National Journal hosted a Nov. 20 panel discussion. This is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Alisha Johnson: Good morning. I'm Alisha Johnson, associate publisher for National Journal. Thanks so much for coming today.

If you are anything like all of us here, you're still walking around the hallways talking about, "Can you believe what happened? Can you believe how crazy this is?" and the historic nature of this election and trying to figure out what happened, what was different, what changed. I'm standing in front of all these people who have clearly a lot more perspective than any of us do, which is why we're here trying to figure out what really drove what's going to happen the next three days, three months, three years.

So, on behalf of all of us at National Journal, Howard Opinsky, our friends at Powell Tate, who partnered with us, we are hoping that today we can give you some perspective. So towards that end, I'm going to introduce Ron Brownstein, who is behind me here, who is our political director for National Journal Group -- National Journal, CongressDaily, the Hotline, our sister publication the Atlantic -- who spent 17 years with the Los Angeles Times, before joining us, where he was a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee for presidential election coverage, and now we are thrilled to have him, and I'm going to turn it over to Ron now.

Ronald Brownstein: Thanks, Alisha. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to "How Obama Won: The New Landscape of American Politics."

It feels a little strange to be talking about this election in the past tense. It was so compelling and engaging and long that it's just kind of hard to believe that it's actually over. A quick show of hands, how many people are still going on the Internet in the morning checking for tracking polls? [Laughter] It's stable now. I want you to think of this as your personal first step in a 12-step program of weaning from the election.

What we want to do this morning is talk about the coalitions that Barack Obama and John McCain built; what those coalitions say about the long-term balance of power between the parties; and how that political environment will, or maybe at least should, influence the strategies the two parties pursue in the coming months and years. And we have a great panel to do this.

For starters we have, I think, two men who would be, at least I think, by common consent the smartest pollsters in the two parties. To my immediate left, we have Stan Greenberg, who has polled over the years for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Tony Blair, Nelson Mandela, and what I like to call "the other Barack," Ehud Barak, and in this campaign was polling, it seemed almost hourly, for the Democracy Corps and studying the election from many different angles. To Stan's left, we have Bill McInturff, who is a founder of Public Opinion Strategies, which essentially polls for, I believe, every Republican House, Senate and gubernatorial candidate and was also the chief pollster this year for John McCain.

To my immediate right, we have Ruy Teixeira, who is a fellow at the Center for American Progress, the Century Foundation, and the Brookings Institution -- he's basically a fellow at every think tank in Washington. He is the co-author of a 2002 book called The Emerging Democratic Majority, which forecast the emergence of a coalition very much like the one that Barack Obama assembled this month, and he is the editor of a more recent book from Brookings, Red, Blue and Purple America: the Future of Election Demographics.

And finally, on his right, we have Bill Kristol who is, of course, editor of the Weekly Standard and columnist for the New York Times, member of the media elite, I think the one true member here on the panel. Bill is here not only because the Weekly Standard is such an influential publication and because he is such a wise and witty commentator in the New York Times and on Fox, but also in a lesser-known earlier incarnation, the last time Republicans found themselves in this situation, facing unified Democratic control of the House, the Senate and the White House, Bill was instrumental in devising the strategy that helped lead them back to their landslide victories in 1994 through a group -- and I use the word loosely, because it was basically Bill and a couple of his friends -- called the Project for the Republican Future that helped devise Republican strategy in '93-'94. It's worth noting that Bill did that -- that group was engineered through the cutting-edge technology of the blast fax. So, he has always been on the forward edge of change.

I just want to make a couple of -- throw out a couple of thoughts to just kind of frame this election in some historic context, and then turn it over to our panel who will each talk for about five, six, seven minutes and then we'll have some conversation among ourselves and bring you in for questions.

This campaign really comes at the tail end, I believe, of what had been the longest period of sustained parity between the parties since the late 19th century. There was a thumb on the scale toward the Republicans in the middle years of the Bush presidency, but overall the country has been divided between the parties since the mid-1990s about as evenly as they had been at any time since the 1880s and 1890s.

We saw this, above all, in the two presidential elections involving President Bush. In 2000, he became only the fourth president in American history to lose the popular vote while winning the presidency. His Electoral College victory was the second-narrowest ever in our history. Fast-forward to four years later, Bush and [John] Kerry don't run against each other quite as long as Obama and McCain did, but even so, an 18-month or so campaign, exactly three states change hands between 2000 and 2004. New Hampshire goes from Bush to Kerry. Iowa and New Mexico go from Gore to Bush. In fact, 47 states vote the same way in 2004 as they did in 2000. In fact, at that point, 34 states had voted the same way in each of the previous four presidential elections, the longest period of such stability since before World War II. And of course, Bush wins re-election by a more narrow margin, measured as a share of the popular vote, than any re-elected president in our history. So, we had kind of stability and parity defining our landscape.

For now, at least, in the 2008 results, Barack Obama and the Democrats broke the tie. Obama wins almost 53 percent of the vote, becoming the first Democrat since [Lyndon] Johnson in 1964 and only the second Democrat since World War II to get past 50.1 percent. He shatters the static red/blue divide. He wins nine states that Bush won last time, including seven that Bush won twice and four that had voted Democratic no more than once since 1964. And he sweeps in with him substantial numbers of House and Senate Democrats, the first president since Reagan in 1980 to bring in members of his party across the board, to the point where when Congress reconvenes in January, Democrats will have a larger margin in both the House and the Senate than Republicans ever had during their 12 years of control.

Obama did all this behind what we've called here a "coalition of the ascendant." Groups that have been growing in society, minorities, African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities, the Millennial Generation that is moving into politics in big numbers, and college-plus white voters, all of which were important elements of his coalition. It's one thing to assemble a winning coalition for one election, it's another to maintain or expand it in office. So I'm going to turn it over now to our panelists, who are going to talk a little bit about what Obama built and what it might take to hold it together. And Stan Greenberg will kick us off.

Stan Greenberg: Thank you very much, Ron, for bringing us together at various points including at the Democratic convention, maybe even at the Republican, but I wasn't there.

