Democrats cheered by 1) conservative mistrust of corporations, and 2) decline of religion.

1) Mistrust of Corporations. Peter Beinart, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, sees Republicans having problems holding onto their anti-elitist core. This is because, Beinart says:

the right-wing base. . . is turning . . . against corporations. The first sign came in February 2006, when the Bush administration . . . support[ed] a Dubai company's plans to manage six U.S. ports. The political backlash -- stoked . . . by conservative commentators such as Sean Hannity -- combined distrust of foreigners and corporate elites. And . . .it presaged the current, much bigger, conservative revolt on immigration. In the past two years, with Iraq going south, immigration has become the hottest issue among conservative activists. But unlike terrorism, it is a doubled-edged sword, wielded against pro-immigration Democrats but also against the pro-immigration corporate right, which largely funds the GOP. [This means that t]he GOP no longer has a unifying populist cause.

2) Rise of Secularism. Ronald Aronson, writing in The Nation, believes Republicans are hurt by the country’s noticeable turn away from God. [The cartoon above, which knocks the GOP for being too focused on religion, is in the spirit of Aronson's argument.] Aronson reasons that:

[With] five books by the New Atheists . . . on bestseller lists in the past two years—[maybe] Americans are beginning to get fed up with the religiosity of the past several years?

We know how zealously the conservative Christian denominations have politicized themselves in the past generation, how the GOP has harnessed this energy by embracing their demands. . .So effectively have they framed the issues that, according to the Pew Research Center's 2006 report on religion and public life, fully 69 percent of Americans believe that liberals have "gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government."

[But a]ccording to the American Religious Identification Survey, which interviewed more than 50,000 people, more than 29 million adults--one in seven Americans--declare themselves to be without religion. [A]llowing space not only for the customary "Not sure" but also for "Would prefer not to say"--and 6 percent of Americans chose this as their answer to the question of whether they believed in God or a supreme being. . . [adding in] those who declared themselves as atheists or agnostics and, lo and behold, the possible sum of unbelievers is nearly one in four Americans.

. . .unbelievers are concentrated at the higher end of the educational scale--a recent Harris American poll shows that 31 percent of those with postgraduate education do not avow belief in God (compared with only 14 percent of those with a high school education or less). The percentage rises among professors and then again among professors at research universities, reaching 93 percent among members of the National Academy of Sciences. Unbelievers are to be found concentrated among those whose professional lives emphasize science or rationality and who also have developed a relatively high level of confidence in their own intellectual faculties. And they are frequently teachers or opinion-makers. . .

[We need] a coalition between unbelievers and their natural allies, secular-minded believers. I am speaking first about many millions of Americans who nominally belong to a religion but effectively live without any active relationship either to it or to God, or belong to a church and attend services but are "tacit atheists," living day in and day out with only token reference to God. And I also include . . .members of the liberal Jewish and Christian denominations . . .a whopping 49 percent believe that Christian conservatives have gone too far "in trying to impose their religious values on the country."

This, then, is an unreported secret of American life: Considerable numbers of Americans, religious and secular, are becoming fed up with the in-your-face religion that has come to mark our society.