Ron Brownstein in 2004:

In this month's election, President Bush carried 97 of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties, most of them "exurban" communities that are rapidly transforming farmland into subdivisions and shopping malls on the periphery of major metropolitan areas.

Together, these fast-growing communities provided Bush a punishing 1.72 million vote advantage over Democrat John F. Kerry, according to a Times analysis of election results. That was almost half the president's total margin of victory.

"These exurban counties are the new Republican areas, and they will become increasingly important to Republican candidates," said Terry Nelson, the political director for Bush's reelection campaign. "This is where a lot of our vote is."

These growing areas, filled largely with younger families fleeing urban centers in search of affordable homes, are providing the GOP a foothold in blue Democratic-leaning states and solidifying the party's control over red Republican-leaning states.

They also represent a compounding asset whose value for the Republican Party has increased with each election: Bush's edge in these 100 counties was almost four times greater than the advantage they provided Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee eight years ago.

In states like Ohio, Minnesota and Virginia, Republican strength in these outer suburbs is offsetting Democratic gains over the last decade in more established -- and often more affluent -- inner-tier suburbs. As Democrats analyze a demoralizing defeat in this month's presidential election, one key question they face is whether they can reduce the expanding Republican advantage on the new frontier between suburbs and countryside.

"When any party is losing a growing group of voters, that's a problem -- and this is a group where support for Democrats is diminishing as the size of the group grows," said Mark Mellman, Kerry's campaign pollster.

Ron Brownstein in 2009:

These intertwined trends—the Republican Party's growing reliance on the South and the erosion of its strength elsewhere, particularly along the coasts—have prompted some unusually public soul-searching within the GOP about whether the party has grown too defined by the unflinchingly conservative priorities of its most loyal region. Although the GOP congressional leadership includes more non-Southerners than it did in the 1990s, much of the party's most militant opposition to President Obama has come from Southern leaders, such as South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The Texan even raised the possibility of secession in response to Obama's initiatives.

In the view of former Rep. Charles Bass, R-N.H., who was defeated in 2006, “The current crisis of the Republican Party is whether it wants to be a regional party or whether it can try to expand ideologically and appeal to other regions.”

Although not as severe, the regional challenges now confronting the GOP resemble those that Democrats faced in the first decades of the 20th century, when Republicans dominated Congress and the White House. From 1896 until Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932, the Solid South, which still rejected Republicans as the perpetrators of “Northern aggression” in the Civil War, provided the sole regional base for the depleted Democrats. But throughout much of that period, the Democrats' pervasive identification with the South made it harder for them to loosen the Republicans' commanding grip on the rest of the country. In those years of Democratic decline, “the South was the majority faction in a minority party,” notes Emory University political scientist Merle Black, co-author of the 2002 book The Rise of Southern Republicans. “And now it looks like the Southerners are becoming close to a majority faction in a minority Republican Party.”

So in four years Republicans have gone from a party with a solid red base that was threatening to foist a mortal wound upon the Democrats by obtaining a foothold in traditionally blue territory, to a party that should worry about being left with a base of Mississippi and Alabama.

Maybe, I guess.

The most striking thing about the 2008 election, however, is that for all the noise and hullabaloo about it being a realignment, there was very little evidence to support such a claim.

Consider the following map. It demonstrates the relative change of the parties' standing from 2004 to 2008. In other words: Barack Obama performed five points better than John Kerry nationwide. A state that moved a little more than that toward the Democrats -- 7-8 points -- is colored light blue, while a 8-9 point shift is coded a shade darker blue, and so forth. Likewise, a state that only moved 1-2 points toward Obama is shaded light red, and so forth:

We see very little movement here. Only eight states moved more than 5 points off the national average, while fully 31 states moved 2 points or less than did the national average. The red/blue map of 2004 is very much alive today; it is just covered up by a national shift toward the Democrats.

Now compare this to a year that is commonly accepted to be a re-aligning year. Here, we'll use 1888 through 1896, because a substantial third party effort makes a 1892 to 1896 comparison impossible:

Note the dramatic shifts. The South (Georgia is a curious exception) and West move sharply toward the Democrats. The Northeast, horrified by Bryan's inflationary politics, move toward the Republicans, wiping out what had been a strong Democratic minority in the region. Only eight states moved within two points of the national average. 21 states (at that time a majority) moved more than five points from the national average.

This is what a re-aligning election looks like (to the extent re-alignments exist). 2008 doesn't much look like 1896. Instead 2008 looks like an election where the country, dissatisfied with the Republicans, moved together toward the other party. The South moved as well, and moved about as much toward the Democrats as did other areas of the country. Since the GOP was stronger in the South to begin with, it maintained its base there, while losing swing areas and getting obliterated in areas where the Democrats had the upper hand. This is something of the inverse of 1984, where Republicans swept the floor everywhere -- but where no one would have called Massachusetts "purple" even though it had gone for Republicans twice in a row.

Politics has ebbs and flows, and when a party's President starts two wars that don't go well, oversees a collapse in the economy unlike any the country has seen since the late 1920s, and is photographed taking a guitar lesson while a major city is destroyed by a hurricane, his party tends to perform poorly in the subsequent election. Quite frankly, this should have been an absolute blowout election on the order of 1920 or 1952; its amazing the Republicans were able to keep it within single digits.

Finally, any analysis of the GOP's tradeoff of the Northeast for the South needs to consider the following: from 1952-2012, the South will have gone from 128 to 159 electoral votes. During that same time, New England will have fallen from 40 to 33, and NE+NY+PA from 117 electoral votes to 83. Even adding California and Illinois to the Dems' base doesn't raise them to parity.

To put it differently, in 1952, NY and PA combined for about as many votes as the entire South combined less TX, GA and NC. In 2012, the deep south (AR, MS, LA, AL, SC) will have more EVs than all of New England, and TX, FL, and GA will have as many EV's as NE+NY+PA. In other words, trading the South for the North wasn't a half-bad trade for the GOP, especially since demographic shifts in New England had begun weakening the GOP's hold in the Northeast during the early 1900s.