It was the night of Barbara Boxer's greatest political victory. She had been re-elected to a third term as a senator from California, beating a credible challenger by a twenty-point margin and securing a higher raw vote total--6.9 million--than any federal candidate save George W. Bush and John Kerry. But Boxer's party was in trouble. Democrats had failed to retake the White House and lost seats in Congress, and a decade after the GOP revolution of 1994 put both the House and Senate in Republican hands, the party that had for so long ruled Congress still did not seem to understand how to mount an effective opposition. "On election night," Boxer recalls, "I said that I knew there were hard and tough times coming and that if I had to stand alone, I was going to do it. I'm not going to worry about what other people are doing. I'm going to be comfortable with being the only vote."

To anyone unfamiliar with the continuing crisis of the contemporary Democratic Party--which, for the past decade, has been exacerbated by the supine character of its Congressional caucuses--Boxer's statement might have sounded bizarre. Sure, things look bad for Democrats, but the party still has a substantial caucus in the Senate. So why would she be talking about standing alone? The answer is that Boxer, a liberal who shares the view of many grassroots Democrats that their party's fortunes will be renewed only by showing strength, was implicitly acknowledging the reality that a lot of Congressional Democrats still don't recognize: that Democrats have to become a genuine opposition party before they can ever again hope to become a majority party.

Barely two months after she made her go-it-alone pledge, the Senator would illustrate that point--perhaps unintentionally, but certainly effectively--when she lodged one of the most high-profile dissents in the history of the Senate. Inspired by electoral justice activists, who, she says, "definitely put the issue on the agenda for me," and by conversations with Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a Cleveland Democrat who was concerned about the disenfranchisement of minority voters in Ohio, Boxer objected to the certification of the presidential election results from that state. Boxer's objection forced a two-hour debate that saw several Senate Democrats making pious statements about the need to count every vote, but she alone voted against certification.

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