It really burns me when people dismiss the Democratic losses in the Senate as part of some kind of historical realignment of the South with the Republican party. As the prominent Kos guest blogger DemFromCT wrote, " The fact that southern states elected GOP senators is no more shocking than the idea that New England states may someday elect Dem senators to replace the last of the GOP moderates (assuming they, themselves, don't switch parties the way Jim Jeffords did)."

The general attitude seems to be that the Dems lost Senate seats in red states, and that this sort of thing is inevitable if mildly regrettable. This is just wrong. If followed through to its inevitable conclusion, then the Democrats will face a structural deficit in the Senate of about 60-40 for the next generation. It is easy to see why this is so just looking at a simple chart of what I'll call "misplaced" senators -- Republicans serving in states Kerry won by 3 percent or more, and Democrats serving in states Bush won by 3 percent or more.

Misplaced Republicans:
Susan Collins (ME)
Olympia Snowe (ME)
Norm Coleman (MN)
Gordon Smith (OR)
Rick Santorum (PA)
Arlen Specter (PA)
Lincoln Chafee (RI)

Misplaced Democrats:
Mark Pryor (AR)
Blanche Lincoln (AR)
Ken Salazar (CO)
Bill Nelson (FL)
Evan Bayh (IN)
Mary Landrieu (LA)
Max Baucus (MT)
Tim Johnson (SD)
Harry Reid (NV)
Kent Conrad (ND)
Byron Dorgan (ND)
Ben Nelson (NE)
Robert Byrd (WV)
John Rockefeller (WV)

Simply put, there are twice as many misplaced Dems as there are misplaced Republicans. You can argue that Nevada and Colorado are trending Democratic, so maybe the number of is 12 instead of 14, but either way, the Democrats must find a strategy to defend red-state seats or accustom themselves to being the minority in the Senate for a long, long time. If the seats above switched to the "correct" party, we'd be looking at 62 Republicans and 38 Democrats in the Senate.

Now of course, some of these folks are popular and will be around as long as they wish regardless of other partisan trends in the state (Dorgan, Chaffee, Bayh, Lincoln, Specter). But some will retire, and some will be challenged. If we can't do any better in heavily red states like North Dakota and Arkansas, we're going to be in serious trouble in the long-term. What kind of strategy should we be looking for?

For one thing, the Democrats should not be so endangered in the plains states. The party need not tilt toward extreme protectionism in order to be pro-farm. The Dems should also think seriously about making plains-state depopulation an issue, because small towns are dying in the middle of the country faster than rain forest in Brazil, and no one seems to know how to address it. If the Democrats could come up with some kind of positive "Agenda For Small-Town America," we might be able to hold those seats even if our most popular figures retire or move on.

The second thing is that we've got to pick off those blue-state Republicans before they can pick off any more red-state Democrats. Beating Santorum should be one of the biggest Democratic Senate priorities in 2006, especially because the guy truly is a loon. That means running a GOTV effort that matches the one PA managed this year. And the party should put serious pressure on Chaffee, Snowe, and Collins to switch parties or face extinction.

The third thing is to find some kind of strategy for the South short of compromising our most important ideals and values. We simply cannot afford to abandon that much of the country to the other guys without a fight. Unfortunately, I have no idea how we should do this.

The wisdom of my favorite film, Big Night, seems readily apparent right now. The movie is about a pair of struggling Italian immigrants who operate a restaurant at the Jersey shore in the 1950s. Primo (Tony Shalhoub) is the brilliant, perfectionist chef, and Secundo (Stanley Tucci) is the pragmatic businessman who manages the whole operation. The trouble is that they serve very sophisticated Italian food which is little known and little understood in the corner of the universe where they ply their trade, while just up the street Pascal (Ian Holm) runs a glitzy Italian restaurant/nightclub that serves up the typical Americanized Italian slop you'd find in your average can of Chef Boyardee. Primo quips at one point that one goes on in the restaurant is "the rape of cuisine." Regardless, Pascal's is packed, while their own business is on the verge of failure. Pascal promises to get the famous musician Louis Prima to play at their restaurant one night, so the press will come and give them the attention they need to save the business.

At one point, a despondent Primo is being told by Secundo that their restaurant is failing and that only Louis Prima can save them:

Primo: People should come just for the food.
Secundo: I know that.
Primo: People should come just for the food!
Secundo: I know that, I know! But they don't.

At another point, Pascal tells Secundo to "Give the people what they want, then later you can give them what you want."

Most Democrats, and most liberals, believe people should vote Democratic just for the ideas, just for the principles that we stand for and believe in. But they don't. They should, but they don't. They go to Pascal's. And we don't have time for them to learn, as Secundo shouts angrily at Primo. "This is a restaurant, not a fucking school!"

Well, this is politics, not a fucking quadrennial civics lesson. If people keep voting Republican, we're going to go under, the bank is going to foreclose. We can't invite Louis Prima to save us, and he wouldn't come anyway; we'd end up throwing another big party that no one shows up for. We have to serve up some of Pascal's bastardized cuisine, which we'll call "values," the word everyone wants to hear. We have to neutralize those values issues, the wedge issues which keep sending poor, rural Americans into the voting booth to cast ballots for the party of oligarchy and regressive taxation. We have to repackage our seafood risotto as spaghetti and meatballs.

