The big blue Democratic wave

By Ronald Brownstein and Carrie Dann

updated 11:19 a.m. ET March 14, 2008

ABILENE, Texas - In this very Republican corner of central Texas, Democrats have been such an endangered species that some women at a Bill Clinton rally two days before the March 4 Texas primary joked that they had told co-workers they were going to the movies.

And yet, despite fierce thunderstorms that rumbled throughout the evening, the former president arrived that night to find more than 500 enthusiastic supporters of his wife's candidacy waiting for him in a brightly lit aircraft hangar. The crowd's size seemed to surprise no one so much as the people in it. In a county that George W. Bush carried with more than 77 percent of the vote in 2004, it had been a long time since anyone had seen so many Democrats in one place at one time.

"There's no real need to come out of the closet, so to speak, if you don't think you have a chance to win," said Julian Bridges, a longtime Abilene resident. "This could be a real turning point for much of Texas. People are not apologizing for being Democrats anymore."

Abilene isn't the only unlikely location where Democrats are resurfacing this year. The riveting competition between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination has engaged and energized Democrats not only in the party's traditional strongholds but also in reliably Republican states from Georgia and Texas to Kansas and Idaho.

This surge of activity could provide Democrats with the opportunity to construct new organizational foundations in red states where their party has long been in retreat. "You are basically rebuilding a party out of nothing in a lot of these places with a huge infusion of money from the campaigns and the energy on the ground," says Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org, the online liberal group.

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Within their national party and at the state level, Democrats are formulating plans to channel the enthusiasm that Obama and Clinton are generating in states where such energy had long been in short supply. In many of the red states that have experienced the most dramatic mobilizations, the Democratic nominee will still face long odds next fall, regardless of which candidate becomes the standard-bearer. But many Democratic strategists argue that the eruption of activism could help the party win down-ballot races in the red states, provided that local parties and candidates can galvanize the newly activated voters.

"It's up to the party and individual candidates to keep folks engaged," says Adrian Saenz, who ran Obama's Texas campaign and is an aide to Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, D-Texas. "But this [presidential] primary is an organizing opportunity the party hasn't had before."

Turnout is up everywhere for Democrats this year, but some of the biggest gains have come in states that attracted little attention from the party in the past two presidential elections. That pattern reflects not only the appeal and organizational work of Obama and Clinton but also the second-term collapse of Bush's approval ratings, even in states that had been among his redoubts.

In Arizona, Georgia, and Tennessee, turnout in last month's Democratic primaries soared by two-thirds over 2004 levels. In South Carolina, the increase was 80 percent. Idaho's caucuses drew more than four times as many participants as in 2004. Perhaps most strikingly, nearly 2.9 million people voted in the Texas Democratic primary. That was more than triple the turnout in 2004 and even slightly more than the 2.8 million votes that John Kerry won there against native-son Bush in the 2004 general election.

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