Michael Barone is one of the very smartest observers of politics around. His Almanac of American Politics is a must read for any aspiring pundit.

The Washington Times summarized some of the points he made in his opening essay. Some of the points we've seen before, for example that both parties had record turnout in 2004, but the Democrats relied on professional, paid workers to get out the vote. The GOP organized an unprecedented effort to get volunteers in every possible community so that neighbors would be talking to neighbors about coming out to vote. That's got to be more potent than some Moveon.org worker coming in to a different state and telling people there that they should go vote for Kerry. And here's an intriguing historical comparison.

Excluding the 1916-1928 period, when women entered the electorate in large numbers, turnout during the 110 years preceding 2004 increased by more than 14 percent only four times: 1896, 1936, 1952 and 1992. Both the 1896 election, when Republican William McKinley won the presidency, and the 1936 election, when President Roosevelt won re-election in a landslide, led to national majorities that lasted more than 30 years. Noting that President Eisenhower apparently had no inclination to build a lasting GOP majority and observing (no fewer than three times) that Bill Clinton "failed" to build a lasting coalition after his 1992 triumph, Mr. Barone reveals that President Bush's 23 percent vote increase in 2004 approximated the 22 percent vote increase achieved by Roosevelt in 1936. While the Bush 51 percent majority in 2004 was much smaller than Roosevelt's 61 percent in 1936, the results of the intervening midterm congressional elections were similar. Prior to the Republican successes in 2002, Mr. Barone reports, "[n]o incumbent president's party had increased its number of seats in both houses [of Congress] in an off-year election since Roosevelt's Democratic Party in 1934."

Observations like these lead Barone to think that we could be in a 51-49% nation favoring the GOP. He found that Bush increased his percentage of the vote in the red states while Kerry often got a lower percent of the vote in blue states than Gore had in 2000.

Here are some of the other auspicious achievements for Bush in 2004:

• Religion once again proved to be one of the demographic variables correlating most directly with voter behavior. Mr. Bush received 78 percent of the vote of white evangelical Protestants, who comprised 23 percent of the electorate. Raising his share by 5 percentage points, the president managed to capture 52 percent of the Catholic vote "against the first Catholic nominee since 1960."
• Mr. Bush also benefited from a huge "marriage gap -- a gap that is far wider than the oft-touted gender gap." Married people, who comprised 63 percent of the electorate, voted 57-42 for Mr. Bush.

And all this electoral good news happened with the Democrats having raised more money than the GOP.

• Conventional wisdom held that Republicans would raise much more money than Democrats, but that, too, was disproved. The Kerry campaign, the DNC and the Democratic 527 organizations spent $344 million on ads during the campaign. That was more than $55 million above what the pro-Bush forces spent. George Soros and the other wealthy contributors who were so instrumental in funding the Democratic 527s underwrote a TV campaign that "seethed with Bush hatred." According to post-election surveys, however, the TV assault turned out not to be very persuasive overall. While the anti-Bush ads did connect with the Bush haters, "[a]n enduring problem for the Democratic Party," Mr. Barone observed, could be the fact that "George W. Bush will not be on the ballot again."
• Mr. Kerry won a 6.5-million majority in the 100 largest counties. More than 6 million of that majority was achieved in the 48 largest counties that had lost population since 2000 or grew by less than 3 percent. Democrats may not be able to increase their turnout by much in slow-growth or population-losing counties. Outside the 100 largest counties, Mr. Kerry lost by nearly 10 million votes. In addition, Mr. Bush won majorities in 97 of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties, where he achieved a popular-vote margin of 1.8 million, which was more than half of his national vote margin. This 1.8-million margin, while not as large as the one Mr. Kerry achieved in the 100 largest counties, is nonetheless "likely to increase over time, and can easily be increased even more by the kind of organizational effort mounted by the Bush campaign in 2004," Mr. Barone argues.

One analyst, Steven Hill, who is not a GOP fan also wrote in Mother Jones a couple of months ago that the Democrats have a built-in disadvantage electorally in our system because the small states get an electoral advantage that their population does not merit.

So from the Democratic Party perspective, the political geography does not work. In the current climate of Red vs. Blue America, any "emerging Democratic majority" must overcome an 18th-century political system that puts urban-centered Democrats at a decided disadvantage. As I wrote above, it's like having a foot race in which one side (the Republicans) begins 10 yards in front of the other (the Democrats), election after election. It's time to level the playing field.

Read his entire analysis. I think he's correct about the advantages that the GOP is accruing from doing well in small states. But I don't think any feasible electoral reform is going to fix this for the Democrats. They would need to amend a lot of the Constitution to get rid of how senators are chosen, House districts allocated, and the Electoral College works. And you're not going to get 3/4 of the states to vote for something that would hurt all the small states. So, we're stuck with this system, like it or not.

The solution for Democrats doesn't seem to be to try to totally revamp the Constitution, but for Democrats to find a way to appeal to people in these smaller states. They have found that they can elect Democrats for governor or senator in some of these states and they need to expand on this if they want to do better under the system we have. However, aligning themselves with the most extreme voices in their party is not the way to do it.

And thus, there is a tension between how many of the Democratic elected officials would like to position themselves, and what the activists are demanding. The Houston Chronicle looks at this divide today.

Liberal activists have been on the warpath this summer, with some camping out near President Bush's ranch and demanding the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq while others are pushing for the defeat of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts.

But these groups, whose views have been amplified by Internet bloggers and activist groups, often have been at odds with Democratic lawmakers who remain wary of alienating moderate voters.

The tension between the liberal factions and the Democratic congressional leadership has hampered the party's ability to present a unified message to counter the Republicans.

Parties often experience such a tension between activists who tend to be more extreme and and politicians who recognize that most elections should be run to win the middle where the undecided voters are. However, the activists are the most audible voices when it comes to organizing for the primaries and raising money. And it sounds like the Moveon.org group is not going to sit still for being ignored and replaced by the Democratic Leadership Council which advocates for more moderate Democratic politicians. The group that helped to bring politicians like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joe Lieberman to the fore is now derided by the more extreme members of the Democratic coalition. Not good news for some politician trying to form a candidacy bridging all these disparate groups.

Read the entire synopsis of Barone's analysis. And head on over and read the Mother Jones essay. Of course, all this doesn't mean that the GOP nominee is a shoo-in for 2008. The GOP has a great history of blowing things. But analysis like this should encourage Republican partisans who are trembling at the Advent of Hillary in 2008.

UPDATE: Galley Slaves has a link to a Kos post declaring war on the DLC. It doesn't sound like it's going to be a sweet, gentlemanly battle for control of the Democratic Party message.