2008: An extraordinarily ordinary election or an historic shift?

At times over the past two years, it has seemed more an honor to cover this election season than a job. From an interminable primary season that featured fundamental disagreements about the directions of both parties to a general election that rocked back and forth like a ship trapped in a hurricane, no twist was too unlikely, no turn outside the realm of possibility.

Many times, this reporter has marveled about the moment, 20 years in the future, when some new reporter or political science student asks about the 2008 elections.

How did two unlikely candidates secure their party's nominations? How did one party, fresh off a momentous thirty-seat pickup in Congress, manage to capture twenty-one more? And was this the beginning of a major shakeup of American politics, one with ramifications that will stretch into future generations?

Considering what we know, and what actually happened this year, the answer we might give to that future political neophyte would be surprising: 2008 was in fact a startlingly ordinary election.

Barack Obama and John McCain were certainly unique. The first African American president-elect beat out a guy whose career rests upon a foundation of animosity with his own party, not an expected recipe for success in presidential primaries.

But leave aside the historic nature of the actors themselves.
The national political landscape has changed, but in general, it isn't change we can believe in, it's change that everyone should have seen coming.

Begin with what hasn't changed: There was no groundswell of turnout among younger voters and African Americans, two groups many predicted would overwhelm the system with their enthusiasm for Obama. This year, 13 percent of the electorate was black, up just two points from 2004. Eighteen percent of voters were between 18-29, a single point higher than the 2004 numbers.

Overall voter turnout wasn't terribly higher either. Approximately 130 million voters cast ballots (right on the McCain campaign's own turnout model, by the way), only marginally higher than the approximately 125 million who voted in 2004.

The Democratic super-strategist James Carville likes to caution that the more common name for candidates who rely on the youth vote is "loser." Barack Obama's campaign said since before the Iowa caucuses that younger voters were icing on the cake, but that they knew the campaign needed to bake the cake first.

Obama won where John Kerry lost not by expanding the electorate so dramatically, but by winning much higher shares of both demographics than the Massachusetts senator.

Obama, and Democrats across the country, also won thanks to longer-term shifts that have always boded ill for the Republican Party. The GOP likes to point out that states gaining seats in the 2012 redistricting will be largely in the Sun Belt, like Texas, Arizona, Nevada and Florida. That, Republicans say, will help them pick up seats in Congress and votes in the Electoral College (although only Texas and Arizona voted for McCain this year, President Bush won all four states twice).

The influx of transplant voters -- either thanks to the booming Hispanic community or to older and wealthier Americans migrating from colder climes -- should give Republicans pause and cause Democrats excitement. Thanks to the region's changing demographics, Democrats netted a total of three congressional seats in those four states, and some incumbent Republicans in Texas -- the only state in which Democrats suffered a net loss -- could find themselves on future Democratic target lists.

Slow demographic changes are nothing new in politics, but they can come to a head and lead to dramatic swings when conditions are right. In 1994, Republicans took advantage of a growing number of voters favorable to their causes in the South and in the Mountain West as they swept Democrats out of power. Over the past two cycles, demographic changes and the startling move of Hispanic voters away from the Republican Party have led to a similar pop in the Southwest and across the Rust Belt.

That's not to say that slower changes thanks to demographics don't take place as well. With Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut losing, the Republican member of the House in New England has moved from the endangered species list to extinction. Democrats won three more GOP-held seats in New York and one in Pennsylvania on top of earlier victories, making Republicans scarce in that region as well.

By and large, though, recent demographic trends make it difficult to find bright spots for Republicans. While President Bush's vast unpopularity has been an anchor around Republican ankles, the GOP may have found itself sinking, eventually, even without him in power.

That's the real lesson of the 2008 election: For the first time since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, a credible case can be made that the United States is now a center-left country instead of a center-right country.

Some argue that the math is not there: 34 percent of the country calls themselves conservative while 22 percent calls themselves liberal, and that the plurality rules. However, moderate voters, by far the largest slice of the American electorate, chose Barack Obama by a 60 percent to 39 percent margin. Moderates voted Democratic for Congress by a slightly wider 61 percent to 37 percent margin.

Republicans say Democrats ran, in many districts, as if they had an R after their names. Indeed, envisioning younger Democratic members like Heath Shuler, Bobby Bright and others in the same caucus as a Barney Frank, John Lewis or Henry Waxman is difficult to do, and means that some of those more moderate voters were choosing ideologically conservative Democrats.

The other lesson Republicans might want to take is that the big-tent model pursued by Rahm Emanuel actually works, and that party discipline on any given issue is less important than a vote for Speaker of the House.

But in a time of economic crisis, a majority of voters are siding with one of the basic pillars of the Democratic Party: 51 percent told exit pollsters they think government ought to do more, while just 43 percent said they thought the government was doing too much. Unsurprisingly, the former category went to Obama by about a three-to-one margin, while the latter chose McCain at a slightly lower level.

That's an increase in the number of voters who favored government intervention in 2004, when 46 percent said the government should do more to solve problems while 49 percent disagreed.

In any case, a majority of voters saying the government should do more makes for a center-left, not a center-right, electorate.
From an only slightly increased turnout to the conclusion, or continuation, of glacial demographic trends, the 2008 election was, in fact, no more than the average pushback against an incumbent party after two terms in the White House, compounded by a struggling economy and a government held in low esteem. The swing back to the left of the political spectrum may not be completely finished for another few years -- Republicans are faced with the depressing realization that they will once again face a difficult landscape in 2010 Senate races, for example -- but there is little truly extraordinary about this election within the numbers themselves.

Now, the question is left up to the actors. If Obama becomes the Ronald Reagan of the left, able to usher fellow Democrats to a new generation of prominence and power, the electorate's move to the left side of the political spectrum could continue. But if Obama and his fellows in Congress cannot deliver on something, the pendulum will swing back to the right.

An extraordinary election is just a moment in time. The next chapter has already started.