posted November 03, 2004 03:46 PM              

By Alan Elsner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats are likely to enter a period of intense soul-searching and internal struggles after their 2004 election defeats, as they ask themselves how they regain the confidence of the American majority, political analysts said on Wednesday.

It will not be an easy task. Defeated in the presidential election, the party that dominated U.S. politics from the 1930s until the 1990s also lost ground in both chambers of Congress and the Republicans retained control of most of the state governorships.

"I think this is a realigning election. The Democrats are going to have to get used to permanent minority status for a generation or two," said Tom Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

"The party doesn't know what it stands for any more. The Republicans have built majorities around their ideas, which can be boiled down to a few simple statements. The Democrats fish around for issues where they think there already are majorities," said Schaller, a Democrat.

If one topic dominated the post-election talk, it was strength of social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage as a force President Bush (news - web sites) successfully used to motivate and energize millions of voters.

"The Republicans have been successful in framing themselves as the defenders of American traditions -- of religious traditions, family traditions, and I think they have successfully painted the Democrats all too often as contrary to those values," said Barack Obama, newly elected senator from Illinois whose victory provided one of the few bright spots for Democrats on Tuesday.

Schaller said it was extraordinary that many voters in key states seemed more worried about same-sex marriage than the war in Iraq (news - web sites). At the same time, Republicans persuaded millions of people who lacked health insurance to vote against what they portrayed as a Democratic Party plot to put health care under the control of government bureaucrats.

In Georgia, a state where Democrats were highly competitive as recently as eight years ago, a referendum banning same-sex marriage passed with 76 percent of the vote and Bush won the presidential ballot by 18 percentage points.

GUNS, GOD, GAYS

"The Democrats' positions on guns, God and gays has alienated millions of suburban and rural voters. The party needs to find a way to talk to them again if it is going to win national elections but it won't be easy," said University of Texas political scientist Bruce Buchanan.

Republican political consultant Bill Greener said people in the nation's "heartland," where Republicans racked up one victory over another, often saw urban Democrats on the East and West Coasts as smug and elitist.

"If you project a view that people who express strong religious faith are a threat, people who hold that faith are going to feel a sense of resentment," he said.

In many ways, the Democrats have become a coalition of minorities -- blacks, homosexuals, Jews, the unmarried and the unreligious. Bush's political strategist Karl Rove characterized the typical Democrat as "somebody with a doctorate ... people who imbibed the values of the sixties and seventies and stuck with them."

In the immediate term, the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party is likely to be between those on the left led by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (news - web sites), who will argue that the party needs to sharpen its differences with Republicans, and those who would like to see the party find a way to appeal again to middle class and rural voters who appear to have written the party off.