the situation is not that grim - the Republicans are, in fact, still surprisingly competitive in the Midwest, where Democrats should next focus their attention - the GOP hasn't been this low in four decades.
Looking ahead two years, might 2010 present Republicans the opportunity for a good comeback, like the one they mounted in 1966, after Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats had a national landslide in 1964?
