Today was Election Day for state and local offices across the USA. Up here in the Catskills, I’m happy to report that our local republican candidates were back-peddling furiously to distance themselves from President Bush and his "misstatement of facts" regarding his Iraqi misadventure and his "Job-loss Recovery." As I spoke to one our Woodstock candidates for Town Selectman over coffee and doughnuts, he assured me he was only interested in town issues and had nothing to do "with National politics." Later on our confusing multi-party ballot, I saw his name on the "Woodstock Party line," which also co-listed him respectively as the Conservative, Libertarian and Republican candidates. So quite naturally I pulled the lever for a straight Democratic vote - with only a slight left deviation when I voted for the Democrat who was co-listed on the Working People’s Party Line. My vote was indicative of the class split in town. I voted "progressive" like most of my "City transplant" friends - who have university degrees, well-paid jobs, and who work somewhere out of town - while my local libertarian was a white, working class "Woodchuck" with native roots, local ambitions and Bush/Republican sympathies.

So "Blue America" (pro-democrat) meets "Red" (pro-republican) on the streets of Woodstock in a snapshot of the class and partisan divide that will shape next year’s presidential election.

Meanwhile, down in New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has put up a referendum that would eliminate party line voting and leave us with a "non-partisan" ballot for both primary and general elections. An old "progressive" reform idea recycled for a new century, it’s too "Californian" for my taste - even if it’s an artful dodge for local Republicans who don’t want to carry the cross of the Christian Right around their necks. Bloomberg’s non-partisan ballot would only aid and abet ’celebrity" politicians with instant brand name recognition and tens of millions of dollars to spend - like Mayor Bloomberg himself and "Ahnahld" Schwartzenegger, our newly minted, libertarian-libertine, Governor of California.

These are only straws in the wind but indicative all the same of just how hard political survival has become for Republican moderates in the northern third of America. But in the Southland and the Rocky Mountain States, it’s the Democrats who are threatened with political extinction this time round. At the national level the post 09/11, rally-round-the flag sense of unity has long since disappeared, and the electorate is now back to where it was in Fall 2000 : deeply divided between Red versus Blue in a regional split that resembles the conflict of Blue versus Gray of the mid-19th century. And with a national electorate that according to that astute observer, Bill Clinton, is split 45 % Democrat to 45 % Republican, the next election looks increasingly like a "toss-up. So it seems that the presidential election of 2004 could be a sequel to that of 2000 - that is, an electoral contest between two political coalitions that are evenly matched at the national level but whose strength is concentrated in different regions of the country.

The trend toward the regional polarization of the parties and their electorates has been strengthened by demographic trends where foreign immigration to the two coasts has triggered internal migrations of ethnic Whites and Blacks toward interior sections of the South and Rocky Mountain States. In particular, white migrants have abandoned the Northeast, West Coast and Middle West making their remaining electorates more Democratic, and moved to the Rocky Mountain States and the South making them even more conservative. As David Brooks notes the regional/ideological division of partisan voters has made both parties more ideologically cohesive, not less, so that "Republicans and Democrats don’t just disagree on politics - they don’t see the same reality, and they rarely cross over an support individual candidates from the other side."

Against the background of a general electorate that is demobilized and demoralized by the partisan ideological debate that dominates the media discussion of public issues, both parties rely increasingly on the highly motivated and mobilized voters that belong to "single issue," identity movements to get out the vote during elections. This leads both parties to pursue an "intensity strategy" that aims at mobilizing their "core supporters" with focused ideological messages rather than appealing to independent voters who might "split their ticket." As a Republican strategist recently said. "We’re looking at two nations that on some level barely seem to know or understand each other."

The Republican objective next fall will be to maximize turnout in "their own nation, and forget about what’s going on in the other one." In 2004, we may well see a perverse regional vote that might again make the Republicans the national majority party even while they represent an actual sociological minority. This is the consequence of the same constitutional alchemy - an Electoral College where depopulated, "rotten boroughs" like Wyoming and Montana are over-represented - that gave the last election to the national candidate, George W. Bush, with least votes in the popular election.