Rhodes Cook – FROM REPUBLICAN ‘LOCK’ TO REPUBLICAN ‘LOCKOUT’?:
Every day since Nov. 4, the scope of Democrat Barack Obama’s victory has grown more impressive.
His electoral vote total of 364 is the highest for any presidential winner since Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996.
His 53 percent share of the total popular vote is the largest since George H.W. Bush won a comparable proportion in 1988.
And Obama’s popular vote margin of 8 and a quarter million votes (and counting) is the widest since Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection victory over Walter Mondale in 1984.
It is hard to imagine that barely 20 years ago, it was fashionable to talk of a Republican ‘lock’–a GOP dominance of the electoral map so strong that it appeared to guarantee the party possession of the White House for years to come.
But, as is often said: That was then and this is now. Then, the Republicans had the three “S’s” on their side–the South, the suburbs and small-town America. Now, many of the suburbs have defected to the Democrats, the South is no longer an exclusively GOP preserve, and small-town America does not have the votes to keep the Republicans consistently competitive in national politics.