That "backlash" started in the spring of '06.

When you people "ratcheted up" your illegal immigrant bigotry.

It was the beginning of the end, for you clowns.

I think the backlash actually started a year earlier, in 2005, with the Federal government's unseemly and ham-handed attempt to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo. Between the competing spectacles of a Senate Majority leader purporting to render a "professional medical diagnosis" of her neurological condition on the basis of a heavily edited videotape, of a House Majority leader grimly threatening judges for doing their job ("The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior"), and of a "conservative" President ending his vacation early and flying through the night on Air Force One so that he could sign a new law specifically tailored to meddle in the poor woman's affairs the very second it alighted on his desk. . .well. . everyone but the Republicans was repelled. The whole thing came across as a gross overreach of the Federal government's rightful authorty, and an improper attempt to legislate the religious beliefs of a radical fringe of the party's influential Evangelical supporters.

And then, of course, in late 2005, there was Katrina. I don't need to rehash the incompetence and paralysis of the Bush Administration's response to that crisis. . .but for moderates and even some Republicans, that was the very last straw.

By the time the 2006 election rolled around, Republicans were disaffected, independents were resentful, and Democrats were (still) seething with a bottomless tectonic resentment going all the way back to the 2000 recount and Bush v. Gore.