For the United States Senate, the GOP elected a person with signs of late dementia (Kentucky), a guy who pled guilty to Medicaid fraud (Oklahoma), a guy who made back-door deals with David Duke (Louisiana), and a guy who thinks all gay teachers should be fired (South Carolina).
And people say there's something wrong with us? We're not the ones who foisted this menagerie of nincompoops on the rest of the country. The Republicans did. I'd say they have more problems than we do.
You hear a lot of talk about resentment against the so-called "liberal elites." As Franks points out, the GOP has made a lot of hay by playing on this resentment, and re-directing it from the moneyed "elite"--the country club crowd--to the so-called "cultural elite," i.e. Hollywood and other latte-sippers. He's right, which is why we ought to stop doing things that help to promote that stereotype. (Lose Whoopi Goldberg, in other words.)
He's also right that we need to re-focus on blue collar issues--jobs, health care, education, outsourcing, corporate fraud and cronyism. True, there aren't as many votes there as there used to be, but we are, or should be, a working class, middle class party. Republicans will scream "class warfare." They always say that, and we need to stop being intimidated by it. Instead, we should say, "Hell yeah! You Gucci-wearing, champagne sipping plutocrats have been waging class warfare on the rest of us for years, except you didn't call it that. You called it `trickle down economics' and we're tired of being `trickled on.'" (But let's keep Bruce Springsteen.)
To me, the red states to reach out to are those in the west and southwest--Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, perhaps Montana. (Utah is lost forever.) If we win the southwest, we win. In order to win there, we are going to have to continue to win the Hispanic vote, which I believe we will, but we'd better make sure because we'll never win without it.
Some exit poll data indicated that Bush received up to 44% of the Hispanic vote. Don't believe it. Bush's Hispanic support in Florida, for example, actually went down several points this time. In Colorado, Bush pulled only about 30% among Hispanics. That 44% figure was being driven by the figures from Texas where Bush supposedly got 59% of the Hispanic vote, which I don't believe either. His performance in the entire state was only about 2% above 2000. If he'd really received 59% of the Hispanic vote, he would have pulled about 70% statewide.