A New Republican Generation?

by PHILIP JOHN DAVIES

Contemporary Review, March 2003, volume 282, issue 1646, pages 139-146

A WEEK after the 2002 US mid-term elections Karl Rove, the Special Assistant to President Bush, gave a speech at the University of Utah that praised George Bush for leading the Republican party to an unusual victory. Against the tide of history the presidential party had gained congressional seats at the mid-term elections in November, 2002. These gains had been made in both chambers of the national government -- the House of Representatives as well as the Senate. In the face of an election when more Republican-held than Democratic-held constituencies were up for election both in Congress and at the gubernatorial level, the party's candidates had beaten the statistical odds on defeat, holding on to a majority of governorships as well as making legislative gains.

Some of the individual victories were close, but the fact that the balance of power had tilted towards the Republicans at every level, and in every branch, was clear by the morning after election day. There was no 36-day wait for a result in 2002, and Rove was quick to claim a mandate for George Bush. Having become President in the 2000 election where he did not gain a plurality of the popular votes that were cast, George W. Bush picked up the mantle of a mandate from an election in which he was not on the ballot at all.

While he was pleased with the short-term impact of the mid-term results, Rove saw much more potential in this victory. '[S]omething is going on out there', claimed Rove. 'Things are moving in new direction. It's not just that Republicans picked up three seats in the Senate or six or seven or seats in the House. It's something more fundamental, but we'll only know what it is in another two or four years'. In particular he claimed there was a 'pretty dramatic' growth in Republican identification among young voters, a shift in the gender gap, and indications of Republican attraction to Hispanic voters, each of which 'could be a significant trend' for the building of a generation-long Republican future.

There were echoes in this vision of a prediction from a generation before. As Richard Nixon entered the White House, in 1969, Kevin Phillips' book The Emerging Republican Majority set the tone for political analysis of that era. Given the slim margin of the Republican presidential election victory in Nixon's victory in 1968, this seemed to many to be a rather hopeful and partisan position. With the exception of brief periods of Republican control in the 80th and 83rd Congresses, long-term Democratic control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives stretched back to the demise of Herbert Hoover, and the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

The 1968 campaign had been divisive as it was fought in the shadow of the Vietnam War. The Democratic Party campaign imploded in the convention hall and on the streets in Chicago. Television covered vitriolic exchanges between politicians, and riotous confrontations on the streets. Democratic party leaders appeared to be culpable for pursuing the war, Democratic party followers appeared to be fomenting the rebellion on the streets, and a Democratic city appeared to be unable to maintain any kind of order. Hubert Humphrey, the then Vice President, was nominated for the Presidency by the Democrats at their Chicago meeting, but left the city feeling like he had 'been in a shipwreck'.

From then to November 1968 the Nixon/Agnew campaign spent most of its efforts making sure that the Democrats' self-inflicted wounds did not heal. The Republicans were under little pressure to produce a positive agenda -- blaming the Democrats for failures in foreign policy and domestic order was likely to be enough to coast to victory. But the result was still remarkably close. With a lead of fewer than half a million popular votes, albeit a clear Electoral College victory, one might expect it to be difficult for Nixon to claim the foundation for a mandate. And legislative victory still evaded the Republicans. The last time that the Republicans could claim to be the consistent majority party of the nation was when Amelia Earhart flew the Atlantic, and Mickey Mouse was only just emerging from a young Walt Disney's imagination.

Regardless of Nixon's victory, Phillips' confidence that the Republicans were on their way to majority status was quite startling. But his belief that the party political balance of the USA was due for significant change was shared by some others. Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg opined that divisions in the electorate were being re-defined by a complex of tensions that they aggregated as 'the social issue', in a way that tended to benefit the Republican party. Furthermore, there were many in that party who just thought it was their turn to grasp the reins of government authority. The history of party political eras in the USA has been conceptualised by many analysts as a generational cycle, and a good number of Republicans felt that the generation of Democratic strength launched by Franklin Roosevelt's victories should have run its course. They were putting their faith in a party political realignment that would alter the foundations of US electoral politics just enough to shift the advantage to their side .

In the USA the theory of party political realignment has been used to impose a conceptual pattern on generational change in American political life. Analysts are relatively united in the acceptance of five political eras, covering the period from the late eighteenth century to the 1930s. A generation after 1932 came the volatile election year of 1968. Political commentators, and increasingly, political activists, have been examining the entrails of elections ever since in the attempt to determine whether America has entered a sixth party political era, and debate is now engaged as to whether the indicators in the early twenty-first century suggest that the sixth era, if it ever started, is being superseded by a seventh.