I think Ron's initial point is actually quite right, which is to say that we've come out of a period of parity of the parties. But it's not just that we were in a period of parity; the close parity in the parties shaped the strategies or tactics of the two parties in order to try to edge past that midpoint. If I look to Reagan, Reagan had a vision -- not just a vision, it was also a strategy for building a sustained national majority. He reached across to groups, I think, in an ideological way. There was a coherence to the breadth of his reach that the Republicans made to the South to Baptist voters, to the North to Catholic voters, and had laid possible ground. There was, obviously, re-alignment, but part of a process toward trying to have a sustainable majority.

Karl Rove's strategy, Bush's strategy, almost acknowledged the parity, and almost all of the reaches were tactical, so you do prescription-drug, you do entitlements, spending for senior citizens to get them, you do compassionate conservatism, No Child Left Behind for education for suburban women -- it was a bunch of tactics, where we have a good immigration policy not because it fits into an overall worldview, but because we know we'll lose these states in the Pacific Rim if we don't do that. But it doesn't add up. And it requires intense mobilization, polarization, in our politics, and it had a reciprocal reaction on the Democratic side and again, energizing, immobilizing. It finally came crashing against the problems facing the country, whether it's the economy, Iraq or health care or climate change. It was not a politics that had any promise of solving any problems that the country faced, and it crashed. They fell short and crashed.

What's left, what's come out of this is, I think, something that has the potential to be quite enduring in Reagan's terms, but only if there is successful governance that takes this beyond where we are here. It's very striking, both the coalitions that formed -- not just because there were coalitions that formed, this election happened twice. This election happened in 2006, it was almost identical to the election that happened in 2008. There are some differences that were impacted by Obama's candidacy and who he was, but the patterns that were there, the rural areas outside the South no longer being presumed Republican territory, the strong vote for Democrats in the upper-income suburbs, the gains with young voters, the strong performance of the Latino voters in 2006, all of that happened in almost identical form to what happened in 2008.

Part of what makes me believe this is more enduring is simply that this is not that they tried it once and -- in fact, if you look at the trend of right direction, wrong track, everything you want to look at, 2006 was just like, people just didn't pause. They just kept going past 2006 to 2008, both on how alienated they were -- but it cemented these votes. 2006 was a 10-point swing from 2004 congressionally. 2008 was a 10-point swing from the 2004 presidential. So voters did this twice. They're very conscious of what they are doing. This is an engaged electorate that was extraordinarily political, and we couldn't research "Bradley effect," but what we did was brought people together to indirectly get at the subject. The voters would talk about the Bradley effect in those names. They knew that they were not supposed to vote for the people they said they were voting for. [Laughter] They knew what they were doing. I think they were very conscious of the character of the coalition and the critique and the vision that Obama offers.

I should say, by the way... one of the things that happened in 2006 that Obama didn't quite get is that white, older blue-collar voters moved significantly in 2006; it was part of the Democrats making their big gains. He had a harder time with those older, white blue-collar voters, but that may be Obama-specific. I don't know what happened. He was very much seen as a cultural liberal, obviously, an African American representing this new diversity that people weren't sure they were that comfortable with. As he governs, if he's governing the way he is in the transition, obviously, it's going to be much tougher when you get the real problems. I wouldn't rule out -- assume that these older voters that moved in 2006 don't begin to move back over to Obama and offer the possibility of growth to end up with a Republican coalition that's deeply grounded in the South, and it's got to be, if you think about it, a strategy for the Republicans, the fact that they went -- this didn't just shift the whole country shifting in the same direction, the South went the other direction, that is, white voters in the South, you know, were more supportive of McCain than they were for George Bush, and so they went against the trend nationally. For someone who studied the South in various guises as academic and otherwise, this was old-South, Confederate-type politics where the largest concentrations of African Americans are, the more whites voted with Republicans and historically voted for white supremacy. That's not what they were voting for, but it does reflect that historic dynamic in the South. It makes it very hard to be part of what's going on in the country.

The other piece of this is, obviously, the white Appalachian piece, which has a very strong religious component, and if you look where there's a strong Evangelical component, the Mormon components in rural areas, you pretty much get to where Republicans can feel comfortable about carrying states. But it puts them in the midst of dynamics -- it's not just groups, it puts them in these dynamics that just don't represent what is going on in the country. Now, none of this will matter if we end up with a post-1992 form of governance, but... the 2006 and 2008 Democrats-elect, almost all their new seats were seats that have been elected in this new territory. These are New Dems and Blue Dogs, they're coming out of rural areas, they're coming out of upscale suburbs and they represent as much this scale of shift within the Democratic caucus. This scale of shift is as important -- and they're part of the Obama win, they're all part of this same process. This is not a -- I don't for a second believe this is a liberal win in the sense that the liberal wing of the party dictates where it goes. I think they're all part of the 2008 change. I think those new people elected including Obama represented, I think, the way he's forming his administration in the transition, I think reflects it. The economic crisis sets them up for dealing in a much more unified way than we were able to do in '93-94.

Brownstein: All right. Bill.

Bill McInturff: People keep saying "how are you doing," and I keep saying, "This is a great country. Neither am I in a common grave with the other brain trust of the McCain campaign, nor have I been sent to a re-education camp." [Laughter] Yet....

To speak of my old friend Tim Russert, I do polling for NBC, Wall Street Journal. It was the last week to go, a week to go in 2006, and Peter Hart and I had to brief 40 people, the producers, the on-air talent, what was going to happen in this election. Peter, to his credit, would handle the tough stuff. And so Peter says, "Republicans will lose the House. Republicans will lose the Senate. That's the story of this election." And then, of course, Russert turns to me and says, "How many seats exactly?" And I say graciously, because the NRCC is my largest client, and I say, "I think Peter's covered the main story, and he speaks for both of us in the polling team." And Russert says, "How many seats?" And I start blinking torture. I say, "That's not really the story." Then Russert says, "I remember when you were a man and you had guts. How many seats?" And I said, "Tim, have I told you that the NRCC now owes me $1.6 million and they've put my children in a safe house for the last week." Everyone laughs and there's this long pause and Russert says, "OK. Which one do you care most about?"

