As Steven Taylor notes, GOP candidate Ernie Fletcher has won Kentucky’s open gubernatorial seat, and Haley Barbour has a fairly robust lead in Mississippi—so robust, in fact, that Barbour made a victory speech just after midnight, despite the slim remaining chance that he will not receive the absolute majority of the vote required to avoid the legislature deciding the election (as they did in Ronnie Musgrove’s victory over Mike Parker in 1999).

John Cole credits the successes of Fletcher and Barbour to DNC head Terry MacAuliffe. However, I’d probably chalk it up to something more fundamental: in the mass media and Internet age, the Democratic and Republican parties have become increasingly nationalized, with little scope for state parties to tack too far from the national party’s position. Even in Mississippi, a state where “yellow dog Democrats” have had a lot of sway, that’s slowly fading as Democrats retire or change parties. Take, for example, one political scientist’s observations on the election*:

John Bruce, a political science professor at the University of Mississippi, said though Musgrove and Barbour ran a tough campaign with ads criticizing each other, the two candidates took similar positions on many issues.

Bruce said he took statements about gun ownership, abortion and other issues off campaign Web sites and quizzed his students about which candidate had made the statements. He said many thought the statements came from Barbour — but all the positions came from Musgrove.

“They’re both conservative,” Bruce said. “They’re almost identical on a lot of issues.”

And “almost identical” southern Democrats are increasingly finding that southern voters will choose the real thing—Republicans—over conservative Democrats who increasingly have to rely on the support of groups—like African-Americans, state employees, and transplanted Northern liberals—who aren’t conservative at all.

That isn’t to say that parties can’t field successful candidates in states where their national ideology isn’t competitive—the most obvious case in point would be the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. But they’re going to be in an uphill struggle, without the ability to bring in “name” fellow partisans to support them, and they’re going to need to work much harder than they’d have had to in the past to convince local voters that they are truly “independent” of the national party. Ronnie Musgrove couldn’t do either, and ultimately that is what cost him this election.

PhotoDude has more on this theme, tying it into the whole Dean flag flap (via InstaPundit), and Stephen Green notes the GOP surge, but encourages Republicans not to get cocky.