A number of political characteristics have generally been associated with earlier realignments. There is usually an associated weakening of party political attachments, and growth of independence and split-ticket voting among the electorate. A rapid growth of the electorate may contribute to instability. Minor party activity might increase as disaffected voters search for new ways to express their political wishes. Significant changes in party structure and style may be evident. Ultimately a shift of support that changes the balance of party political power for a political generation is, in hindsight, the best evidence of a realignment having happened, but few political scientists are content to wait for hindsight, and even then they are likely to disagree on who has perfect vision.

Evidence can certainly be found in the late twentieth century. There was an increase in black and Hispanic voting, and a continued entry of substantial populations of immigrants to the US electoral system. The proportion of the electorate claiming to cast their votes independent of party influence rose to almost forty per cent in the late 1970s, and by the 2000 presidential election twenty-seven per cent of voters reported themselves as independents, and a further nine per cent reported voting against their usual party preference.

The two major parties are institutionalised within the US electoral system to a degree unusual in Western democracies. Nevertheless minor parties have been active throughout the period of the late twentieth century. George Wallace's American Independent Party took five states in 1968, John Anderson's National Unity Coalition attracted almost seven per cent of the vote in 1980. Neither the Libertarian Party nor the Green Party have gained large proportions of the vote, but in the close election of 2000 Ralph Nader's Green Party candidacy impacted very strongly on the presidential election. For the lack of a few hundred votes in Florida, Al Gore's Democratic candidacy failed to gain the presidency. Ignoring the question of whether hundreds of voters in West Palm Beach misunderstood the ballot and accidentally voted for the Reform Party candidate, Pat Buchanan, over 97,000 Florida voters chose Nader and the Green Party, votes that are likely to have split to the benefit of Gore had Nader not been running in Flor ida. Greens and Libertarians have also influenced local elections in states where their messages have proved attractive. Ross Perot attracted almost nineteen per cent of the presidential vote in 1992 using the 'United We Stand America' banner, and 8.5 per cent in 1996 as the candidate of the subsequent Reform Party. The Reform Party candidate Jesse Ventura took the governorship of Minnesota in 1998.

All this notwithstanding, there did not emerge a domination of the late twentieth century political system by either one of the two major political parties. Previous eras have been typified by unified party control across the branches of federal government, but this pattern has not been evident in the late twentieth century (see Table below).

In an attempt to encompass this, different authors have identified the late twentieth century party political era as realigned, but 'hollow', 'weak', 'casual', 'soft', 'rolling' or 'by default', which bring to mind a kind of era of weak feelings. Others have argued that the realignment concept has outlived its usefulness, and that this is demonstrated by an era which has shown a public commitment to divided government. The reasons posited have varied. It may be that the electorate wishes for different attributes to be represented in the different branches and chambers of government, and recognises these attributes as best represented by different political parties.

It may be that voters have developed a sense of what the late Everett Carll Ladd called 'cognitive Madisonianism': a belief in the value of maximising the oppositions that are already institutionalised within the checks and balances system. The latter seems an unlikely starting point, but it has been discovered that an electorate that has been increasingly suspicious of all institutions of authority over the last part of the twentieth century is generally comfortable with divided government. This knowledge has underpinned campaigns by both parties that have leaped to defend their candidates for one branch by arguing the dangers of handing 'unlimited' power to a single party. For example, on 28 October 1996 the National Republican Congressional Committee, apparently giving up on its candidate Senator Dole's chances of defeating President Clinton, and wanting to tap into the perceived public valuation of the checks provided by divided government, began running a television spot advertisement asking 'What would happen if the Democrats controlled Congress and the White House?... The liberal special interests aligned with Clinton desperately want to buy back control of Congress. If we give the special interests a blank check in Congress, who's going to represent us?' Republican party leaders denied that this was anything less than supportive of the Dole re-election effort.

Certainly this generation has seen a party political landscape unlike any other in US history. The five commonly accepted party eras are all typified by a fairly uniform domination of office-holding by the major party of that era. This pattern has not been evident since 1968, which has been a period of Republican domination at the presidential level, competitive Democratic victory at the Senate level, and predominantly Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives. Temporary losses by the party dominating one branch have not been matched by an ability to hold on to the other. The table above shows the percentage of election results during each party system when the administration party, that is the party of the elected President, was also dominant in the Senate and the House of Representatives. All of the first five party systems are typified by administration party domination of the federal government. In each case the majority of elections resulted in the party controlling the executive branch (the presidency) also controlling the legislature (the Senate and the House of Representatives).

Through all of US political history until the last third of the twentieth century the electorate tended to vote for a government united by political party, and when electoral opinion shifted, even for short periods, the effect was generally felt in all parts of federal government simultaneously. A significant number of elections in the first five party systems did result in the administration party controlling one, but not both, chambers of the legislature, but relatively few election years resulted in a President of one party being confronted by a legislature where both chambers were controlled by another party. The pattern since 1968 has been quite different. The starkly divided government model of a President faced by a legislature united in party opposition has been the majority form.

