Role of religion in elections

The last Republican Revolution occurred ten years ago, and it turned off the voters. Moderate Republicans in Congress, especially from the Northeast, will play an important role in holding off extremist legislation. A Republican-appointed Supreme Court may chip away at Roe v. Wade but is not likely to reverse it; the Court may also find itself forced to find some middle ground on the civil union issue. Arlen Specter, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, can be expected to resist the appointment of ideological conservatives, if only to minimize Democratic filibusters.
Democrats who wanted to do away with the electoral college after Al Gore’s win of the popular vote in 2000 may feel more subdued after George Bush’s three-and-a-half million “mandate.” Who wants the country to be controlled by the red states in the South and the West without the “containment” achieved by the electoral college? On the other hand, they may want to give better expression to the blue voters in the red areas. Eventually we will probably come to some form of proportional voting, either by congressional districts as in Maine and Nebraska, or (even better) by allocating the states’
votes as in the Colorado referendum.
Proportional voting, as Lani Guinier pointed out, enables people to say how they want to be represented rather than “be districted.” Both parties, of course, will be turning to their computers to see how they would have fared under these various plans.
Going into the 2004 presidential election we knew that the country was almost equally divided between red and blue, conservative and liberal, Fox News and CNN, church-goers and college graduates, those who want to reduce the role of government to punishing wrongdoers and those who see government as responsible for the general welfare. (Yes, that’s how majorities of each of these groups voted, according to the polls.)
Al Gore was too quick to be a good sport, not only conceding the election for the sake of “national unity” and “the legitimacy of the presidency,” but declining to lead a government in exile, a shadow cabinet, or even a loyal opposition. Bush took advantage of national unity after 9/11 to impose Draconian new laws like the Patriot Act; his Congressional allies refused to develop legislation collaboratively and played fast and loose with voting procedures when it was to their advantage; and he dictated policy to the agencies of the federal government, creating dismay among professionals in the EPA, the Department of Energy, the Forest Service and the Park Service, the State Department, and the Pentagon. (Lazarsfeld, et al [1944])
We knew the general demographics, too. The “blue” areas were on the west coast, the Northeast, the large industrial cities, African-American communities (both rural and urban), and university towns across the country. They included many who have been disadvantaged by corporate power (labor, African Americans, Hispanics,

buy custom essays