In 1988, the Democrats lost very badly for the third presidential election in a row, and for the fifth time in six attempts going back to the debacle in 1968. Without the Watergate scandal and President Ford’s unpopular pardon of Richard Nixon, it probably would have been a complete shutout. But, since 1988, the Republicans have lost three out of five elections and are poised to lose four out of six. And, in the two years that the GOP “won,” they did so by the narrowest possible margin. In 2000, they lost the popular vote and only won the Electoral College because of a decision by the Supreme Court which handed Florida to George W. Bush. In 2004, Bush would have lost if not for Ohio. Since 1988, no Republican nominee has received more than 286 Electoral College votes. In this cycle, there was never much chance that Romney could exceed that number.
Assuming Romney loses, he will be the one who gets most of the blame, but the GOP needs to start worrying about the fact that they have a coalition that must basically win every battleground state to have any chance at winning the White House. To give you an idea of what I am talking about, consider this. If Obama wins in Nevada and Colorado in the West, New Hampshire in New England, and in Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin in the Midwest, he will have 290 electoral votes even while losing Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. That is 20 more electoral votes than he needs to be reelected. In other words, the Southern coalition is not big enough to compete for the White House. For the foreseeable future, any respectable Democratic nominee for president is going to be just one big state away from winning the election before the campaigning even begins. Winning Ohio will likely be sufficient, and if it is not, winning Virginia and one other state will get it done.
Now, Obama could wind up winning Florida and Virginia and North Carolina, but those states will probably remain competitive in future presidential elections. The problem is, they are not enough for the GOP to win. This is a structural change from the second half of the 20th Century. The Republicans had a lot of success winning the presidency from 1952-1988, but they controlled the House of Representatives for only two of those years and the Senate for only eight. The way things look now, we should see nearly the opposite. The GOP will be hard to dislodge from the House and will trade the Senate back and forth, but the Democrats will dominate the presidential elections. The problem is that the two parties are not built to work that way. The Republicans are not legislators and they do not know how to work with an executive from the opposing party. It’s impossible to understand modern conservatism without understanding that they developed a hatred of the federal government precisely because they almost never controlled the pursestrings from 1933-1994. The have the ideology and mentality of a minority party. Meanwhile, progressive Democrats have developed a deep suspicion of executive power both because of the mistakes of the Vietnam era and because of abuses under Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. To a certain degree, Democrats are less comfortable wielding executive power. These are legacies of the 20th-Century, but they will probably unwind in some ways as this new power dynamic takes hold.
In the short term, it’s a recipe for dysfunction. Our only hope for avoiding this in the short term is to win the House tomorrow. But the real solution to the problem is for the GOP to go through a wrenching civil war and come out the other side with a new ideology more suited to being legislators. They also need to do something to appeal more to non-white voters or their advantage in Congress will dry up before too long.
I think this is a very smart and refreshing analysis. Good job.
Frankly, I’m hoping they don’t adapt and are shut out of both the White House and Congress for at least a generation. Or better yet, go the way of the Whigs while the Dems split into two new, moderately center-left and center-right parties.
Another parallel I think I see is that the northern states appear to be realigning downballot more slowly than at the presidential level. This is a mirror image of what happened in the South from 1964 to 1994. The Dems held the House through that period on the basis of their traditional strength in the South, but as the old lions retired, they got replaced by Republicans. I think an equal and opposite reaction is underway in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. It’s just going to take time for attrition to erode the GOP’s strength in Congress.
Ok, someone explain to me this. There confirmed reports that Romney will be campaining on election day in Ohio tomorrow. I assume he’ll be in a GOP county and will get voters from rally to polls?? But wouldn’t that mean that voters will be at rally rather than polls???
I’m confused, I can’t decide if this is good strategy or not?
My gut’s telling me an act of desperation
Your gut is probably right. Having worked on and been close to a few campaigns, all my experience says that on Election Day a campaign wants 100% of its efforts focused on GOTV—with the exception of the handful of people responsible for the “victory party”, and making sure the candidate has both speeches written (celebratory victor and gracious loser).
Good post, Booman. To extend your point further, in addition to Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, Obama could lose New Hampshire, Iowa and Colorado and still reach 271 electoral votes.
Looking ahead a few years, Arizona (11 electoral votes), Georgia (16 EVs) and Texas (38 EVs) are all moving towards swing state status based on current demographic and voting trends.
