A FIFTY/FIFTY NATION – September 8, 2007

Democrats are looking forward to the 2008 election with slightly uneasy optimism, Republicans with nearly unrelieved dread.  The respective eagerness and dread are easy enough to understand: Republicans are burdened with an unpopular president and an unpopular war.  Not one of the major polls listed at PollingReport.com during 2007 showed President Bush's approval rating as high as 40 percent, or his disapproval as less than 50 percent.  Out of 32 polls reported since the beginning of June, more than a third (12) show less than 30 percent approval, and all but three show at least 60 percent disapproval.[1]  

Even generally favorable economic news has done nothing to budge these grim-for-Republican numbers.  Another set of numbers, closely watched by political professionals, is equally dismaying.  American political campaigns depend almost entirely on private fundraising – candidates for both sides having largely abandoned the option of federal matching funds in favor of raising money with fewer constraints.  Historically Republicans have enjoyed a substantial advantage in fundraising – often by roughly a three to two margin – and have built their campaign strategies and tactics around that assumption.  Yet so far in this cycle Democratic campaigns and party organizations are handily outraising their GOP counterparts.[2]   This is unprecedented in the modern political era, when Democrats have normally hoped only to be competitive in raising money.

Nevertheless, Republican despair is not complete, at least at the presidential level; nor is Democratic enthusiasm unalloyed by anxiety.  Only in part is this uncertainty about the future.  The election is still more than a year away, and in a common American political adage, a week is a year in politics.  Yet few Democrats – and a dwindling share of Republicans – really expect the war in Iraq to start coming up roses, or Bush to regain much of his onetime popularity.  Some Democratic worries, and Republican hopes, stem from the prospect that Democrats may nominate a woman or an African-American, both uncrossed bridges in US presidential politics.  For the most part, however, the GOP's glimmer of hope, and the Democrats' hint of worry, are rooted not in the uncertain future but the weight of the past.

The United States has held ten presidential elections since 1968, a sea-change election that marks the beginning of the modern era in US politics.  Republicans won seven of them, Democrats only three (Carter in 1976; Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996).  In the 1980s Republican strategists and Republican-leaning pundits – acutely aware of the psychological value of perceived inevitability – argued that the GOP had an "electoral lock" on the presidency.  In the state-by-state American electoral system, large parts of the country were regarded as safely Republican, hardly any of it as safely Democratic – Democrat Walter Mondale, in 1984, won only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia (Washington, DC). 

Even in 1988, with no incumbent running, Democrat Michael Dukakis won only ten states, concentrated in the Northwest, upper Midwest, and Northeast.  At a time when the nation's population balance was steadily shifting toward the south and west (as is still the case), it seemed that the Republican electoral lock would only grow stronger with time, accentuated by the built-in gerrymander of the US Constitution, which over-weighs low-population states, typically rural and Republican-leaning. 

Bill Clinton broke the electoral lock, defeating his Republican opponents by handsome pluralities, though the presence of third-party candidate Ross Perot in both 1992 and 1996 held him short of a majority in the popular vote.  George W. Bush did not restore the lock, losing the popular vote by half a million votes in 2000, and winning the electoral vote and the presidency only after a legal battle over the vote tally in Florida.  His 2004 re-election win was also narrow, 3 percent, and a shift of some 200,000 votes in Ohio would have tipped the electoral result to Democrat John Kerry.  Unlike the case in the 1980s, the US in the 2000s has been a "50-50 nation," with the two parties closely matched in their vote totals.

Nevertheless these narrow Republican wins – especially in 2000 – were as demoralizing to Democrats in their own way as a Reagan-era GOP landslide would have been.  Many Democrats still regard the 2000 election as stolen, partly in the legal battle over the vote count, partly as a result of irregularities in the voting process. 

In fact, a badly designed ballot almost certainly caused several thousand Floridians to vote inadvertently for third-party candidate Patrick Buchanan rather than Democrat Al Gore – many of these votes being recorded in heavily Jewish neighborhoods where support for Buchanan, often accused of anti-Semitism, was effectively nonexistent.[3] Had these votes gone to Gore he would have won Florida, by a very narrow margin but sufficient to render any serious recount challenge unlikely.  No evidence of skullduggery was ever found in that episode, but it contributed powerfully to Democrats' suspicions that a Republican fix was in.  (This experience is at the root of exceptional Democratic ferocity toward – and fear of – Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, who they see as the evil genius behind the 2000 outcome.) 

More generally – and for supporters of both parties – the 2000 and 2004 elections brought back an echo of the Republicans-always-win psychology of the electoral-lock era of the 1980s.  To Democrats, the lesson is that they not only have to win the presidency, they have to put it out of stealing reach.  Republicans naturally do not believe that their party stole the 2000 presidential election; to them the lesson of back-to-back narrow wins is that the tide is on their side – that even if things look bleak, some combination of tough campaigning, weak Democratic nominees, and sheer fate will carry the day for them.

It should be noted that almost none of this psychology applies to the 2008 Congressional elections.  Both parties' narratives should logically apply as much to Senate and House races as to the presidential race, but as Oliver Wendell Holmes said of the law, the lifeblood of politics is not logic but experience.  Prior to the GOP Congressional sweep of 1994, Democrats had held the House for 40 years, and the Senate for all but six years since the 1950s.  While this in itself lends no psychological aura of inevitability to Democrats holding Congress in 2008, there's also no lurking sense among members of either party that Republicans can win back Congress simply by being Republicans.  The shadow of the past falls much less heavily on congressional elections.

In the 2008 presidential race, however, the modern history of Republican presidential victories is likely to be a persistent – though rarely mentioned – subtext of both parties' thinking.  Regardless of polls or fundraising, Republicans will be somewhat buoyed up by their memory of victories past, while Democrats will fret about somehow snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Rick Robinson

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Author of the article holds B.A. degree in Economics from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and M.A. degree in English from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California . Mr. Robinson worked as a county-level campaigner in Dukakis (1988) and Clinton (1992) presidential campaigns. He presently works as a journalist and political commentator.

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Footnotes:

1. PollingReport.com (accessed 8 September, 2007).  http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm 

2. Cillizza, Chris. Republicans' Fundraising Peril. Washington Post Politics Blog (25 June, 2007). http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2007/06/republicans_falling_behind_in.html 

3. Brady, Henry; et al. Evidence of Excessive Buchanan Vote Share in Palm Beach County, Florida. Web document (4 March, 2001). http://elections.berkeley.edu/pc01/node8.html

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