First-time voters were 11 percent of the total and Obama carried them by 68 percent to 31 percent. The much-vaunted Obama Organization came through: Twice as many voters reported being contacted only by the Obama camp compared to McCain's, and they went 80 percent Democratic.

Is this the end of the Nixon-Reagan-Bush era? Perhaps we should have seen this realignment coming as it was historically due. Party coalitions have generally changed every 28 to 36 years (in 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932 and 1968). The last great upheaval came in the late 1960s when moderate-to-conservative Democratic blue-collar workers defected, first to George Wallace and then to the GOP. Republicans won seven of 10 presidential elections from 1968 to 2004 and controlled the Senate for nearly half of this time.

The Nixon-Reagan-Bush Coalition was built on traditional Republicans in suburbia and the Farm Belt plus gains among white workers in the South and West. In the last generation, federal policy shifted from pro-labor to pro-business and from social programs directed at the urban poor to tax cuts for suburbanites. Figuring 36 years after 1968 would have meant that the next realignment was due in 2004 at the latest, but it was delayed four years by the fluke election of Jimmy Carter after Watergate. The Republicans dodged a major bullet in 2004 with Bush's one-state re- election victory, but the problems of the last four years wiped out their position.

Now the Obama Democrats will have the opportunity to build a new coalition based on the economic insecurities of the 21st century -- and the country's new demographics caused by a generation of immigration from the Third World.

Republicans attempted to rerun a '60s-style anti-liberal attack campaign against Obama by linking him to various radicals like William Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but voters were in no mood to hear this old message after $3 trillion of household wealth disappeared in the crash. Who cares about some '60s radicals who will have zero influence in an Obama administration when you've lost 40 percent of your retirement savings in a year or your house is being repossessed?

Unless the Obama administration is an obvious failure, Republicans will need a new generation of candidates with a new set of ideas.

There was also, of course, the race factor.

Perhaps we should have seen this one coming, too. Over the past 50 years, numerous black athletes (Willie Mays, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Jim Brown, Magic Johnson) and entertainers (Sidney Poitier, Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington, James Brown, Al Green, the various "Motown" singers, Samuel Jackson, etc.) have risen to superstardom based on manly charisma and natural leadership qualities. It was inevitable that these talents would eventually present themselves in politics. Obama managed to combine the charisma of a black movie star with the knowledge of a former editor of the Harvard Law Review. Like his hero John F. Kennedy, Obama's ethnic background promised change, but his Ivy League education and cool television demeanor reassured moderate voters that he was no Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.

The big story was that the much-anticipated racial backlash failed to appear. There was no great difference in partisanship between the 10 percent of voters who said that race was an issue and the 90 percent who said it wasn't. The few voters who would not go for a black candidate were buried by a tide of economic concerns.

The bad news on the racial front was that roughly 10 percent of Kerry voters wouldn't support a black candidate, thus costing Obama about 5 percent of the national popular vote. The good news was that Obama was able to easily fashion his majority out of the 90 percent of voters who said race didn't matter. This will probably not be a state or national issue again: qualified minority candidates will be judged on their merits. As Bill Schneider pointed out on CNN: Obama won on the issues and race was simply not one of them.

Of course, now comes the hard part. David Gergen, who worked for four presidents of both parties, has stated that the new president will face the greatest economic challenges since the Depression. The bad news is that "all" Obama has to do is jump-start the economy, raise the stock market, create jobs, save the auto industry, promote "green" energy alternatives, clean up the credit mess, successfully end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, deal with the rest of the Middle East, begin to reverse global warming, correct the housing bust, provide universal health care, avoid a middle-class tax increase and eventually reduce the deficit.

The good news is that Obama seems to have a lot of natural talent and is a fast learner. He also won't have much opposition from a collapsed Republican Party, and the voters will likely give him a longer than normal honeymoon. President-elect Obama was wise to stress the need for patience in his post-election comments. He is going to need a lot of time to get a grip on these massive problems.

Patrick Reddy is a Democratic political consultant in California.

Originally published by SPECIAL TO THE NEWS.

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