America: Speaking to Republican volunteers around the United States during the recent campaign, Karl Rove liked to quote Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, on how to win an election.
"To divide their county into small districts, and to appoint in each a subcommittee, whose duty it shall be to make a perfect list of all the voters in their respective districts, and to ascertain with certainty for whom they will vote. If they meet with men who are doubtful as to the man they will support, such voters should be designated in separate lines, with the name of the man they will probably support. It will be the duty of said subcommittee to keep a constant watch on the doubtful voters, and from time to time have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence, and also to place in their hands such documents as will enlighten and influence them," Lincoln said in 1840.
Using techniques such as "micro-targeting" to tailor messages for individual voters, whose personal preferences were stored in the Republicans' "voter vault", Rove employed a high-tech version of Lincoln's plan to maximise his party's vote. The operation was successful in mobilising the Republicans' core supporters but it was not enough to prevent the electoral storm that saw Democrats take control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 12 years.
Tuesday's election leaves in ruins Rove's dream of creating a durable Republican majority to match the achievement of William McKinley, whose election as president in 1896 launched a period of Republican dominance that lasted until the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Rove's plan, which won President George Bush narrow victories in 2000 and 2004 and helped Republicans to retain control of Congress until this week, involved shaping policies to appeal above all to the Republican base. Each election was presented as a choice between competing visions of America, with Democrats portrayed as unpatriotic, profligate and out of step with the religious values of most Americans.
Anchored in the conservative South, the Republican Party became a coalition of Evangelical Christians, national security hawks and economic liberals. Rove understood, however, that an enduring majority required the support of a significant part of the African-American and Hispanic communities, who tend to be socially conservative.
This week, Hispanic voters abandoned the Republicans in huge numbers, with 70 per cent voting for Democrats, up from 55 per cent in 2004. Some 89 per cent of blacks voted for Democrats, the same proportion as in 2004, despite energetic outreach efforts by Republican national committee chairman Ken Mehlman, who warned this week that the Republicans were in danger of becoming "a party of whites".
The harsh line on immigration taken by many Republican congressmen, who voted to build a fence along the border with Mexico and to criminalise illegal immigrants, threatens to alienate Hispanic voters for many years to come. Many Latinos who are US citizens have relations and friends who are undocumented and they perceive the Republican assault on immigration as an attack on their community.
This week's election has also highlighted the perils of governing solely for one party's political base in a country where more voters describe themselves as Independents than as Republicans or Democrats.
Democratic national committee chairman Howard Dean's strategy of trying to make his party competitive in all 50 states has uncovered pockets of Democratic support in some of the most conservative states. Demographic changes mean that states such as Virginia, until recently solidly Republican, now belong to neither party.
Evangelical Christians still support the Republicans by a margin of two to one but the fate of ballot initiatives on abortion and gay marriage in a number of states suggests that moderate voters are losing patience with the conservative social agenda.
Voters in South Dakota rejected a ban on abortion and Missouri voted to allow state funding for embryonic stem-cell research.
Gay marriage bans passed by modest majorities in most states where they were on the ballot, but in Arizona, where the initiative would also have banned civil partnerships, voters said no.
President Bush appears to have understood the message of this week's elections and has promised to reach out to Democrats in governing from the centre. It remains to be seen if the bitter and divided Republican minority, which is now more conservative than ever, will follow suit.