The fact that a blackKenyanMuslimSocialist president is running for re-election with 8% unemployment and stands a better-than-even chance of winning only illustrates your point more clearly.
I hope progressive Democrats never become too comfortable wielding power. I hope they always have that suspicion. This is the best way to ensure they will not abuse it and will use it as wisely as they can.
It’s California and women voters.
Republicans use to own California, unless you were Pat/Jerry Brown. Then the GOP went out of their way to antagonize Latinos, and become the undeniable party of white supremacy in all its forms, not just anti-black. The Democrats start every election with three of the four largest states in the country in their pocket: CA, NY and IL. That’s a hell of an advantage to 270.
And on the national level, the southern strategy met its demise in 1992. It’s just taken awhile to recognize it. It’s cause of death? Women voters.
Once upon a time, there was always a gender gap between the parties, but women voted for the eventual electoral winner in every election from 1960-1988, D or R. Then the supreme court wars of the late 80s and early 90s happened. Then the relitigation of Roe with Planned Parenthood v. Casey happened. We saw groundbreaking shifts of women into the workplace, and the rise of single parent households. And the GOP rolled out out-of-touch old men like Poppy Bush and Bob Dole as its champions, along with abortion extremists and fascists like Pat Buchanan as its public face.
Women have voted Democrat every year beginning in 1992. They comprise a majority of the electorate. The Democrats win a majority of the majority, every four years. It’s no surprise then that the Democrat has won the nationwide popular vote five of the last six times, including tomorrow (knock on wood).
The party of white men, at the exclusion of all others, is screwed.
Okay Booman,
Now reports are that Romney will be campaigning in Cleveland and Pittsburgh tomorrow???
I don’t see how one or two rallies really does anything at this point. Maybe he keeps people from voting because they attend the rally. At baseline, Romney’s run a very incompetent campaign.
Frankly, I doubt that any campaign rallies change any votes at all. They just bring out the people who are already energized. Sure, you get a little local TV coverage. Probably decades ago that might have helped. There was a time when there were no 24 hour news channels and most people watched the local and national news broadcasts nightly, so this was a way to get some TV time. Now it’s almost impossible to avoid news about the campaigners wherever you go.
I suspect they do it because if they didn’t campaign the fear is that they’ll “lose the news cycle”. They feel they have to project the image of constantly fighting … better if their voices are hoarse and they are obviously tired from the long hours … and constantly having people roar approval.
I think it was in 2000 when Gore did an all-night set of campaign events leading to the polls opening on election day. I can’t imagine that this changed a single vote.
So why is Romney doing it? Well, first, it doesn’t hurt (unless they are taking GOTV people away from that task in order to get them to the rallies). And, second, Romney has been given a massive amount of money from people in his social group. If I were him I’d want to avoid any opportunity for anyone to claim that he didn’t do every thing he could to win. (And yes, that means he knows he’s going to lose.)
It IS interesting to speculate as to the future of the GOP. In some ways they have remained viable far longer than demographers might have expected, if you look back to the book The Emerging Democratic Majority. They are playing every tactic for all it is worth, from felonizing as many dark-skinned people as possible, to vote blocking, to creative redistricting, to news media management, to the incredible power of the wingnut propoganda machine. Throw in their tactic the last 4 years of openly trying to destroy the economy so Obama would get the blame (and the media’s failure to call them on it – or even to correct public misperceptions about taxes and spending) and they really have maximized their potential.
But, as the saying goes, California leads the nation. The California GOP has been shooting itself in the foot (except, alas, for the Arnold exception) for 14 years now with extremist candidates and catering too much to their extremist base, and now that has become the m.o. of the national party.
In this election the GOP had a better chance if they could have curbed their inherent sexism on women’s issues, but they couldn’t. They might have done better if they hadn’t openly tried to dismantle Medicare … even though they haven’t paid the price they should for that trick that was still a factor.
I have to wonder if the GOP leadership has lost control of the frankenvoter they have created. They KNOW they have to appeal to Latinos, but every time they try some bridge-building, perhaps building on Catholic social “wedge” issues, some faction of their party goes on an anti-Latino crusade under the guise of “illegal immigration” and the whole effort fails. They KNOW they have to do better with younger voters but every attempt is utterly inept … like that stupid rap video the white college republicans came up with in 2008.
I don’t know what their plans are … at the moment they seem to be doubling down on the same tactics. Maybe they hope that if they can thoroughly pack the SCOTUS they’ll interpret the 24th amendment so that poll taxes can be allowed back in.