Democrats face grave difficulties following last week’s election, according to a panel of pollsters and analysts at the Georgetown University Law Center last Friday.

Traditional party lines blurred throughout the discussion, as each pollster was notably critical of his own party and looked ahead toward what future problems may arise.

“The Bush victory cannot be understated because he started from a very weak hand,” Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen said. “There were heavy job losses and you couldn’t make a case that the war in Iraq was a good decision or even won. Bush maximized a very tenuous position.”

Domestic issues never quite made it to the forefront of the campaign, and in many ways this was a victory for the Bush camp, Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio said.

He said that in liberal bastions such as California where Democrats are accustomed to winning by 12 to 15 percent, Kerry only won by 9 percent this year. Democrats have been unable to compete in the South, he added.

Despite heavy voter turnout, which analysts say generally endangers incumbents, Republicans were able to match Democratic voters state by state. “This could spell a prolonged period of minority status or a regional role for Democrats,” Schoen said. “There’s been an ideological swing. The number of self-identified liberals and moderates fell while the number of conservatives rose.”

Fabrizio credits the phenomenon to Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser, who decided to energize the Republican political base rather than pursue elusive swing voters.

“We brought out more of the same people,” Fabrizio said. “Our voters were right of center, not young, moral and interested in national security.”

Republicans were overwhelmingly identified with “moral values,” a nebulous characteristic that voters are increasingly rewarding.

As far back as 1997, Fabrizio said, the Republican Party was becoming “a bastion of theocracy” and a haven for people who “don’t think there should necessarily be a separation between church and state.”

Since moral issues energize voters, Fabrizio said that Republicans framed other issues in terms of morality as well.

“Bush talked about terrorism in terms of right and wrong,” Fabrizio said. “While many people thought he was going too far, the people who he was energizing see the world as right or wrong. They see it in black and white.”

Rove brilliantly conducted the campaign to the evangelical Republican base underground while the Democrats appealed to their base much more openly, he continued.

“In the debate, Bush said that he didn’t have a litmus test for choosing Supreme Court justices and repeated it,” Fabrizio said. “Why didn’t Gary Bauer and the religious right react to that? Because they knew that he did.”

In fact, among voters who cited moral values as their most important criteria for choosing a candidate, 80 percent of them supported Bush, Newsweek political analyst Melinda Hennenberger said.

Yet the Republican monopoly on morals is a recent trend. Shoen claimed that Clinton successfully framed his policies in terms of morality.

“When I got married I didn’t think I was doing a Republican act and when I got divorced I didn’t think it was a Democratic act,” he said.

Hennenberger had reservations about that assertion.

“In good economic times Clinton could talk about the v-chip,” she said. “But this election was never going to be about the v-chip.”

As for terrorism and Iraq, the panelists affirmed the effectiveness of Republican strategies.

“Anti-terrorism voters voted for Bush because they didn’t know if he would catch them or not, but they knew he would kill them,” E.J. Dionne, Washington Post columnist and public policy professor, said.

All agreed that while John Kerry was in fact consistent on Iraq, the issue was too complex for a sound byte.

“The Republican message was simple but brilliant,” Fabrizio said. “While Kerry was consistent, the Bush team made him consistently inconsistent.”

Looking toward the future, Schoen was not optimistic on the prospects of Democrats unless something changes.

“There is no diversity of opinion on abortion issues in the Democratic Party and that is a strategic mistake,” he said.

Fabrizio agreed, specifically criticizing the Democrats choice of which moral issues to highlight. “Do the Democrats think their base is anti-abstinence?” he said. “In politics the point is to pick the battles that benefit you, not to put a gun in your mouth and blow the back of your head out.”

Yet Republicans are not assured of their political hegemony and could face serious problems because of internal divisions along religious lines, he added.

Theocrats are much more prevalent among the Republicans controlling the 2008 presidential nominating process than among the party in general, Schoen said. Such internal divisions are not as notable among Democrats.

All panelists, however, predicted Democratic gains in the 2006 midterm elections.

The Georgetown Public Policy Institute sponsored the event.