If Ford had won back then (it was a close election after all) Reagan would have never been president. In 1980 Ford would have run as an incumbent and by 1984 Reagan would have been much too old for a first time candidate. The Reagan Revolution, as we know it, could have never come to pass. In all likelihood the same issues that killed Carter (lousy economy) would have killed Ford for the second term. Who knows, maybe Ted Kennedy could have won.
My point is not that we will win in 2008 and erase all this or that this loss is not real. My point is that elections have a way of playing out over time that we can’t know in advance.
So rest if you must, take a break if you need it, but don’t abandon the fight. Liberals and progressives got us civil rights, environmental regulations, women’s right to choose (and vote), minimum labor conditions, and a myriad of other policies that we now consider unquestionable but in their time were bitterly opposed.
Republicans control both the Congress and the WH but they have done so for several years now and voters have made clear to them there are limits beyond which they do not want them to go. They can cut taxes but they can’t cut spending in any meaningful way because voters simply do not want them to. That’s not going to change next year.
A quick look at the data shows that the minority vote continues to grow in importance. Bush did better this time than in 2000 but he still lags the Democratic candidate by a lot. And the proportion of minority voters will continue to rise. Whites were 81% of the vote in 2000 but only 77% this year. The trend is clear.
The exit polls appear to indicate (although it’s a open question if we should trust them) that moral concerns turned out to be a bigger issue than many expected, especially gay marriage. That is not going to change overnight but change it will. We just need to keep fighting for what we believe in. If Democrats had fought for Civil Rights in a national campaign in the 1950s they would have lost massively. We lost the South because of that in the 1960s. But it was the right thing to do.
And meanwhile the Iraqi mess remains. Nothing that happened last night changed that. And, for better or worse, it is now 100% in the hands of republicans.