Gallup says Dems now well ahead of GOP as majority party

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 (UPI) -- It's official: Heartland Republican America is no longer Republican. Red state America has turned blue.

A massive Gallup Poll survey has concluded the Democrats last year replaced the Republicans as the dominant party across the American heartland in terms of official party affiliation and preference. Some 36 percent of voters registered as Democrats across the entire nation compared with 28 percent as Republicans, the polling organization said. It was the strongest Democratic advantage since Gallup began monitoring such trends 20 years ago.

Gallup said its conclusions were drawn from no less than 350,000 interviews in the course of 2008. It listed only four states as now solidly Republican in orientation -- Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Alaska. And all those states have exceptionally small populations.

According to Gallup, in terms of party affiliation and strong voter preference, the Solid South strategy of Republicans since Richard Nixon has now broken wide open. In terms of strong preference, the Dems now break even with the Republicans in such previously reliable heartland GOP strongholds as South Carolina and Arizona, Gallup said.

The Democrats even show a 1-point lead in party affiliation and strong preference in Mississippi, and the Republicans are down to a 1-point lead in Alabama.

The analysis, released over the past week, should come as no surprise. First, the Democrats won clear majorities in the popular vote, the number of congressmen and senators elected and, of course, in President Barack Obama's 7 million vote advantage over Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the national elections on Nov. 4.

It was the largest Democratic victory since Lyndon Baines Johnson's landslide win over Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., in 1964, and it was the first time since then that any winning Democratic presidential candidate had captured a majority of the popular vote. The Democratic victory margins both in the national election and in the House and Senate races were less striking than the party affiliation changes monitored by Gallup, but they were far greater than Republican strategists and most politicians had expected, especially in the presidential vote.

Of course, there are caveats and qualifiers to these trends: Opinion polls only registered the real sweep to Obama over McCain in the last two months of the election campaign after the great financial crisis capsized Wall Street and it became clear McCain and his economic advisers didn't have a clue what to do or even what to say about it.

Second, whenever economic hard times come, the party in power always pays the price. The Republicans were cast out of office for 20 years after the Great Depression, and following President Jimmy Carter's utter failure to slay the dragon of stagflation -- stagnation and inflation at the same time -- the Democrats were cast out into the political wilderness for 12 years.

If Obama succeeds in rescuing the U.S. economy from its current plunge into recession or worse, and if he can avert the specter of national bankruptcy, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression, then the Democrats could be in for another 12 to 20 years of uninterrupted power.

But if things get far worse on Obama's watch, then he and his party will be cast out too in the elections of 2012 and some new form of reaction -- quite possibly a heavily protectionist nationalist populism -- will sweep in to fill the political and ideological gaps.

Therefore, even for the currently ascendant Democrats, the Gallup poll's findings, while cause for celebration, are certainly no cause for complacency.

Above all else, the Dems have to stabilize the U.S. economy and restore the financial credibility of the U.S. government; otherwise all their dreams and visions will be flushed down the drain.

For the Republicans, the wake-up call is even starker. They have to come up with new policies that can actually work in the real world, and they no longer can sit back and let a Republican president use his bully pulpit to make their case and then follow him blindly as they did for the past eight years.

To echo Obama's quote from St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians in his inaugural speech, the Gallup results serve notice to the GOP that at long last it is time for them to put away childish things.