Reihan has a smart article in The Spectator on social change in the U.S., and he gets extra points for making a clever trans-Atlantic electoral reference:

On 13 May, the Democrats had their own Crewe and Nantwich in Mississippi, where Democrat Travis Childers soundly defeated Republican Greg Davis.

While it is very clever, the comparison isn’t exact, since MS-01 was filled with registered Democrats who previously reliably voted for Republicans, party affiliations were not listed on the ballot and Childers had strong local connections that won him strong rural and small town support.  Crewe and Nantwich was more startling and more significant, because it represented a wholesale repudiation of Labour in a parliamentary by-election that confirmed the local election blowout victory the Tories had just had.  Flukey Democratic wins in Southern states are not necessarily unheard of–think of Doug Nick Lampson’s odd success in TX-22 two years ago–but Tory wins in by-elections are.  (In fairness, Reihan goes on to note the differences between our special elections and British by-elections.)

However, I have to take issue with Reihan’s description of LA-06 as a “conservative bastion” for reasons I have given before.  The demographics of the district shifted significantly between 2004 and 2008 because of Katrina refugees, and this was masked in electoral results in 2006 by the fact that the Democrats did not recruit a candidate with Cazayoux’s profile.  Indeed, they failed to recruit anyone.  Baker was unopposed in 2006 in a year when his traditional margin of victory would have likely been reduced noticeably.  Republicans were blindsided in Louisiana because they were still operating as if the Baton Rouge area was the same as it was four years earlier. 

Actually, in a way the Republican failure in LA-06 dramatically demonstrates the point Reihan is making: the GOP is basically oblivious to ongoing social change, including such basics as the political effects of demographic change.  This is one reason why they are continually refighting the last electoral war (or sometimes they are fighting two or three wars ago), because they seem fixated on how things were when the GOP and the President were still reasonably popular and they are not responding at all to the rapid changes that some of their own policies have (unwisely) unleashed.  Republicans continue to talk about “rebranding,” but what they have failed to see is that their traditional “market” has all but collapsed.