So, that's what the last couple of cycles have been like. Let me talk about this cycle. Here's the McCain view very quickly. We had a very unpopular war. We had the most unpopular president in American polling history in terms of length of months under 40. We had 70 percent wrong track. And we were winning! We were winning. And then what happened? What happened was we said, "That's not hard enough for John McCain. We should implode the financial markets and just take every hope that you had that things would be OK and implode the financial markets." And what did that do? We went from 71 wrong track to literally 90. We had polling days in mid-October -- in America, we had 8 percent right direction, 91 wrong track. Then reporters were calling me and saying, "Have you ever seen this?" and I said, "Oh, yeah, yeah. I've done a lot of polling. Bulgaria, 1992." I said, "You know, it's clear that we should just move to Bulgaria. They are used to this." Or, "We should start interviewing Bulgarian political experts about how do you govern with 91 percent wrong track."

Here's my point. My point is if you get to 91 percent wrong track, lots of things crack. OK? I think Ron's right about party identification. Let's look at the underlying thing in this election. In 1976 and 1980, Democrats in the exit polls had 15-point party ID edges. It's a different era. Ronald Reagan gets elected in 1980, and from 1984 through 2004, through a generation, the largest gap in party identification on an exit poll was 5 points in 1992, also a difficult economy. Today, in this election it was minus-7. That's a huge number, especially when you are at 0 in '04 and minus-3 in 2000. So, this economy, Iraq, the president -- and, again, here's a very quick summary, George Bush is at 27 percent job approval on the exit poll, and guess what? Every state where he's below that, McCain lost, every state where he's above that, McCain won. And so you're asking the Republican nominee to run and get a majority coalition with 27 percent job approval.

So, minus-7 party ID in the history is the worst since 1980. And so the question really, fundamentally, becomes what direction does that go? Does President-elect Obama consolidate those gains and keep party ID at 5-8 points? Which, by the way, is attainable, that's possible. Or is there pressure to push ID closer together?

One of the things that I look at is, I look at -- and I did at my presentation to the Republican governors -- are what things I think are unique, meaning that are the fragmentation of this horrible environment, what things are enduring. For example, in my -- we did 2,400 post-election interviews the night of the election. With white men, white college-educated men, John McCain only won by 7 points. And I can tell you the day they shifted. The day they shifted was we had the House screwed up and didn't vote for the bailout, which kept that story going another week or eight days and it helped implode the campaign. We had the bailout vote, they suck it up because all the smart guys kept saying, "If you vote for this, this is all going to get better," and then we drop 1,500 points in the market. What happened was if you were tracking every day as I was, white college-educated men lost 1,200-1,400 points in the market and said, "Oops, that's it." Boom.

So I have a hard time believing that we're going to keep losing those guys or only win those guys by 7 points. Here are the enduring things that strike me. One is, of course, Latinos. The percent of the white electorate's gone from 81 percent -- I mean, if you look at where it's gone since 1992, we're becoming a black and brown country, Ruy's work is entirely correct. And if the Republican Party lets Latinos stay where they are or drift any worse, then you become a minority white party.

Now, what's emblematic, to me the most emblematic commercial of this campaign -- lots of you didn't see it, you probably don't watch lots of Spanish-language media -- is a commercial -- and you have to remember, if you're John McCain, your pollster was begging you in 2005 and '06 that he was going to implode his race on the issue of immigration, and John said, "No, we're going to pass it." So he imploded his campaign in the pursuit of a reasonable immigration policy. He imploded his own race to do that. What happens? What happens is that they're running commercials on Spanish-language TV saying, "Here are John McCain's friends," and they have Rush [Limbaugh] calling the Hispanics stupid and lazy. A guy, Rush, who has spent his entire frigging life torturing John McCain, we're in a TV commercial with the guy. And they're saying, "These are John McCain's friends." Here's the other thing. If the other team has $700 million and they're running five times as much as you are in Spanish-language stuff saying that crap, it has impact.

So my point is that I believe that the congressional Republicans of 2006 have left a legacy that has helped make it impossible for McCain to make up strides. That negative legacy now could be reversed by a president with any kind of adroitness trying to lock up that vote, and it creates long-term trouble.

The second thing that I am very concerned about is the marriage gap. The difference between single and married people is becoming even more profound, and in this election, it is a longer-term trend; single even white guys have been drifting towards the Democratic Party because of the status of the economy in the last two elections. We as a party have -- I've been trying to preach what I call, "We are pro-family and pro-single." The unintended consequence of what Republicans have been talking about for a generation or two generations in terms of a pro-family party, is if you're a single person in your 20s or 30s with no kids, they keep saying that "they're not talking to me." We have not had thought through what a rational policy would look like for people who are not living in something even close to a traditional family. I think that's an enduring issue.

Obviously, look, you cannot get whacked by 35 or 40, and if you take in the 18-29 vote, a third of which is black and brown and they're getting bigger, but even with white young voters, McCain lost by 10. You cannot take, if you look at it demographically, OK, let's say 18-29-year-olds are 20 percent of the electorate, you just lost by 40 points. Forty percent of 20, that's a huge, huge chunk that's very hard to get back with the rest of the electorate.

And again, as John McCain's friend since 1991 and something that I saw Frank Luntz, who's a moron, I saw Frank Luntz make a joke -- I want to make sure this is clearly on the record. [Laughter] You know, most of us outgrow being a snotty jerk. Somehow this has eluded Frank. And so Frank saying to the Republican governors, making fun of John not being able to use a BlackBerry? OK. Let me make sure this is clear. The man can't lift his arms above his head. I would like to take a hammer and start breaking different bones in Frank's arms. The man can't use a BlackBerry for the same reason that he can't tie his shoes, because he can't use his fingers and hands. But my point is that as a party, when they ran a commercial talking about John's not being able to use a BlackBerry or use a computer, Joe Biden as his friend went and said, "I am sorry. That's kind of a cheap shot. I bet it's like everything else, the guy can't do it because he's much more disabled than people imagine." But it is emblematic and it's a terrible story. It's terribly unfair because of this man's injuries and what he did for the country, but it speaks to a broader problem and the broader problem is when you have, as we did with Dole, a 70-year-old nominee versus a different-generation candidate, it's very hard.

