Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Trendlines

Donald Lambro:

Two huge trendlines emerged from Tuesday's election: continuing decline of the Democrats in wide swaths of electoral territory across the South and West and growing Republican majorities in Congress.
The focus on the eventual mathematical settlement of Ohio's electoral votes in President Bush's favor seemed to obscure the larger picture of what happened Tuesday night: First, Mr. Bush won a 51 percent of the popular vote, the first time a president's done that since 1988. Second, he did it as his party significantly expanded its representation in the House and Senate, which doesn't happen very often in national re-election politics.

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The Bush campaign clearly defeated the Democrats in this ground war, but there were big strategic differences between their operations: Mr. Bush's ground game was made up of volunteers who knew the neighborhoods and, in many cases, knew their neighbors.
Mr. Kerry's ground organization did this, too, but much of its get-out-the-vote army were staffed by mercenaries, paid workers, brought in (sometimes from out of state) to offset the GOP's grass-roots advantage, especially in Republican-dominated suburbs. A lot of Mr. Kerry's ground forces belonged to third-party groups who worked in his behalf but were not a real part of his core organization: labor unions, whose political clout has shrunk, and other independently funded liberal activist groups like Americans Coming Together (ACT), who worked outside of the Kerry campaign but in collusion with it.

It also turns out that the Democrats and their liberal supporters were scammed on voter registrations that were paid on the basis of new sign ups, many of which turned out to be ficticious.

Another aspect of the race is that the country has literally moved away from teh Democrats. If both sides had won the same states as they did this year in the 1960's or 1970's The Democrats would have had more electoral votes. Starting witht he 1980's census and moving inexerbly through 2000 the same state margin has grown for the Republicans.

Another thing the numbers tell us is that the Democrats are runnign out of excuses. In 2002, they claimed that they did not get their message out, even though clearly their message was rejected by a majority of voters. This year they got their big turnout and still lost. Logic should tell them that their message is being rejected, but Nancy Pelosi just seems to think we are too ignorant to get it and all we need is more education. Really!