I am confident that eventually the South will move on from its racist past. In fact, I think they are close to that moment now (I think George Allen's defeat is more instructive here then Harold Ford's).
Religious fundamentalism tinged with gay baiting has served as a handy replacement for now. But an ideology based on hating an outside group is hard to maintain - it needs a never ending crop of new groups to demonize. Eventually, you've demonized more than half the country - and you're in a lot of political trouble.
Which brings us to the Hispanic vote. To be fair to George W. Bush, Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove, for all the heinous things they have done, they were smart enough (and perhaps compassionate enough, depending on your take) to court Hispanic voters. They realized it was a very bad long term play to demonize the Hispanics in this country. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, this was the one idea by the Bush crowd that House Republicans chose, in their infinite wisdom, to not follow.
They were on board for Iraq, torture, taking away habeas corpus, denying the minimum wage, etc., etc., but when Bush said be careful in pissing off a huge chunk of voters that only promises to grow larger, that's where they drew the line.
House Republicans have been running on hate for so long, they don't have another play in the playbook. So, when they threatened to make nearly every Hispanic-American a felon by insisting on a law that would criminalize even knowing an illegal alien (and not turning them in), they cost themselves in a way that will hurt them for a long time to come.
So, Hispanics are the new blacks. George W. Bush got anywhere between 40-45% of the Hispanic vote in 2004. In 2006, Congressional Republicans got only 23-29% of the Hispanic vote. That's not a bad trend. That's a disastrous trend. If the Hispanic vote goes the way of the black vote and becomes 90% Democratic, it's over for the Republican Party. Kiss the Southwest goodbye. Kiss national elections goodbye. Kiss close elections goodbye.
Throw in the fact that it looks like the Midwest and the Mountain West is quickly becoming as disgruntled as the Northeast with Republican extremism, and you have a recipe for a dying party.
It'll take decades for Republicans to win back the trust of the Northeast. Right now 68 out of the 92 House seats in the area are Democratic, and so are 17 out of the 22 Senate seats. And it only promises to get worse in the immediate future.
If Congressional Republicans insist on taking on the entire Hispanic population of the US, it will also take decades for them to recover from that mistake. And how many mistakes will it take to drive a stake through the party? How many geographic regions and voting blocs can they abandon before they become an anachronistic, washed out sad old party? I guess we'd have to rename them the SOP then. The Sad Old Party.
For the record, this is not Monday morning quarterbacking. I wrote about this over three years ago. Extremism might work in the short term, especially in extreme times like the aftermath of 9/11. But in this country it is a horrible place to be in the long term. It is not tenable. It wasn't tenable back then. The 2006 elections are simply the chickens coming home to roost.
If the Republicans don't rush back to the middle soon, there will be a reckoning coming. They risk slipping into irrelevance. They've now learned the hard way that the answer in Iraq is not to stubbornly stay the course. If they don't learn that same lesson in domestic politics, they will have the same result here.
Structural problems always catch up with you. America is not an extreme country and if you run to either extreme long enough, you will pay the price. Just ask 29 Republican congressmen, 6 Republican senators and 6 Republican governors what happened to them this past Tuesday. And this is just the beginning of the trend.
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