by Elliot Ewert

Created on: September 17, 2009   Last Updated: September 19, 2009

If one bothered to quantify the total number of municipal, state, and federal elections held since the ossification of the two-party status quo in America and then categorize the winners by party, the column of blue names would no doubt be significantly more extensive than the red.

All politics is local is a maxim that the Democrats have put into practice in their campaign platforms for decades with hugely positive results on almost every electoral level, including Congressional races. Of the last 50 Congresses, only 14 of them have been assembled under the auspices of Republican majority rule.

It is thus evident that if political processes and outcomes are at their respective roots determined on the local level, one party is better at exploiting this than the other.

Determining why the Democrats are so effective is relatively easy to discern from an analysis of their ideology. As the primary purveyor of mainstream leftist politics in the United States, the Democratic Party, in the debatable words of conservative activist David Horowitz, is "the party that believes that human salvation is possible on this earth."

This summation although not universally applicable to the party's members, holds many implications for the party's platform and behavior. It explains why Democratic Party ranks are populated by fewer numbers of the religiously devout, why its national platform endorses free government-administered health care, and why taxation as a means of wealth redistribution is a largely acceptable concept to the party faithful.

Unlike Republicans, whose candidates are often bound to far-reaching objectives that tend to transcend the existence of single generations or regional boundaries, Democratic ideals permit greater ideological fluidity and inconsistency among its members.

Democratic contenders for political office thus fit more snugly to the contours of localized political landscapes than cookie-cutter Republican nominees (e.g., a pro-gun, pro-life Democrat running in South Carolina is more acceptable to the party leadership than a protectionist, green thumbed Republican competing in Seattle is to the GOP establishment).

Democrats' keen sense of local political climates is exemplified in the party's historical mastery of the party machine, in which political bosses organized the citywide vote for a Democratic candidate through a web of favors and payoffs. This system, now largely defunct, was never an effective tool of the Republican Party.

Just as political

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next Page >>