IT seems a little unfair to comment on a book entitled The Emerging Democratic Majority a few months after its publication and a few weeks after an election in which the Republicans [increased their majority in the House and secured a majority in the Senate. But that’s a risk authors take when they write books predicting majorities for one party or the other. And anyway, in my judgment the 2002 election results do not necessarily disprove John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s thesis. The scenario they set out, of a country evenly divided between the parties in 2000 becoming more Democratic because of the increasing size of Democratic-leaning constituencies, could still occur. It didn’t seem likely to me before this year’s election and it seems somewhat less likely to me now, but it is not impossible.
As a conservative and an optimist, I say that partly out of-caution. Political judgments are affected by temperament. Optimists tend to be confident that their side is winning and alert to signs that things are moving their way. Pessimists tend to be gloomily certain that their own side is messing things up and that the other side is running circles around them. Pessimists often produce great political reporting. Robert Novak, an embattled conservative, is always ready to report stories that show conservatives hopelessly divided, outmaneuvered, on the verge of defeat. The Washington Post’s Thomas Edsall, a gloomy Irish liberal, chronicled the rise of the Religious Right and conservative Republicans’ gains in the ethnic working class. We optimists have it a little harder. We’re inclined to see the smallest glimmer of hope as a harbinger of victory. We tend to overlook issues or character traits that produce serious problems for our candidates. We are slow to discern trends in the wrong direction. We can try to discipline ourselves by rigorously analyzing data, but sometimes such discipline is not enough.
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