Realignment, Now More than Ever The next best thing to a permanent majority. by Fred Barnes 11/22/2004, Volume 010, Issue 10 KARL ROVE SAID LAST YEAR that the question of realignment--whether Republicans have at last become the majority party--would be decided by the election of 2004. And it has. Even by the cautious reckoning of Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, Republicans now have both an operational majority in Washington (control of the White House, Senate, and the House of Representatives) and an ideological majority in the country (51 percent popular vote for a center-right president). They also control a majority of governorships, a plurality of state legislatures, and are at rough parity with Democrats in the number of state legislators. Rove says that under Bush a "rolling realignment" favoring Republicans continues, and he's right. So Republican hegemony in America is now expected to last for years, maybe decades. Listen to Walter Dean Burnham, professor emeritus at University of Texas at Austin, who is the nation's leading theorist of realignment, the shift of political power from one party to another. The 2004 election, he says, "consolidates it all"--that is, it solidifies the trend that has favored Republicans over the past decade. To Burnham, it means there's "a stable pattern" of Republican rule. "If Republicans keep playing the religious card along with the terrorism card, this could last a long time," he says. Burnham, by the way, is neither a Republican nor a conservative. His definition of realignment is "a sudden transformation that turns out to be permanent." The breakthrough occurred in 1994 when Republicans shattered the 40-year Democratic grip on Congress and the statehouses. Since then, the GOP has held its gains, and even added to them in the 2002 and 2004 elections with George W. Bush as president and Rove as strategist. Burnham says the 2004 election "may be the most important of my lifetime." (He's 75.) The reelection of Bush plus pickups in the Senate and House was "a very, very impressive showing, given the past." Democrats will have enormous difficulty overcoming "the huge weight of Republican strength," he says. Republicans gained four Senate seats, giving them 55, bringing their numbers back to the historic high they'd reached in the late '90s. (The last time Republicans had more than 55 seats in the Senate was 1931.) They won three more House seats and are expected to capture at least one of the two seats at stake in runoff elections in Louisiana in December. That will give them 232 or 233 seats, the most they've held since 1949. In 1992, the year before realignment began, they held 44 seats in the Senate and 167 in the House. Republican governorships have jumped from 18 in 1992 to 28 or 29 today, depending on the outcome of the governor's race in Washington state, and control of legislatures has risen from 8 to 20. What hasn't emerged is the much-touted "emerging Democratic majority." It remains a theory of liberal analysts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, based on their take on voting patterns of women, urban professionals, and Hispanics. The theory faltered in 2002 and even more this year. The gender gap in the presidential race dropped from an 11-point Democratic advantage among female voters in 2000 to a 3-point edge in 2004. And Ken Mehlman, the president's campaign manager, said the Bush vote in urban centers of more than 500,000 people grew by 26 percent in 2004 over 2000.