Barone's Analysis of the Wave Election of 2010

Michael Barone of the Washington Examiner should be required reading for anyone going into or studying government or politics- his analysis of elections and voting patterns is the best. Here is a shortened version of his most recent analysis of the Wave Election of 2010- be sure to check out the full article here:

Gentry liberals: The tsunami swept from the George Washington Bridge to the Donner Pass, but didn't wash away affluent liberals to the east and west of these geographic markers. Also surviving were the cannibals -- the public employee unions that are threatening to bankrupt states like California and New York, a prospect that doesn't faze the left-leaning gentry.

Jacksonians: In 2008 Barack Obama ran weakly in lands settled by the Scots-Irish from the Appalachians southwest to Texas. In 2010 Democrats did even worse there.

Germano-Scandinavian America: The Upper Midwest, settled largely by German and Scandinavian immigrants, has long been the most pacifist, isolationist and dovish part of the United States. That's one reason Obama did well in caucuses and primaries and in the general election in 2008 in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa. He even made it a close race in the Dakotas. But that appeal seems to have vanished this year.

Blacks and Hispanics. Black voters remained almost unanimously Democratic this year. Not so Hispanics, who voted Republican in Florida and only mildly Democratic in Texas, where Republicans captured two Hispanic-majority House seats on the Mexican border.

The Finnish vote: Around 100 years ago Finnish immigrants flocked to the mines and woods of the country around Lake Superior, where the topography and weather must have seemed familiar. They've been a mostly Democratic, sometimes even radical voting bloc ever since. No more, it seems.

Finns, Hispanics, Midwest pacifists/isolationists, and Jacksonians are all falling out of the modern-day Democratic Party. It appears that the election of Obama in 2008 is indeed going to destroy a modern-day party, but it isn't the Republican Party as expected- he is going to rip apart the Democratic Party into those who produce and those who are parasitic.