We have to give the people what they want, so that later we can give them what we want. And we have to figure out how to do that. And soon.

Edwards (sigh)
Obama
Blanche Lincoln?
Hillary
Bayh
Sebelius
Vilsack
Rendell

I'd like to see Obama-Lincoln.

I know. This is trivial. But it's the only thing keeping me from jumping off the proverbial bridge. Long-term strategic question -- do we want to keep running southerners who can't even carry their own home states? It's seems to me that it's about the party and the party's brand name, rather than about finding the magical man with the southern accent.

CNN says that with 99% reporting, fewer than 113 million have voted. What happened? We were expecting 116-118 million minimum. If those numbers are real, we've got to seriously rethink our GOTV game if we ever want to win another national election in this country.

I don't know if John Kerry is going to win this election. I'm optimistic, and I believe that Democrats are energized and united in a way I've never seen in my lifetime, but polls are polls, and they're a mixed bag. I believe Chris when he says the incumbent rule will give us the election, but we have to be prepared for a loss.

Either way, I want to talk about the amazing transformation in American politics that has taken place over the last 18 months. Think back to March of 2003. Just a few months past the Republicans humiliating the Democrats in the mid-term elections, taking back the Senate and rolling congressional opposition to the pre-election war resolution, things looked incredibly bleak for the Dems. Though the anti-war movement held huge, energetic, and uplifting demonstrations all across America and the world, the Bush Administration's refusal to slow its relentless march to war had the party and the left feeling discouraged and defeated. Bush's approval ratings were high, and neo-conservative ideologues were beating the drums for war, war, and more war. The same lunatics who were referred to as NUTS (Nuclear Utilization Theorists) in the 1970s were now in charge of American foreign policy. Politically speaking, March 2003 was probably the nadir of the modern American Democratic Party. In opposition in all three branches of government with dismal hopes of regaining control anytime soon, any partisan of the left had great reason to feel miserable about the next five years.

But the nadir also contained the seeds of the Democratic resurgence. What remained of the anti-war movement (myself included) latched onto the guerrilla presidential campaign of Vermont centrist-turned-populist rabble-rouser Howard Dean. Dean was the only presidential candidate who was unabashedly against the war, outside of Kucinich, who was rather clearly not electable from the get-go. Dean also harnessed popular resentment against the hapless Democratic opposition in Congress, which was getting embarrassed at almost every turn, and trampled upon by the GOP majority like never before in American history. Dean drew crowds in the thousands 6 months before the first Democratic primary was even held, which is pretty astounding when you think about it.

When I returned from a summer of Lebanon in August of 2003, I attended a Dean rally on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. The lawn was packed with energized Dean supporters, voter registration people, and the kinds of people you don't normally see at political rallies. The crowd waited more than 2 hours for Dean to show up, and went nuts when he asked what Democrats were doing supporting the President's "unilateral war in Iraq." I thought Dean was a decent speaker, and he was the only guy saying the sorts of things I wanted to hear at the time. I had left for Lebanon in June as an enthusiastic supporter of Dean, and he was still my guy at the time.

I don't know when the media turned on Dean (probably about when it became clear that he might win the nomination), but I never had the opportunity to support him in the primaries. I honestly can't say whether I would have voted for him in a close race against Kerry, Clark, and Edwards. That's not the way it went down, and Pennsylvania votes very late. I do know that Dean was responsible for activating and energizing the grassroots base of the Democratic Party, and made me proud to be a Democrat for the first time in years. The Democratic primaries, mocked in the media, put the Democrats on the offensive, and sharpened the attacks that Kerry has used so effectively against an incumbent who once had a 90% approval rating. The way the party has rallied around Kerry -- who was pretty much every Dean supporter's second or third choice -- has been impressive.

Whatever happens tomorrow, it has already been a victory for the Democrats. The party has a direction for a change, and has brought a whole new generation of young, creative activists into the party fold. If this isn't your idea of a huge victory, just remember that four years ago Ralph Nader was the choice of the young left, and he was packing in huge crowds wherever he went. Today he can barely draw in the hundreds. If nothing else, this campaign has convinced hundreds of thousands of young progressives that the way forward lies within the Democratic Party instead of outside it. Win or lose, it's up to groups like Moveon, American Coming Together (which needs to turn into America Staying Together), and progressive think tanks, bloggers, writers, and public intellectuals to propel the next big ideological wave forward. If 2002 was the Democrats' 1964, an ugly and embarrassing, but galvanizing defeat, than any close result tomorrow can be seen as a victory of sorts.

This is not to say that I won't be devastated if Kerry loses. I will be. But after a week or so of moping, it will be time to get back in the game, to start writing, to start volunteering, to start paying attention to local and state governance (where the GOP has wiped the Democrats' clock for the past 20 years) and to rebuild this party and the ideological infrastructure of the center-left from the ground up. It can be done. The ideas are out there -- and not just the stale ones from the New Deal coalition, but new ones, exciting ones that combined the power and the responsibility of the government with the force of the market and spirit of the entrepreneurial drive. Why not now? Why not us?

I believe that John Kerry will win the election tomorrow night. But if he does not, we must not throw up our hands and say that all is lost. We must not move to Canada, and abandon America to the extreme right wing. We must continue to fight back, with our feet, with our pens, with our money, with our time, and with our hearts. Keep up the hope, and keep up the fight.