In 1968, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross published On Death and Dying.  In this book, she outlined five stages that individuals facing a terminal diagnosis go through.  Although the idea remains scientifically controversial, it has been extended to other major life traumas.  Based upon some personal experiences lately, I think it provides a useful analytical framework for understanding individual response to traumatic but not fatal experiences. It occurred to me that Kubler-Ross ideas could usefully applied to the current behavior of the Republican Party.  Follow me below the fold for more.

For years, it has been an article of faith that national elections in America are competitive for three reasons: the urban areas are heavily Democratic, the rural areas are heavily Republican, and the two parties come reasonably close to splitting the difference in the suburbs.

This type of regional analysis have elevated the suburbs to the kind of "make or break" political entity that has been alternated between "soccer moms", "NASCAR dads", and whatever other demographic subgroup the analysts on the various cable networks elevate to relevancy in any given election year.

The difference, of course, is that the suburbs really DO matter. According to the 2008 exit polls after the presidential election, 49% of the American electorate live in suburbs. This compares to 30% that live in urban areas and an ever-declining 21% of U.S. voters that live in rural areas.

The near-majority of voters emanating from the suburbs is a new phenomenon. Even as recently as 2000, only 43% of voters hailed from the suburbs. It has been a steady increase in vote share throughout the decade.

Furthermore, the growth of suburban voters has come entirely out of the rural areas where Republicans try to run up the score. Consider the following distribution of voters by region over the last three presidential election cycles (Source Here):

Year    Urban   Suburban  Rural
 2000     29       43       28
 2004     30       46       25
 2008     30       49       21

Barack Obama's historic and decisive victory in 2008 has a million fathers, but one of them was the simple fact that the Republican base, geographically speaking, appears to be on the wane. This can be read in two ways: first off, the GOP base is on the wane because Democrats are doing better in rural areas. But it can also be read that the rural areas that the GOP relies on (Sarah Palin's "Real America") is becoming an ever-smaller share of the electorate.

Consider the following: in 2000, the exact scenario I outlined in the first sentence of this piece came to pass: Gore and Bush held serve in their "home regions" whereas Bush just edged Gore in the 'burbs. By 2008, Obama's zone of strength is now 50% larger than McCain's zone of strength. Obama did not even need to win the suburbs to be a likely winner overall.

Yet, exit polls show that he DID win the suburbs, albeit by a narrow edge. Unlike 2000 (when the GOP candidate won the suburbs 49-47) and 2004 (when the GOP candidate won there 52-47), the 2008 exit polls showed Obama edging McCain 50-48.

And...still...the exit polls don't tell the whole story. Obama's march through suburbia was even more impressive than the modest lead in the exit polls would imply.

A few months ago, using an excellent online resource (Dave Liep's Atlas of U.S. Elections), I compiled a list of sixty-seven counties that I classified as "suburban" counties.

Skeptics will want to stop me right there. Indeed, there are a number of ways to define what IS a suburb. In exit polls, presumably, voters self-identify, which will no doubt skew their numbers. Indeed, some election analysis avoids any discussion of suburbs at all, lumping most suburban areas in with rural areas, and classifying the two other community forms in America as "exurban" and "rural."

The bottom line--there isn't a true consensus on what is a suburb, for these kind of political purposes.

Therefore, my criteria was arbitrary, to be sure, but not without some logic. I chose counties which had vote counts over a predetermined level (I won't lie to you, dear reader, I can't remember if I chose 125,000 or 150,000 voters), and it had to be directly adjacent to a major urban center.

The simplest analysis is interesting, nonetheless: for the first time since Bill Clinton cruised to victory in 1996, a Democrat won the majority of these suburban counties:

Year    Dem Wins   GOP Wins
 1996     37       30
 2000     31       36
 2004     29       38
 2008     44       23

A more sophisticated analysis is more telling. The flaw in just taking straight vote totals is that it ignores national trends in elections. To put it more simply, we'd EXPECT Barack Obama to do better in the suburbs than John Kerry. One was victorious in his election by 7.2%, the other was defeated by 2.5%.

So, what happens if you look at how the counties voted AHEAD or BEHIND the national margin?? Here, you see an even more positive conclusion for Democrats. In the last four election cycles, we have seen a steady increase in the number of suburban counties where Democrats out performed their national margins.

Year     Ahead of Nat'l     Behind of Nat'l
 1996        22                45
 2000        31                36
 2004        32                35
 2008        40                27

That's right, when you are not looking for raw winners and losers, but rather playing these counties "against the spread" of how the candidates performed nationally, each successive Democratic candidate has gained counties in suburbia, culminating in Obama winning nearly 60% of them this year.

Other conclusions that can be drawn from this analysis of the suburban counties of America:

1. CLAIMING NEW GROUND: Among Obama's many notable electoral achievements in 2008 was this one: nine of the 67 counties in the study had not seen the Democratic candidate carry that county until Obama managed to do it in 2008. In the interests of full disclosure, two of those counties were in Illinois' collar counties. That said, others were in pivotal swing states like Colorado (Arapahoe and Jefferson Counties) and Virginia (Henrico and Prince William). Indeed, Prince William county in Northern Virginia might have represented the most impressive transformation: after Democrats lost the county by margins ranging from 7-8 points, Obama claimed victory there by 15 points.