For many Republicans, the abiding feeling of the last generation has been that this unique pattern of party competitiveness was an aberration. It was not so much a new kind of realignment, as it was a Republican realignment irritatingly stalled, or rudely interrupted. Instead of the relatively clean break of previous party political eras, where a period of four years or so would see a shift of dominance from one electoral coalition to another, election after election produced governments where authority was divided between the two major parties. This stumbling partisanship was blamed variously on the damage to the Republicans caused by Watergate and the Nixon resignation in 1974; the collapse of public trust in politicians and the increase of a deeply embedded scepticism about political parties in the wake of the nation's intervention in Southeast Asia; and the capture of a discouraged Republican party by its own right-wing.

Nevertheless the Democrats could at no point during this latest political generation completely shake off the challenge from the Republicans. The electoral battle has increasingly been between a Republican party machine determined to achieve its destined realignment, and a Democratic party determined to resist. It was not just political scientists who were waiting for realignment. Candidates, office-holders and political parties were increasingly using consultants both internal and external to their normal operations staff. Consultants and other political actors were increasingly aware of political science research. The language of political science crossed over into the political parties.

One could be excused for thinking that the orchestration of realignment had become a target of the major parties as their relationship with the electorate weakened, and they looked to experts to advise them. The winning of elections is essentially a short-term task. A date is fixed. You need a plurality of the vote in the constituency. But US political party leaders were faced with a system that was no longer working predictably and according to established received wisdoms. Simultaneously there was a suspicion that the opportunity might exist to create a new voting pattern that could last for a generation, rather than an election. It is not clear that the party leaders were trying to 'win realignment', but the need to respond to changes both in electoral behaviour, and in the legislated structure of the elections process meant that they certainly had to think of doing more than the short-term aim of winning the next election.

While he was Republican party chairman in the 1980s, Frank Fahrenkopf's '1991 Plan' injected resources into local party organisations around the country, in an attempt to stimulate realignment from the grass roots. At the national level the Republican party began generic television advertising in 1980. The Democratic party, having spent years devoting some effort to reducing the power of its Southern conservative wing in order to develop a progressive civil rights policy, in the last quarter of the twentieth century thought it necessary to give more weight to the South in its presidential selection process in order to produce candidates acceptable to the national electorate -- to the point where 1992 produced an Arkansas/Tennessee ticket (Clinton and Gore). Both the significance accorded to realignment, and the extent to which it had impinged on the consciousness of political leaders was signally indicated in 1984, when, upon winning re-election, President Ronald Reagan, a sharp and focused politician, but no t noted for his academic analysis, declared that 'realignment is real'.

If Republican false dawns occurred with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, and then again in 1980 with Ronald Reagan, the distress at losing the momentum when the Democrat Bill Clinton was elected with only forty-three per cent of the vote in the three-cornered election of 1992 was palpable. Some Republicans felt that the party's storming congressional victories in 1994 presaged a new GOP generation, but ambitions to take full scale national power hit the wall again with Clinton's re-election, and Speaker Newt Gingrich's ideological and ambition-driven political self-destruction. Even the victory of 2000, assiduously pursued on the streets of Florida, and in the state and federal courts, was subsequently spoiled for Republicans when the new president failed to keep Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont onside, and his new self-definition as an Independent gave the Democrats control of the US Senate.

After 2002, Republicans are hoping that what they perceive is not another false dawn, but rather that they are looking towards the generation of the GOP. The election resulted in extremely rare legislative gains for the presidential party in a mid-term election, as the Republican party increased its share of House seats to 229, regained control of the Senate with 51 seats, maintained its majority of governorships, finishing in control of the executive in 26 states, and gained state legislative seats in all regions of the country, becoming the majority party at that level for the first time in fifty years. In all of these cases, as in the overall national popular vote, the Republican share is only just over fifty per cent, and the Democratic share only just below that figure. It is almost a statistical tie -- a shift of a few votes here and there would have changed the results. But the Republicans won this tie. In every case the small majority lies with the Republicans, and the combination is to give that part y a very considerable, and interlinked, foundation for national political authority. It is hard for the Democrats to discover the cracks in this political facade through which to squeeze any political initiatives. The Republicans, meanwhile, want to build on this foundation an electoral strength that will continue to deliver fifty per cent plus of the seats to their candidates, and which will steadily pull them ahead, and away from the situation where they win in a tied race.

The Republicans, meanwhile, want to build on this foundation an electoral strength that will continue to deliver fifty per cent plus of the seats to their candidates, and which will steadily pull them ahead, and away from the situation where they win in a tied race.