As a party, from a policy perspective, what did we say to people 18 to 29 years old? And again, the Obama campaign did a terrific job with the money they had, having an honest-to-God policy discussion about education and a targeted campaign delivered through new media to those voters in a way that was rational for them to vote for Barack Obama.

And as my last point, and I agree this is the thing, we have a congressional wing that is essentially locked into one region and locked into seats, by the way, that are enormously Republican. We don't have many seats left with swing guys who have to worry about a swing seat. Their instincts are going to be to match their constituencies, and their constituencies aren't who's in play in the national election. What it means to me is that we will not rebuild this party from our congressional wing, I'm not being mean about them, I'm just saying our best and last hope are the Republican governors. We are blessed that the way America works, we have 36 gubernatorial seats at play in 2010 and that we have 36 different laboratories to re-run a different candidate and a message and different policy across those 36 seats, including most of our major states.

Brownstein: Thanks, Bill. Before we turn to Ruy, I just want to button up one point. You noted that Obama won white voters under 30 in addition to benefiting from the increasing diversity; it's worth noting that Bush, in both of his elections, got 55 pecent of whites under 30 and Obama got 54 percent of them. So it was a significant move in addition to the fact that more of them, a third of them in this election were nonwhite. And to talk about this and similar matters, Ruy Teixeira.

Ruy Teixeira: Thanks, Ron. My theme is basically growth and decline, I guess. Democrats equal growth. Republicans equal decline. These are...we could argue about how conjunctural some of this stuff is in this election, but typically these are long-term trends we've been tracking for quite a while that fundamentally disadvantage the Republicans at this point.

So, first thing, the growth in the minority vote: In 1988 the minority vote was 15 percent of voters; this election it was 26 percent of voters. So that's an immense change. The minority presidential vote this year was 80 percent to 18 percent, which is pretty amazing. Blacks were 95 to 4; they were up 2 points with a percent of voters. Hispanics up another percent of voters. They went from being... Oh, sorry. Should I speak into this? All right. Hispanics went for Obama 67 to 31 -- so much for the idea that Hispanics wouldn't vote for a black guy. So, that 36-point margin was double what Kerry had in 2004. So the minority vote growing and coming in super-strong for the Democrats.

The women's vote, obviously strong in general. Single women were 70 to 29 for Obama and 20 percent of the electorate -- and another growing constituency; we're pushing -- we're getting to the point where about half of adult women are going to be single. And working women -- which didn't get as much play as I thought it might -- they were 60 to 39 for Obama, a 21-point margin. In 2004, Kerry only carried working women by 3 percentage points. So that's just a huge change.

Postgraduates continued their steady march -- professionals toward the Democratic Party. One of the sort of stylized facts about American politics in the last 30 or 40 years is the realignment of professionals from Republican to Democratic, and that just continued in this election -- going up. At least it's the best proxy we have in the exit polls for it -- 58-40 Obama among postgraduates.

And millennials have been mentioned -- basically, folks born after 1978 are typically assigned to the millennial generation. As they've moved into the polls, the youth vote has gotten more and more heavily Democratic. In 2004 it was a 9-point margin. This year it was a 34-point margin, 66 to 32; it's been mentioned even white, 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Obama. And looking forward, we are going to have more and more of these millennials in the voting pool: There were about 48 million eligible voters who classify as millennials in this election, there will be 64 million in 2012 and it will be 81 million in 2016. The number of voters that will add each time -- actual people who show up at the polls -- is more in the nature of 10 million an election, but that's a lot. And in fact, if things continue as they are, if you sort of benchmark millennial performance this election -- there will probably be some falloff, but let's say it stays the same -- simply by this process of cohort replacement in the electorate, you will increase the Democratic margin by another 2 1/2 percentage points in 2012 and yet another 2 1/2 percentage points in 2016 just by walking these additional millennials into the electorate. So that would be a little worrisome to me if I was a Republican.

Another thing is what I call the non-Christian coalition -- the fact that secular, less observant and other-religion voters tend to vote heavily Democratic. This was very true in this election -- 75-23 no religion, 67-30 among people who don't attend, 78-21 Jewish, etc., etc. The thing is, this is another growth constituency. Sometimes it's is not understood, with all the talk about white evangelicals -- the real growth constituent in the religious mix in the United States is more secular voters and people of other religions. So, for example, John Green of the Pew religion center has estimated that by the time that we hit the year 2024, 45 percent of U.S. adults could be either unaffiliated or some other religion besides Protestant and Catholic. So that's kind of interesting. That is a pretty big change. And right now, the Democrats look like they are on the leading edge of yet another growth constituency.

Well, it's not all peaches and cream for the Democrats, of course. There are some constituencies in which they're doing less well.

The chief constituency, in a very broad sense, is white working-class or non-college voters. The Democrats did improve somewhat in this election; they went from a 23-point margin to only an 18 deficit -- so a 5-point improvement, but clearly under what they did with the rest of the population. And it's interesting to compare white working-class voters in 1988 to today. [Michael] Dukakis lost these voters by 20 points. Obama lost them by 18 points, so not a lot of change. The problem for the Republicans is there are less and less of these voters.

White working-class voters are down 15 percentage points as a percent of voters since 1988. Minorities are up 11 points. And what's the rest of it? Well, I'm glad you asked. White college graduate voters -- and here we do see a very significant shift since 1988 -- in 1988, white college-plus voters were a 20-point deficit for the Democrats; it was 11 points in 2004, 4 points today. So they're almost getting toward an even split for the Democrats. That's a huge shift, and they are increasing as a percent of voters, by about 4 points since 1988.

So you've got the growth constituency on the one side -- heavily Democratic, moving Democratic; you've got the decline constituency on the other side remaining relatively stable for the Republicans. And if you look across all the different contested states -- and I studied 10 of them in particular with Bill Frey of the Brookings Institution -- if you look at each of these states from 2000 to 2006, looking at American Community Survey data, white working-class workers were declining as a share of eligible workers in each and every one of those states, sometimes spectacularly. In Nevada, there was a 6-percentage-point decline in the percent of eligible voters who were white working-class just in a 6-year period. That's down a point a year. That's just extraordinary. And it's not as spectacular in some of these other states, but it is a uniform pattern of decline across states.

