Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- They have had more than a month to cool off since the November election, but voters are still unhappy with the Republican Party.

The question now is what Democrats are going to do to turn that disaffection into affection -- affection for Democrats, that is, and not merely a brief, kissy-face flirtation but a deep, abiding romance that will realign voters for the 2008 presidential election and beyond.

Just how unhappy those voters are was made clear last week by a National Public Radio poll conducted by Republican and Democratic pollsters.

Almost two out of three likely 2008 voters say the country is on the wrong track. Only 28 percent say they are inclined to vote for the Republican presidential candidate in 2008; 46 percent say they will vote for the Democrat.

Nearly half -- 49 percent -- say their opinion of the Republican Party has gotten worse over the last decade. Roughly the same percentage -- 54 percent -- say their opinion of the Democrats has stayed about the same.

Not surprisingly, then, the percentage of likely voters calling themselves Democrats has held steady over the last year while the Republican percentage has dropped, from 41 percent to 35 percent -- one of the lowest numbers for Republicans in recent memory.

This decade was supposed to cement the new Republican majority. We are seeing evidence of a crack-up instead.

Agonized Self-reflection

Given the antagonism to Republicans, what are Democrats going to do about it? They have been talking about this problem a good deal, of course -- agonized self-reflection being one of the specialties of professional Democrats.

Some ideas are more interesting than others. The Democratic pollsters who took the NPR poll, for example, boldly asserted that it should inspire Democrats into ``prioritizing bipartisanship and getting things done for the country.'' (No wonder pollsters get paid so much money.)

A more interesting and provocative approach comes from a young political scientist and author of a much-discussed new book, ``Whistling Past Dixie.'' Thomas F. Schaller of the University of Maryland takes the question of what Democrats should do now and turns it on its head.

What Democrats shouldn't do, Schaller says, is continue their obsession with regaining the electoral advantage in Southern states that they lost thirty years ago. The South is now solidly Republican and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Dixie Distraction

Wooing back the disaffected social conservatives of Dixie, Schaller advises, only distracts Democratic candidates from cultivating a majority in more fertile territory, particularly the post-industrial Midwest and swelling Southwest.

``In a country divided 49-49,'' Schaller said last week, ``you have to go to the places where you get a high rate of return. For Democrats, that's not the South.''

Schaller's point is a direct affront to the most fashionable thinking in Democratic circles these days, where such graybeards as former Clinton aide James Carville and Harvard University professor Steve Jarding get excellent press by deriding their own party for its out-of-touch left-wing elitism.

Without wooing the votes of culturally conservative white Southern males, they say, Democrats are condemned to be a permanent minority; if nothing else, the South is just too big electorally to ignore.

Stagnant South

Not so, says Schaller, and the numbers bear him out. He brandishes a series of graphs that show Southern electoral power is usually overstated. Population growth in several Southern states is stagnating.

``The South today,'' he writes, ``wields not much more electoral power nationally than it did a century ago,'' when it formed the solid base of the (minority) Democratic Party.

By contrast, he says, Democratic power in the country's most robust regions -- the interior West and Sunbelt -- is growing, thanks, he says, to voter disenchantment with the Republican Party's social conservatism, the very ideology that helps Republicans in the South.

Schaller's reading of the landscape offers support for the party's unashamed liberals. In the Midwest, he says, they should run on a protectionist platform. In the Southwest, a campaign for vigorous enforcement of immigration laws would ``put the region up for grabs.''

Out West, muscular environmentalism and a program of land and water conservation would woo crusty libertarians and the new transplants from the coastal blue states. Add universal health care and higher taxes on ``the rich'' and voila: an electoral majority.

Dixie-phobia

A dozen objections can be raised against Schaller's analysis. He exaggerates the rightward drift of the Republican Party, as most analysts do, and he underestimates Republicans' ability to anticipate and adapt to demographic and ideological changes. Republicans have smart advisers like Schaller, too.

Just as important, he slights the degree to which voter disenchantment with Republicans is tied to the Iraq war, raising the likelihood that this year's election results were an aberration in a long-term trend rather than the beginning of a new one.

But Schaller's Dixie-phobia is refreshing nonetheless. Unlike Carville and Jarding, who want to expand the party with more moderates and even conservatives, Schaller says the best strategy for Democrats is to be who they are: the party of social liberalism and economic intervention in the marketplace.

He is betting that voters, particularly new and young voters, will approve, and he may be right.

We will soon see whether Democrats in Congress, led by their new Speaker, are willing to make the same bet.

(Andrew Ferguson is a Bloomberg News columnist. In 1992, he wrote speeches for President George H.W. Bush. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Andrew Ferguson in Washington at aferguson62@yahoo.com.

Last Updated: December 19, 2006 00:05 EST