Just to piggy back of Chris's excellent post, I'll note that there is an increasing likelihood that Republicans are going to shed some of their big business allegiances and retreat into a much more nativist mode. I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out. First of all, Saxby Chambliss gave Sarah Palin credit for this victory last night.
"I can't overstate the impact she had down here," Chambliss said during an interview Wednesday morning on Fox News.
"When she walks in a room, folks just explode," he added. "And they really did pack the house everywhere we went. She's a dynamic lady, a great administrator, and I think she's got a great future in the Republican Party."
Palin uses the term 'good union job' to describe her husband's work, and generally operates as a reactionary populist. What prevents her from taking over the party is the big business interests in the party, who do not like her because they do not like people that laud good union jobs, even by accident (this dynamic was reproduced for Huckabee as well). But the financial crisis is having a very weird effect. Foundations are devastated because of endowment losses, leading to nonprofit cutbacks, corporations are cutting back on lobbying, and advertising sales that sustain mainstream conservative media are crashing. The right-wing infrastructure is probably going to face serious cutbacks, as rich people and companies find their wealth evaporating.
In other words, it's going to become cheaper to organize people than money, which will help populists across the board. That means the Republicans might morph into a fully nativist populist party during a prolonged economic slump, and big business will invest relatively more in the Democratic Party.
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