Conversely, we have a uniform pattern of increase of white college-graduate voters among eligible voters in all these purple states -- you know, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, on and on. And then of course the minority share is bolting up even faster in these contested states. Again, Nevada is the best example -- 5-percentage-point rise in the percent of minorities among eligible voters just in six years. So that's one reason why Nevada is changing so fast that it's making people's heads spin.

Now all of these dynamic changes -- the shift in the demographic mix -- is strongest typically in these contested states in what you might call their growth epicenters, the large dynamic metro areas where the white working-class is declining the fastest and white college-graduate and minority voters are increasing the fastest.

Just to give you some examples: In Ohio, the growth epicenter is arguably the Columbus metro area. Between 2004 and 2008, the Democratic margin increased by 9 points. It's increased 31 points since 1988 -- so, a 31-point pro-Democratic margin shift in the Columbus metro in Ohio since 1988. That's pretty extraordinary. Cincinnati wasn't bad either in this election, actually; that also moved by 9 points -- probably the other dynamic metro area, though not as dynamic as Columbus.

So, Denver metro and Colorado: Half the people live in the Denver metro. It's where a lot of the strongest growth is and certainly the biggest counties. The Democrats had a 15-point shift in margin in the Democratic metro in this election, a 21-point margin shift since 1988. Fort Collins metro, just north of Boulder, another dynamic area -- same story, 15-points in this election, 22 points since 1988.

Take Florida: The I-4 corridor -- where the Orlando metro and Tampa metros are -- the I-4 corridor a 10-point shift overall toward the Democrats in this election, 28 points since 1988. And Orlando metro within the I-4 corridor had a 17-point margin shift toward the Democrats, 48 points since 1988 in this dynamic, huge metropolitan area in the I-4 corridor.

Pennsylvania is a very stark story. One reason why it's been blue and it just went more heavily blue in this election, is -- despite the fact that white working-class voters actually were more heavily Republican in this election than in 2004, they still got whacked even worse -- is because what's happening is that the growing areas of Pennsylvania are uniformly shifting Democratic and the declining areas in the west are uniformly pretty stable, or certainly relative to 1988 have been getting more Republican. So the Philadelphia suburbs -- 8-point shift this election, 39 points since 1988. The northeast -- which is the Allentown, Reading, Scranton, that whole area -- is actually where some of the strongest growth is in Pennsylvania. It's all relative -- it's a slow-growth state. But that was an 11-point shift in this election, 22 points since 1988. And then if you look at the Harrisburg/York/Lancaster area: This is actually quite a pro-Republican area generally, and I always thought that if the Democrats started moving voters in this area it would be very bad for the Republicans as a party in the state -- they had a 16-point shift toward the Democrats in this election, which is the biggest of any of the regions.

Northern Virginia -- a 15-point shift in this election, 38 points since 1988. Las Vegas in Nevada -- a 14-point pro-Democratic shift in this election and a 34-point shift since 2000 and 1988.

So you keep on looking at these growth centers in these contested states, and you look at the patterns of change, the demographic patterns of change and the voting trends -- you put it all together and it paints a fairly bleak picture for the Republican Party. The only places typically they're holding their own in these states are in the declining rural areas. So this is the challenge the Republicans face and this is the opportunity the Democrats have.

Brownstein: Let me underscore one point Ruy made real quick, and then turn it over to Bill. In the University of Michigan's post-election surveys, which go back to 1952, if you look at every Democratic presidential candidate from Adlai Stevenson to John F. Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson to Hubert Humphrey, even through Jimmy Carter, they all ran significantly better -- 9, 12, 16 points better -- among white voters without a college education than white voters with a college education. That was the New Deal political order that was class-based. Well, starting with Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Clinton ran even. He ran as well with college-educated whites as he did with non-college whites. And then in the last three elections, we've seen the class inversion accelerate. Al Gore actually ran 4 points better among college-educated than non-college whites, John Kerry 6 points better among college than non-college, and then Barack Obama, this time, 7 points better. So, you have this kind of remarkable class inversion over time, but as Ruy said, the non-college whites are now down to 39 percent of the electorate when they were a majority as recently as 1992 -- an absolute majority of the voters. So, it is kind of a fundamental reordering of what the Democratic coalition has been over time. Bill.

Bill Kristol: Thanks, Ron. I will just be brief, and maybe I'll pose a thesis and an antithesis, which I think is in a way the big question posed by this election -- I don't differ from almost any of the analysis, which has been very good, I think, of what actually happened in terms of the groups and the comparison with '04 and previous elections -- I mean, look, how big an election was this? I think that's the question on everyone's mind. The answer is not knowable now because -- I think Stanley suggested this -- it will depend on how Obama governs, and I will come back to that in a minute. It will depend a little bit also on what Republicans do, as Bill suggested, over the next two to four years, but more on Obama and what the Democrats do.

But before I get into that -- I'll get to that at the very end -- you could make the case this is potentially a very big election. It's the first time since 1980 a president has taken over the White House, a party has taken over the White House, increasing its seats in both the House and the Senate. We forget that Democrats lost seats in 1992 when Clinton won the presidency. Republicans lost seats in the Senate in 2000 and ended up losing the Senate, actually, when [Jim] Jeffords switched when Bush took the presidency. But they lost five, I think, even before the Jeffords switch in 2000. Neither had much momentum, is one way to put it. I think one can criticize Clinton's performance in '93-'94, but to be fair to him, he had gotten 43 percent of the vote, they were losing seats in the House, they had no pickups in the Senate; it's not like the Democrats on the Hill thought they owed him anything. And he had a tough governing challenge. Bush in 2000 -- lost the Senate six months into his first term -- also a tough governing challenge.

