Mark Steyn pricks the bubble of so many current interpretations of the US political scene:

Just as your rattled Democratic supporter is beginning to feel a harsh jab of reality in what Slate's Mickey Kaus calls the "liberal cocoon", the media rush to lull him back to the land of make-believe, assuring us that the Democrat defeat is attributable to strictly local factors and is definitely not part of a trend.

Oddly enough, all these non-trends seem to trend the same way: November 2002 - Democrats lose control of the US Senate; October 2003 - Democrats lose the California gubernatorial race; November 2003 - Democrats lose the Mississippi and Kentucky gubernatorial races.

...The American electorate is "polarised" in the sense that a seesaw would be with Kate Moss at one end and me at the other. The 50/50 nation of the 2000 election is gone. A small but significant sliver of the electorate shifted Right after September 11: we can argue about whether it's four per cent or 12 per cent, but not whether it exists. Who are these voters? They seem to be young, hitherto natural Democrats who aren't as hung up as their wrinkly parents on Vietnam nostalgia. A lot of them are female, which is why the so-called Republican "gender gap" the media like to harp on about was wiped out in 2002, while the Democrats' own gap with white male voters has widened to a chasm.

As for Bush merely solidifying his base, Kentucky hasn't elected a Republican governor since 1967 and Mississippi has elected only two in the past 125 years. In the swing states, the change in voter identification since September 11 is all in one direction - Florida: Republicans up six points; Minnesota: Republicans up eight points; Michigan: Republicans up nine points; Iowa: Republicans up 12 points; Arkansas (home of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library): Republicans up 15 points.