NYTimes: 'G.O.P. Worries About Effects of State Losses'

'G.O.P. Worries About Effects of State Losses'
"Last week’s losses by New York Republicans are finally sinking in: Democrats swept every statewide office for the first time since 1938. Eliot Spitzer amassed a record 69 percent landslide by winning 59 of New York’s 62 counties. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton carried all but four. Three House seats changed hands, consigning Republicans to their smallest share of the state’s Congressional delegation ever.
And if those results were not grim enough for New York Republicans, they also worry about their longer-term prospects.
Party officials fear that their shrinking political base will enable Democrats to wrest control of the State Senate in two years and complete their sweep of statewide offices and both houses of the Legislature for the first time since 1934, in the early days of the New Deal.
“The party’s not dead, but if the Democrats take the Senate out, it will be pretty close to dead,” said Alfonse M. D’Amato, a former United States senator.
Mr. D’Amato expressed concern that last week’s losses were not merely cyclical, but potentially more fundamental and forbidding, a conclusion echoed by others — particularly if the Democrats control legislative and Congressional reapportionment after the 2010 census."