Obama has a chance to govern in a way that arguably no American president has since Reagan in '80. And he's a little stronger than Reagan in '80, because though Reagan was able to forge a de facto majority in the House, of course the Democrats still controlled the House in 1980. Obama has comfortable margins in both the House and the Senate. He's the first Democratic president, of course, to win an absolute majority of more than 50.1 percent of the popular vote since Johnson in '64. The first time since 1950-52, I believe, that a party has in successive elections won substantially increased numbers in both the House and the Senate. That's extremely unusual, actually, in American history going all the way back -- very unusual in this century to pick up whatever the Democrats picked up -- what did they pick up? Thirty in House seats in 2006 and then another 24 or so this time, and to pick up what, about six Senate seats in '06 and another seven or eight this time. That's pretty impressive.

So you could make the case that if you put together '06 and '08 and Obama getting 52-point-whatever percent of the vote it was, and the huge number in the youth vote, which presumably is the worst vote to lose because there is a lot of political science evidence that young people tend to continue voting the way they vote the first couple of times they vote. That may change, incidentally, in our modern era; a lot of that is based on -- presumably, the same things that make consumers change their preferences much more easily in a modern Internet age might also make voters less "sticky" in terms of their partisan preferences in this age. So I'm not quite as fatalistic about this as some Republicans that this whole generation is gone and it's going to vote 66-31 for the next 40 years, but nonetheless, if there's any voting bloc that you don't really want to lose by 2 to 1, it's presumably younger voters, who will be around the longest and more of them will start voting -- a higher percentage of whom will presumably start voting or come into the voting electorate.

So for all those reasons, Obama is in a strong position. A lot of Republicans I think still don't quite get that. Frankly, I think there is a little bit too much nostalgia for '93 and '94, when there was an ability to trip up Clinton and to take advantage of some underlying trends, actually, at the time and to get a Republican majority in both houses for the first time in 40 years. But that's -- I don't think that's going to happen in 2010; the numbers are just too tough, certainly in the Senate and probably in the House, to take back either house.

So we're looking at a 4-year, I think, majority, a 4-year chance for Obama to govern, not a 2-year, in terms of congressional control. He's got a majority of the vote coming in, which Clinton didn't have. He is in a very strong position. He is more master of his fate than anyone since Reagan in '81, and that I do believe. And that's, you know, interesting -- could be good for the country. It could be good to have a successful president and a successful presidency, but it, just as a political science matter, it's something most of us -- we on the panel, a little older, so we remember this -- but most of you probably actually haven't really been in Washington when there was a president with this much potential power. So that's sort of the "this was a very big victory" argument.

The counterargument, which I think is equally plausible and equally true perhaps, is: Look, it was an ordinary election. If you told any of us five years ago you are going to have an incumbent president at 25-percent approval, a massive financial crisis with a recession beginning and visibly beginning in the election year, a very adept nominee from the out-party facing an older, very impressive man from the incumbent party, but a somewhat confusing campaign, I guess, and in any case having -- and I very much agree with Bill on this -- having inherited a lot of the, through no fault of his own, problems of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, neither of which he had been complicit in, but nonetheless, which voters were going to blame him a little bit on...

And I do think that came together in a perfect storm in a way, with the financial crisis and the bailout, where we had the spectacle of a Republican administration making a very unconvincing and really a very poor case for what was probably -- some version of which was probably the right policy, the $700 billion, but really pathetically explained, I think. The House Republicans, probably foolishly, though understandably given how bad the explanation was, rebelling, but probably foolish at the end of the day. So you have the Republican secretary of the Treasury saying something has to happen, the Republicans in Congress preventing it from happening and the Republican presidential nominee, I think understandably -- I am, like, the last defender of McCain coming back to Washington there -- understandably thinking maybe I need to come back and try to resolve a total meltdown in my own party six weeks before Election Day, but unfortunately, I think, not having thought through how to do it, and maybe it was just impossible to do it. If you put those three things together combined with the underlying objective fact of the plummeting stock market and the financial crisis, it's pretty hard to win the presidency.

So, you know, you get an incumbent president and a financial crisis, you lose eight years in the White House, you lose the presidency. It doesn't mean that American politics has had a tectonic change; it just means that every eight years voters tend to change presidents' parties anyway. And so Obama won by 6 1/2 points. Shouldn't he have won by 15 or 20, incidentally, in the objective circumstances that obtained? The Democrats picked up decent pickups in Congress, but we're not talking Roosevelt-level majorities here, at least not yet -- well, that's the big question -- in the Senate or the House. He won by a little bit higher margin than Clinton beat Bush in '92. His majorities in Congress -- what was that, about 5 1/2 percent, 5 3/4, almost 6, I think, in '92 and this was a little over 6. [Crosstalk] Yeah, so this was 6-plus. [Crosstalk] OK. That's really going to make a huge difference, you know, that extra percent. One can over-interpret these things. The majorities in Congress are exactly the same as they were when Clinton took over, actually. So you could argue that this is fine. This is 1993. The out-party lost, people were sick of it. There was a recession. There is a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress. That's happened before in our memory. The majorities in Congress are lower than they were when Carter took the presidency back from the Republicans in '76, and that didn't end up being a terribly happy four years for the Carter administration and ended up being a prelude to a pretty good eight or 12 years for Republicans.

So you can make a respectable argument that this is just an ordinary turnover of power and an ordinary punishment of the Republicans for a lot of mistakes, fairly or unfairly applied to the Bush administration and to Republicans, and politics goes on and it's on a fairly even keel -- slight Democratic tilt now, the way there was maybe a slight Republican tilt a few years ago, but no necessary big realignment. I don't think it's necessary.

I think the truth is probably -- I mean, incidentally, one ironic thing about this -- I wish Obama well, and I respect him a lot as an individual, and I think it was a very impressive campaign. On the other hand, I actually think he -- weirdly, another Democrat would have won by more, the truth is. His cultural -- his difficulty reaching down to the white working-class is what prevented it from being a blowout election. And we're now going to have a huge cult of Obama, which is fine; incoming presidents get that, and they should get it in a way -- it is healthy for the country to feel good about the election and who they elected, and he got a majority of the vote. But the honest analytical truth is if Dick Gephardt or Hillary Clinton had been the Democratic nominee, it would have been a 10-point race or even bigger, conceivably. I don't know which way that cuts, but for Republicans it suggests that the situation is even worse.

