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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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Big red machine
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| Contributor | None Entered |
| Last Edited | None Entered Mar 26, 2005 10:27pm |
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| Category | Analysis |
| Media | Magazine - US News and World Report |
| News Date | Monday, February 14, 2005 06:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | It's hard to escape the symbolism. The Nebraska state flag is blue, but what flies atop flagpoles here is the bright-red banner of the perennially powerful University of Nebraska football team, the Cornhuskers. Nebraska celebrates red like nowhere else--fitting for a land that has not voted Democrat in a presidential election since 1964. In 2000, George W. Bush carried the state with 62 percent of the vote. Four years later, Bush did even better: 66 percent. And John Kerry was victorious in just one of the state's 93 counties. "They spray for Democrats out here," says Julia Holmquist, an aide to Matt Connealy, one of only 13 Democrats in the 49-seat Legislature. Republicans outnumber Democrats in statewide voter registration, 50 percent to 34 percent. In the expansive Third Congressional District, which comprises 69 rural counties, 32 lack even a Democratic Party chair.
Once known as a friend to the working man, Democrats have lost their way in the heartland. Kerry won not a single county in Oklahoma and Utah. And President Bush has won twice in a row in the Dakotas, Kansas, and Missouri.
But perhaps no state has been a surer Republican bet than Nebraska. Settled by German immigrants and Republican Union soldiers after the Civil War, Nebraska was born conservative. Though Democrats like native son William Jennings Bryan struck a chord with agrarian populism, the party of late has been on the wrong side of politically active religious groups. |
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