2. A NATIONAL PARTY NO MORE: Anyone who read Zell Miller's angry little tome attributing that phrase to the Democratic Party (no available at fine car wash cut-out bins everywhere) has to get a laugh at how true that phrase has become...of the Republican Party. Of the ten best Republican suburban counties in America, seven of them are in the South. And even some of THEM are shifting. Williamson County, near Austin, had gone for Bush by margins of 41 and 43 points. McCain won there by just 13 points. I'll be the first to admit that the home-state factor accounts for some of that variance, but 30 percentage points??!!??

3. IT'S NOT (JUST) ABOUT RACE: To be sure, Obama cleaned house in those few suburban counties (like DeKalb in Georgia) which have substantial black populations. But soaring support for the Democratic ticket expanded well into suburban counties with few black and brown faces. San Mateo County in California has a black population below 4% (a bigger Latino population, though). It is historically well left of center, but it gave Obama far greater margins than Clinton, Gore, or Kerry enjoyed. The same is true for Washington County, which lies southwest of Portland, OR. It is neither heavily black (1.2%) nor particularly liberal (Democrats won here by margins of 3-7% between 1996 and 2004). Obama won here by a whopping 59-37 margin.

Now, I will be the first to admit that the analysis has some limitations--starting with the one I already called on myself. It might be easy to delineate between a rural county from the other categories. But getting a universally accepted definition of a suburban county is going to be a tough one.

Furthermore, this is at the mercy of things like campaign targeting. The excellent Obama performance in the suburban counties of Colorado could be owed to the fact that the Democrats held their convention in Denver, or to the fact that Team McCain seemed to see the inevitable there by October, and pulled their resources elsewhere. Also, no Democratic candidate in recent history made the effort that Obama made in Florida, therefore it should be no surprise that he gained some yardage over Kerry and Gore in that state's suburban counties.

That said, there are trends here that have to be heartening for Democrats, and depressing for the GOP. It is important to note that, by and large, this is a trend that was already developing before the recent epic electoral failures of the Republican Party. Using the "beat the spread" math that I did on the third table up above, we see that the Republicans have been steadily falling behind expectations in the suburbs. As the suburbs grow in political stature (one has to assume that suburban voters will be a majority in 2012), they are going to have to dramatically re-tool their message politically. What they had in 2008 clearly did not work in much of suburbia.

Fortunately for the Democrats, and given recent events, that seems unlikely.

Cross posted from Huffington Post

This isn't going to make you happy with me. As much as we hate to admit it, the American people let this one slide.  Not all of us.  But it did happen. Sadly, this is reality.  

    I'm not sure why I am so focused on Georgia these days.  What can I say, the state just fascinates me.  I think one of the things I find so interesting about it is that it is truly a state of contrasts.  Atlanta, the cosmopolitan megalopolous juxtaposed with the sparsely populated counties in the northern and southern ends of the state which haven't changed much in the past few years.  

    Just your regular monthly update with the state by state polls and whatnot.  Obama is doing awesome!

UPDATE:  BTW, I keep meaning to ask, does anyone have the full election night on videotape on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, or NBC?  You see, one of the bummers of being out in the field helping with GOTV is that I didn't get to watch the election nignt that much.  Some of it is on youtube, but not much.  Anyone?  :)

Last October, Representative Michele "Crazy as Steve King" Bachmann (MN-06) disgraced herself on "Hardball" and sparked a ridiculously successful fundraising drive for her Democratic opponent, El Tinklenberg. I was impressed by the enthusiasm and kicked in a few bucks for Tinklenberg myself, but I was dismayed to see bloggers continue to help him raise money even after he'd raised more than $750,000 and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had promised to spend an additional $1 million in his district. Within a few days of Bachmann's notorious comments, Tinklenberg had more money than he needed to run a solid media and GOTV campaign during the final two weeks before the election.

Since most Congressional races against incumbents are longshots, I wanted to see the netroots expand the field by raising $50,000 or more for a large number of unheralded challengers.

Instead, the fundraising frenzy for Tinklenberg continued.

According to one of the more accurate pollsters - PPP (especially in North Carolina, where they are headquartered), Obama has a +16 approval rating in what was one of the most closely fought battleground states in the 2008 election.

    It's about darn time we had a President who was an advocate for high-speed trains in this country.  Not to mention the fact that we have a Vice President who actually utilized high-speed trains on a weekly basis for years and years in his commute between Delaware and D.C.

I just got the giggles reading the AP article about the "revolution" that is unfolding today.

Cross-posted here. This topic area has been touched upon at Daily Kos, both on the front-page and in some recent diaries, but I wanted to develop on it further.

For all of Politico's faults, they do produce some good stuff from time to time. This evening they published a really well-written and well-researched trend story on nail-biter election returns and the prevalence of court challenges. The apparent trend is even the foundation of the 2008 movie, "Swing Vote" that I saw last summer, where the whole presidential election comes down to one guy, who gets a do-over when the machine cancels his vote. The probability of that occurring is infinitesimal, but the likelihood of extremely close elections, according to the Politico story, is higher than ever before.

   It's time to pull out my little gloat parade.  Even after having beared the brunt of the full-throated Republican attack machine, Obama is still doing rather well and is well-liked by the American people - especially in some unexpected regions of the country.

Update:  Wow, I had to go visit family so I didn't get to see this make the rec list.  What fun!  :)