So which of these is true? Ordinary election or big election? I think the answer is, we'll see, based on how Obama governs. I mean, that really is the key.

There is this huge political science literature that Stanley and I have debated in the past and analyzed in the past together on panels. You know, realigning elections -- it's all a little misleading. Elections don't realign. Governance realigns. '32 wouldn't have been a realigning election if Roosevelt hadn't been perceived as governing successfully, hadn't increased his majorities hugely in '34, hadn't trounced the Republicans in '36, etc., etc. It's what happens now that matters the most. '80 wouldn't have been a realigning election if Reagan hadn't governed successfully in the first two years to hold the Senate -- people forget how important that was in '82 -- and then above all, to have trounced Mondale in '84 and then be able to hand the presidency off to Bush in '88.

So these next four years, actually, are very important and interesting just from a political science point of view, because they really could be the equivalent of the Reagan first term or they could be the equivalent of the Carter first term, to take two obvious examples. And I think that depends a lot on how successfully Obama governs. I think the economic crisis is probably an opportunity for him; he has more room to maneuver, presumably more room to unite his party than if you didn't have a crisis and people didn't feel that they had to band together. On the other hand, as Stanley said, there are an awful lot of moderate Democrats now in the House and, to some degree, in the Senate. That is good for the party, but it makes it a little harder to unite the party, I should think, on a whole lot of issues. It will be a real governing test for Obama.

I think -- with all due respect to my pollster friends, I think we would all agree that the utility of looking backwards to the last election is going to start to diminish very quickly and the utility of following closely Obama's governing strategy and tactics will matter a lot. It's a little unfair, incidentally -- you can say in retrospect that Bush and Rove, the prescription drug benefit, being liberal on immigration, No Child Left Behind were just tactics, not part of a strategy, but failed presidencies in retrospect look like they just had tactics, that if they had succeeded would look like a strategy. I mean, to be fair to Bush, he did try to do three things that I think were correct -- that arguably, certainly in the case of prescription drugs, turned out to be very good policy. No Child Left Behind is more ambiguous, but so far the right effort. He didn't know the House Republicans were going to blow up his immigration policy. And in fact he tried to modernize the Republican Party in all those ways. I don't think prescription drugs was just about getting some votes from seniors. It was an actual way to modernize a welfare-state program in a way consistent with conservative principles of competition and choice. Anyway, whatever, it didn't work politically.

[Laughter]

No, no. I will be brief, but it didn't work politically, one reason being that they didn't explain it at all. I've talked to [David] Axelrod about this, and I think the Obama people understand this very well.

I'll close with this one thought. It really is stunning, because it is a governance issue. They put everything on the line for this vote in what was it, October of '03? They kept the House open four hours, they twisted arms. And it was a partisan vote in the House, and they bludgeoned conservatives and they got it through -- the prescription drug benefit. Huge conservative complaints, bitter liberal opposition -- payoff to the insurance companies. Is anyone in favor of banning or repealing the prescription drug benefit now? Did Obama run against it? I may have missed that part of his campaign. Do they even want to modify it much, incidentally? I'm no expert on... [Crosstalk] Basically, this was a public policy success which the Bush administration, as only the Bush administration could do, took no credit for at all. They don't even talk about it. They have a very competent Health and Human Services Secretary, Mike Leavitt, who has never been seen on television explaining that this thing is a success. If this had been the Clinton administration, Donna Shalala would have been on TV every two days touting, you know, enrollment is now up to 91 percent and here is a happy senior in Canton, Ohio. Hi, happy senior. Aren't you grateful to Bill Clinton for doing this?

The Bush administration -- I will close with this. So one doesn't really know -- these underlying trends are true and interesting; all underlying trends are true until they reverse and then they are not so true anymore. One just doesn't know how much this is all a product of very particular conditions, the Bush presidency and its problems, the Obama campaign and its achievements, and how much we are talking about sort of underlying tectonic forces that will change things for good. And I think everything depends a little bit on Republicans over the next four years -- you can talk more about that if you want -- but mostly on Obama.

Brownstein: Want to bring in the audience questions. Quickly, I want to call your attention to one thing that you have on your chairs which is relevant to this, which is a series of charts from the Results Center we're doing on NationalJournal.com. I thank Karl Eisenhower, my colleague, for pulling this together. These have a consistent storyline to them which go to the point that Bill made in terms of governance and the capacity or the opening for realignment.

To some extent, the Bush governance has created an opening for realignment for Democrats because what you see on these charts, if you look through them, interesting patterns. John McCain in the red states largely held George Bush's vote, but collapsed in the blue states, a severe decline, whereas Barack Obama had a reasonable increase in the blue states, but a substantial increase in the red states. If you look at Congress, the next group, you see a similar kind of pattern where Democrats are expanding the number of seats in the House they hold that voted for Bush in 2004. In other words, they are winning on terrain that is tilted against them or is at least center-right terrain, whereas the number of Republicans in seats that voted for John Kerry in 2004 is now down to 5 of 180.

Similarly, in the last group of charts, which will take you through a number of battleground counties by different category in the country, it shows the Republicans holding, by diminishing margins, some of the most culturally conservative and exurban counties, but collapsing in these white-collar suburbs and especially these melting-pot white-collar suburbs like Fairfax here or Arapaho in Denver where you have large numbers of college-educated whites and large numbers of minorities and all of which seem to point toward the same challenge, which I think both Bill and Stan alluded to, which is, as they end the Bush era after a very base-focused presidency in many ways, Republicans seem to be struggling to speak to voters beyond their core coalition.

These are all different manifestations of that same trend. When you look at what happened to McCain in the 19 states that voted for Kerry, in the end, he got past 42 percent of the vote in only three of them. You have a party that is being driven back toward its core areas, I think, at the end of the Bush years.

Let's start with -- let's go to the audience for some questions and have the panel -- Mike, why don't you start us?

