So what does everyone think of this now?
He's right only if we take Presidential results to be the be-all, end-all of partisanship, which I don't. Someone made the point earlier that Arkansas is fairly strongly Republican, but it's not. It has two Democratic Senators, (as of 2007) a Democratic governor, 3 of 4 Representatives are Democrats and the Democrats have supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature and improved their standing in 2006.
Now, at the Presidential level Arkansas is at least weakly Republican. (I wouldn't go so far as to call it strongly Republican; more so than Colorado or Iowa, but not strongly.) However, one of the advantages the Democrats have had in recent years, and to some extent for a long time, is that the Democrats are much better at appealing to local populations than the Republicans.
Democrats run localized campaigns for House and for Senate and are willing to tailor their platforms and their candidates to districts and states, and then those Representatives and Senators are given more or less free reign by the establishment to be moderate or even somewhat conservative on all but a few issues. The same is not true for the Republicans; while the Republicans have kept some holdovers from their days of classical liberalism (Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee were good examples), for the most part Republicans run doggedly conservative candidates everywhere they can find them, even at their own expense (see AZ-08 in 2006). Now, this is not entirely or even mostly the party's fault since it is the Republican proletariat, not the Republican elite, that choose the candidates in primaries, but among Republicans the ultraconservatives are the most active members in party organizations everywhere, even in the Northeast where non-incumbent Republicans really can't win. Sometimes moderate Republicans stick around for a while, but they almost never go without primary challenges (Toomey in 2004, Laffey in 2006).
Now, I know a bunch of people are going to leap on me shouting "Lieberman, Lieberman", but let me explain my reasoning. For one, Lamont could have won, could have
easily won, statewide in Connecticut. Toomey would have been hard-pressed in PA even in 2002 and Laffey doomed under any scenario. A more fitting comparison would be if the Democrats ran Lamont against Ben Nelson in a primary, and I know you know how ludicrous that sounds. For another, Lamont-Lieberman was a single issue race that was not really about Lieberman being "too moderate" (whether he is or not is a topic for another thread), but about Democratic anger over Iraq. Neither Toomey nor Laffey was a single-issue candidate; both ran on a wide array of conservative positions and in opposition to almost all of Specter's and Chafee's positions rather than only some of them.
Now, if the Republicans manage to change that issue, manage to wrest control of their primaries from the ultraconservatives, primaries that routinely threaten to topple their moderates, they might come to dominate the Senate and politics at a state level. For now, though, the only reason Democrats don't win landslide Presidential victories is because the Democrats are, by the necessity of not being able to run local campaigns, as polarizing as Republicans in Presidential races.
