Even in California, which went for Kerry but not as overwhelmingly as might have been expected, the political fault-lines followed these same patterns. Kerry piled up huge majorities in the San Francisco Bay area, which has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and has experienced strong net out-migration since 2000. Bush won handily in Riverside-San Bernardino and the Central Valley, winning upward of three-fifths the vote in the emergent "Third California" that is experiencing the bulk of the Golden State's population and job growth. These inland areas are where Arnold Schwarzenegger won his election during the recall and where, by 2008, a Republican like a John McCain or Rudy Giuliani could sweep the nation's most populous state back to the GOP. If that happens, the Democratic Party as we know it will be all but moribund. The economic and demographic fault lines in California and elsewhere do not favor the Democrats in their current configuration. Nowhere is this clearer than in Kerry's hometown of Boston, which has been losing jobs and population since 2000. Nearly 40,000 have dropped out of the greater Boston region's workforce since 2002 alone. Like Boston, many Democratic strongholds - Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Chicago - all lost population since 2000. Some of these cities had much ballyhooed revivals during the late 1990s with often highly celebrated, but statistically tiny, increases in downtown lofts, arts venues and other measurements of urban "hipness." But viewed from a regional perspective, these regions continued to lose both jobs and middle-class families to the periphery.Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack