Even with election season over, FiveThirtyEight remains the awesome. Particularly of interest are two recent posts on the rump-ness of the Republican Party, here and here.

In 2003, totally scary and insane former Georgia Democratic Senator Zell Miller wrote a book called A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat. In it, he argued that the Democratic Party was abandoning the American South and Heartland and becoming a regional party of the Northeast and West Coast. A national party no more!

But as the 2008 elections have shown, it's the Republican Party that shows signs of becoming a regional "rump" party rather than the Democratic Party. First, check out this map (click on "voting shifts"), which shows counties which voted in 2008 more Republican for President (pink, red) and more Democratic for President (light blue, blue) than in 2004. The map shows a wide swath of blue, save for a pink and red crescent starting in southern W. Virginia and ending in southeastern Oklahoma. That crescent represents Republican gains for the presidential ticket. That is the rump.

But even the rump is problematic. Overlay the 2008 Congressional district map over the 2008 presidential results, and you see that Democrats are quite competitive throughout the red crescent. Granted, these are likely more "conservative" Democrats who are winning. But that's sort of the point ... people like Zell Miller pretend that the Democratic Party has abandoned this region, yet it hasn't.

Instead, it is the Republican party which currently finds itself increasingly isolated to region, namely the South and interior West. And even within that region, the right kind of Democratic candidates have proven they can prevail. What is currently left for the Republican Party are super-safe Repulican districts, mostly in the South and interior West region. FiveThirtyEight's chart confirms this. (It's easy to vote "No" on a stimulus package when you feel reasonably assured of re-election no matter how the package works out.)

Unfortunately, the elite Washington media has yet to digest how much of a minority the Republican party now represents. Still operating as if it's 1995, opinion-maker shows like Meet the Press devote inordinately more time and legitimacy to Republican talking-heads than what they electorally deserve. The political terrain has shifted, yet the Beltway still sees the terrain in Newt Gingrich-colored glasses.

If there is anything to the new Organizing for America, I hope this is it: to supersede the Beltway culture which insists on legitimizing failed Republican talking points for some vague notion of Washington Village comity. Engaged citizens in-between elections, putting pressure on elites - to enact the changes that they were elected to make - may be what it takes. Apparently, watershed national elections alone won't pierce the Washington bubble.