[Inaudible question]

McInturff: We had 122 million votes and we're at least at 127 right now. We had a higher turnout -- people forget, we had 96 million in '96, we had 104 million in 2000. By any historic standard, 127 billion plus people is a huge number. I am getting, again, I am like Mr. Chip-on-his-shoulder, because I said we are going to have 130 million votes and I keep telling people that it is not over. You don't understand. They haven't certified these elections, and we're going to get very close to 130 million people. I am saying that when I said we were going to get 130 million people, the first counts get stuck at 119 or 123 million and I keep saying you don't understand how many millions of votes are going to be still counted before we get to final certification. I don't know if we will get to exactly 130, but I believe we are going to be like 128 to 130 is going to be the actual final vote count.

Brownstein: These tables actually -- one interesting angle on that is that, as we said, the big decline is Republican vote in blue states. McCain equaled Bush's votes cumulatively through the states that Bush won. Obama substantially increased his vote, enormously increased his vote, in the red states, a substantial increase in the blue states, but the Republican vote in blue states just collapsed. I think McCain lost California...

Teixeira: Do you mean the blue 2004 states?

Brownstein: Yeah, 2004 states. Except for New Hampshire, states that voted against Bush both times. I think McCain lost California...

Teixeira: Do you mean purple states or something? Rather than blue or red?

Brownstein: You can look at them from different angles, but it is a similar kind of story. I think McCain lost California by more than Goldwater did. Yeah. (talking in background) (laughter)

[Inaudible question]

Greenberg: Bad for the ticket. I can't find any angle into the argument that doesn't, whether it is empirical and people self-reported reasons for voting against McCain which was at the top of our list, but also for those Obama voters who wavered with McCain, far and away Palin was the top reason against. She also changed, not just demographically -- it was not her, it was a choice by John McCain to go to Sarah Palin, I was very nervous about this election going into the Democratic Convention when they were focused on national security and experience and risk, and had they kept to those core ideas, combined with his independence, and carried that once the financial crisis hit, they would have been a much stronger position to address those. I think Obama may have well looked like the inexperienced and risky candidate in that moment, but they gave up experience, they gave up risk. They lost fundamental things with choosing Palin.

Kristol: What would the vote have been if he had picked Pawlenty?

Greenberg: Or Romney? Closer.

Kristol: How much?

Greenberg: Closer. I don't know. I am not going to fall for that.

Kristol: I want to make two points, success has a million fathers and failure is an orphan. So, I will be the orphan parent of Sarah Palin here. As Bill well knows, this was a very difficult choice for McCain. He was right. I think his instinct that he had to make a bold choice to have a chance of winning. Stanley would have praised him for the Romney choice.

Greenberg: No, I thought Joe Lieberman, which is what I said at the--

Kristol: I wrote a column in the New York Times that Monday saying you should pick Lieberman. I thought it was worth it. It was easy for me to say. I don't have to manage the Republican Convention and lose 20 percent of the vote on the vice-presidential ballot and, literally, have six states walk out and have three weeks of coverage about how the Republican Party is in total meltdown and social conservatives are going crazy. I think it could have been managed. [laughter] Well, no, this is a serious question. I think it could have been managed and I think it could have ended up, net, in a better position by the time it mattered which was about late September.

But that's a very tough choice to make in real time, and I don't cavil with the people in the McCain campaign who very much, McCain himself was very tempted by it, [Tom] Ridge is sort of a secondary Lieberman-type pick, obviously. They were tempted by going that way. And I think it's a hard call whether it would have helped. There's a lot of evidence that fall that people like me like Lieberman and people like Stanley perhaps think it would have doubled down on experience and given it a certain bipartisan reach. There isn't that much empirical evidence that amongst real voters Lieberman would have done that much, frankly.

Here's just a couple of facts. On Palin: a) It's hard to believe it made any difference in the actual outcome. Clearly, I think the pick of Palin lost some voters who were swing voters. I suspect they were mostly blue-state swing voters who weren't going to change an electoral outcome, and I think Palin gave him at least a shot at energizing the voters who could have put together the Electoral College math he needed in states like Ohio. It's just an empirical fact that the best two weeks in the McCain campaign were the two weeks after he picked Palin, from September 1 to September 15, and as everyone here has said, what did in McCain was the financial crisis, either the crisis itself or the way it was handled by the administration and the House Republicans and maybe McCain himself. None of which had anything to do with Palin.

I mean, Palin could have been managed better. Did Palin on October 30, was it the same as Palin on September 1? You know, no. I mean clearly the damage was done. But look, the one actual exit poll question certainly that tries to address this directly as opposed to these very dodgy questions about whether you approve of the pick and that kind of thing which, of course, doesn't tell you whether the people who are saying they don't approve were in play anyway, the one question is, Did the pick of Palin, did it make you more or less likely to vote for McCain? And about -- more than half of the voters said it didn't matter; and among those who say it mattered, they were stronger for McCain. I still don't think -- so I think the empirical evidence on this is very mixed.

McInturff: Well, I do think -- well, two things. First, the -- when -- first, let's talk about some of these -- the things that the governor brought to the ticket.

We had -- first, there was an extraordinary burst of money, and the money, just as measuring -- as a way of measuring reactions, the extraordinary burst of money -- and actually the money the RNC in the fundraising was really substantial. Number two, she did incredibly well on the road in terms of crowd and intensity. Three, there's no question that she had -- that in terms of intensity of people voting for McCain and all the intensity measures, that her addition on the ticket sharply strengthened all those intensity measures. And I would say number four on her behalf, when people saw the real Sarah Palin, meaning after her performance at the convention and frankly after the debate and then frankly the last week of the campaign -- there were three times this woman had any visibility and each of the three times she was visible, her approval numbers went up.

We were tracking two measures, her approve/disapprove and do you think she's qualified to be vice president. Those three measures were stronger after her speech, stronger after the debate and stronger in the last week of the election when she was a much more visible campaigner in the -- in the campaigner. I think that all of those things, you know, are the reasons that suggest that she will continue to have a future in the Republican Party. I think that the difference between the real Sarah Palin and the caricature of Sarah Palin can be measured by those things.

Speaking of the convention, for those of you who've not actually run a Republican National Convention, let me explain one of the rules. The rules are that you can request a floor vote, and you have to vote on where there's a floor vote, if four -- of the majority of four delegations request a floor vote, you have to go to a

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