The Next Right counters Open Left.

Each are rather wieldy posts, resorting to plethora of statistics and charts to buttress their points, but we can summarize each argument thusly:

Open Left:

The country is currently at a peak of liberal policy preferences, not a centrist node. The country is becoming less Republican, and has not experienced a decline in Democratic self-identification since at least 1994 (and possibly since 1984). What these three trends point to, if anything, is the country becoming more progressive, liberal, leftist, or whatever you want to call it.

The Next Right:

This country has generally had a center-right governing majority for most of the past century, interrupted by some “hiccups” to the left, notably from 1932-1937 and from 1964-66. Power has moved back-and-forth between Republicans and Democrats with some regularity, but in terms of “real change” in the governing philosophy of America, the swings have been overstated.

In other words, Obama is unlikely to manufacture a new progressive majority. Reagan didn’t, and even FDR didn’t. What those Presidents did was recognize an extant majority coalition for them, and give it life.

Personally, I find the Next Right argument more compelling. Progressive sites like Open Left are a bit too optimistic in their rush to conflate the decline of the Republican brand under Bush with the emergence of a new progressive majority.

One of the obvious errors Chris Bowers makes is not filtering out independent leaning voters from Party identification. If you filter out the "leaners," Democratic Party Identification is relatively unchanged from the time Bush took office. What has changed significantly is decline in partisan GOP identification, and the percentage of independent voters who now lean democratic.

Let's look at the raw numbers recently compiled by Pew Research.

Dem: 36%
GOP: 27%
IND: 37%

If we split the leaners from the Independent Group, with 15% going to the Dems, and 10% going to the GOP we end up with:

Dem: 51%
GOP: 37%
IND: 12%

The inclusion of "leaners" suddenly makes the Democratic majority seem impressive, but this can be a fleeting coalition. Back in 2004, this was the breakdown including leaners:

Dem: 44%
GOP: 41%
IND: 15%

Therefore, it's fairly easy to make the case that the current Democratic Majorities simply reflect a democratic leaning shift in an increasing Independent voting block, entirely at the expense of the GOP. However, this shift should be tempered by the extraordinary low opinion polling for the Democratic majority Congress and the fact that the Democratic Party itself has not seen any significant increase in it's positive opinion ratings. The likely scientific conclusion to draw is that this shift represents a "lesser of two evils" change in perception with respect to the 2 parties as opposed to a mandate for hardcore progressive government. In fact, the very type of progressive overreach advocated by Open Left, in taking advantage of the decline in GOP branding, is likely the very thing that would reverse democratic trends and revitalize the GOP brand. If the Democratic Party wants to retain it's majority, it also needs appeal to the libertarian vote, and would do well to avoid this addle-headed nonsense.