Voter News Service, the exit poll service that has fed myriad figures to political enthusiasts in recent decades, collapsed under the strain of the 2002 election night. This leaves the field free for post-election pundits to develop their ideas on the basis of the modest, and contestable, data that is available. If anything, the information that does exist may not be as encouraging as the winning party would hope, although it does give indications of a winning strategy. For example, Opinion Dynamics Corporation, researching for Fox News, having conducted surveys in ten key election states, concludes that the Republican victories 'were more the result of well-executed campaign tactics and the vagaries of electoral politics than of any significant shift in the national mood'.

Nonetheless the same source reports a 'hint that Hispanic voters may be on the verge of a significant shift towards the GOP', a move that Karl Rove has claimed to be part of the foundation of a twenty-first century Republican majority. This analysis also indicates that the attraction of Republican education policy has underpinned this growth in support. Hispanic criticism of Republican immigration and bilingual education policy was significant in the growth of support for Clinton in 1996 -- even among traditionally Republican Cuban-American voters. If the Republican party has successfully responded to this electoral slippage it has done well. The Hispanic share of the vote is set to increase steadily and strongly into the next generation. Hispanics have just replaced blacks as the largest minority group in the US. Republican success in appealing generally to this population would be a considerable help in maintaining the party political grip.

At the same time, if the Republicans manage to convince the electorate that they are the party most trusted to deliver on the central policy area of education, they have an advantage on a matter of interest to a wide spectrum of the population. Meanwhile, the Democrats are widely considered to have the problem of identifying those policy areas where they can attract majority trust, and which are simultaneously salient to a large and active part of the electorate. Prescription drug costs did not appear to do it in 2002, and such specific issue identification will probably never shift a significant part of the voting population for any length of time. Broad brush faith in politicians' attempts to deliver across a spectrum of policies offers a better chance of a long-term relationship between a generation of voters and the party candidates.

In 2002 the lack of very coherent and gripping issues presented by either party, and perhaps particularly by the Democrats, left the election as a kind of referendum on the incumbent president's management and credibility, not particularly on his policies. In this race Republican campaigns did particularly well in marshalling and organising their majority white voters, especially the men, to come to the polls. The non-white population of the USA will continue to grow faster than the average, but at present still provides less than twenty per cent of the votes. Republican strategies to nurture the party's attractiveness to blocs of non-white voters will be increasingly important as the population changes, but for the moment the strategy of catering to and maximising the white demographic in which they have shown strength probably provides the Republicans' firmest foundation. With presidential approval ratings in the 60-65 per cent range, a very active approach to electioneering for months preceding the electio ns, and a get out the vote effort unequalled in recent Republican history, in 2002 the party tipped the scales to its advantage.

In 2004 the Democrats will be defending nineteen Senate seats, as opposed to the Republicans' fifteen. In addition to this statistical disadvantage, more of the Democrats' seats appear vulnerable, and a number of sitting Democratic Senators seem likely to retire. In the House the Democrats might take hope from the fact that the Republican lead has stretched, but only by about as many seats as the party could have expected from the effect of post-census redistricting. However the recent redistricting exercise has been used in many states further to entrench party majorities in certain constituencies, and to reduce the proportion of seats which are clearly competitive. As usual, incumbents standing for re-election stood little chance of defeat. Fewer than ten per cent of House seats were won with a majority of less than fifty-five per cent of the vote. Almost all of these were open seats. In such a tightly managed duopoly partisan change is slow in coming, and then likely to be slow to dislodge.

With Al Gore's withdrawal from, presidential contention for the 2004 nomination, the Democrats face the difficulty of nominating a challenger from a bunch of candidates relatively unknown to the US public, in a process that formally begins in less than a year's time. They will be hoping to choose a candidate early in the primary season, and with limited bloodletting. After the 2002 results President Bush must be seen as having the political momentum. Even with his high mid-term levels of support, he could suffer if the electorate's sense of economic stability was deeply shaken, or if a foreign policy adventure such as Iraq went seriously wrong, but as his father's son, President Bush is well aware of the need to avoid these piffalls.

The electoral pressure on the political parties is unrelenting, as preparations for the next campaign follow immediately on the heels of election victory or defeat. The country is very evenly divided in its allegiance to the two major parties, but in that situation it takes a lasting decision from only a small portion of the swing population to confirm the Iong-term authority of one party. It is still not since the time of Amelia Earhart and the nascent Mickey Mouse that the Republicans have been able simultaneously to re-elect a president, and both chambers of the legislature. To do this in 2004 would be a momentous return to form, and might finally provide the basis for a Republican generation.

TABLE

Party domination of Presidency and US Congress, 1789-2002: the
proportion of years

                       1789-   1826-  1860-  1896-  1932-  1968-
                       1824    1858   1894   1930   1966   2002

Presidential party      95%    59%     50%    83%    78%    22%
Controls Senate
And House

Presidential party       5%    23%     39%    11%     0%     22%
Controls Senate
Or House

Divided control:         0%    18%     11%     6%    22%     56%
Presidency faced by
Senate and House
Of a different party