I can recall a friend of mine making the comment that a New Jersey Republican is a Virginian Democrat. A statement of the changing political principles as you moved further south from the North Eastern United States. I can recall talking to local Democrats in Virginia who were all fiscally conservative, I am not quite sure how Cato came up with approximately 15% of Americans falling into that category. I would have suspected it to be much higher.
There is not really that many that I know of in the US how are protectionist, it is a free-market nation that is aghast at prolifigate public spending.
There has also been a large migration of the populations of the coastal cities into the south and interior. Northern Virginia for instance is all immigrants from other part of the United States who have carried their political values with them. It is a large purple area that is politically distinct from central and southern Virginia, enough that they go by the acronyms NoVA and RoVA where the RO condescendingly stands for the 'rest of' Virginia.
The electoral college is an electoral system which was chosen to amplify the federal character (as opposed to national) of the system. This gives the smaller inland and southern states larger influence than it would in a purely national electoral system.
But if we look at George Bush's performance in 2000 and 2004; neither was a strong and resounding win. He got over the line with the help of the Supreme Court in one, and did not have a dominating win in the second. It could be argued that Bush's wins were anomalies and that the southern strategy has been waning for a considerable time.
Then again governance has been so bad under the Republican Party in the US that there is no way it could be expected that the party would win the executive or a majority in either house of congress under a democratic system in 2008.
