What's the Matter with Kentucky?

Guest Essay by David Schankula

Electoral map from fivethirtyeight.com

Election over! Let’s recap.... Barack Obama is our new President. According to Bill Cosby and Karl Rove, Obama’s historic win is due in part to Cliff and Claire Huxtable, the First Family of 1980s television. According to most everyone else, it’s due to the yawning gap between the Republican party and the reality that is most Americans’ lives. Obama’s victory is part of a larger political picture.

In the midterm elections two years ago, Democrats picked up 30 seats in the House and six in the Senate. This year, that national swing continued. Democrats wrenched at least another six Senate seats and 20 more in the House from Republican control. And they’re not even done counting the votes.

Three incumbent Republican Senators are still hanging on for dear life—in Minnesota, Georgia, and Alaska; and four races remain undecided in the House—in California, Ohio, Virginia, and Alaska. The Democrat appears to be an all-but-declared winner in that Virginia race. If so it continues a remarkable flip-flop for our neighboring commonwealth, a historically Republican state, where the Governor’s mansion and both US Senate seats have switched from Red to Blue in recent years.

The GOP’s problem in Alaska is even clearer. Even if both Republicans—Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young—ultimately win, their protracted battles clearly define the party’s great weakness: Republicans are not who they claim to be. Stevens is a convicted felon and, after years of palling around with criminals, Young is under federal investigation for corruption. Both men are hanging on for dear life in a state swooning with love for Republican governor Sarah Palin. With her at the top of the ticket they should have cruised to victory, but when Alaska finally counts all its votes (and up to 100,000 votes might still be missing), these guys may just end up being two more Republican losers. This is the 21st Century Republican Party.

The original Republican Party was born in 1854, under a banner of abolitionism and small-government. Its ideology flourished in New England but over the past 150 years, the Party’s platform has changed, and now America’s north-eastern states are solidly Democratic. Over the past several elections those few Republicans who remain have steadily lost their seats. Lawrence Cafero Jr., the Republican leader of Connecticut’s House of Representatives, told the Associated Press that the party’s national image has damaged his state GOP. He knows when the problem started, too: with Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Republican Revolution,” when a group of 50 firebrand ideologues took Washington by storm and wasted half a decade alternately shutting down government and investigating Cuban cigars. “They lost their way,” Cafero said, “and I think
more and more New England people, especially those who were Republicans basically because of smaller government and less government intrusion into our lives, started to see their party led by people whose foremost issues were social issues, religious and values and morals, etc.”

So, New England went Blue. In Levittown, Pennsylvania a different sort of change has taken place. A postwar suburban blueprint of a town where 17,000 houses were built and no blacks were allowed, the biggest obstacle facing Democrats this year was race. As the New York Times reported this past Sunday: “A lot of people in Levittown needed the five months between the primary election and Tuesday to get used to a new idea. After Mrs. Clinton’s defeat, followed by a financial crisis that shook Americans to the core, they came to terms. If Mr. Obama’s race had been a factor, they eventually had to weigh it against other concerns. “For a long time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was black, if you know what I mean,” Mr. Sinitski, the heating and air-conditioning technician, told me. “I’m not proud of that, but I was raised to think that there aren’t good black people out there. I could see that he was highly intelligent, and that matters to me, but my instinct was still to go with the white guy.”

But the change was simple. Ultimately, in the face of a never-ending war in Iraq and a cataclysmic economic collapse, race didn’t matter much to the voters of Levittown. In 2004 they’d given their votes to George W. Bush. Four years later, they voted for Barack H. Obama.

And so did Pennsylvania. By 11 percent.

If comparing Obama’s win to Bush’s previous ones is instructive, setting it against Bill Clinton’s 1992 triumph is positively enlightening. Political math whiz Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com crunched those numbers and found that while Democrats had yielded a handful of states including Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia—the DNC had offset those losses with big wins, from a clean sweep of the Northeast to big gains across the West. “Essentially,” they wrote, “by sacrificing 50 or so Electoral Votes from the inland South, the Democrats have taken about 60 votes from former swing states and turned them into Lean Democratic states, and another 44 or so from former lean Republican states and turned them into swing states. This is a good trade-off.” And sure, maybe it’s a good trade-off for the nation—hell, Barack Obama’s the President!

But what does it mean about Kentucky? Why are we bucking a national trend? With the election now over, it is time to take stock and set a course for the future.

So here’s a simple question: What’s the matter with Kentucky?

■ David Schankula is a founder of The Lexicon Project, a member of ACE Weekly’s Community Advisory Board, and a child of Lexington’s 3rd District. He can be reached at david@lexiconproject.com.