Open-Field Politics
By Michael Barone, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, June 15, 2007
We seem to be entering a new period in American politics. We have come through a period of trench warfare, in which two armies of approximately equal size faced each other across the battlefield and tried to rally their sides to achieve the incremental gains that would make the difference between victory or defeat. There were few defections from either army in this culture war, and almost no one crossing the lines. Like the trench warfare of World War I, our politics in this period, which stretched from 1995 to 2005, was a conflict of many bitter battles and no final victories.
Now we seem to be entering a new period, a period of open-field politics. It seems to be a time when there are no permanent alliances, when new leaders arise with new strategies and tactics, when the voters, instead of forming themselves into two coherent and cohesive armies, wander about the field, attaching themselves to one band and then another, with no clear lines of battle and no landmarks to rally beside.
Americans are facing the first presidential election since 1928 -- 80 years ago! -- that doesn't feature the incumbent president or the incumbent vice president as a candidate. We have gone through periods of open-field politics before, most recently between 1990 and 1995. In those years, a little-known governor of Arkansas challenged an incumbent president whose job approval rose to 89 percent; a Texas billionaire announced his candidacy on cable news and soon led the putative Republican and Democratic nominees in the polls; and the Republican Party, after 40 years in the minority in the House, won thumping majorities in the House and Senate. Few professional observers of politics predicted any of those three surprising developments.
Similar surprises, or quite different ones, may be in store for us. In the first months of 2007, the presidential candidates leading in the polls included the wife of a former president, a man who had never been a governor or a senator and who was far out of line with his party on issues important to its base, and a man who during the immediately preceding presidential contest was a state senator in Illinois. More surprises may be coming.
The 2006 Elections
The results of the 2006 election were significantly different from those of the five biennial elections between 1996 and 2004. For a decade, we seemed to be an almost evenly divided and deeply politically polarized country. From the 1995-96 budget showdown between President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich until after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the political balance across the country remained very much the same. We were a 49 percent nation, as was written in this space six years ago.
In the five House elections between 1996 and 2004, Republican candidates won between 49 percent and 51 percent of the vote, and Democratic candidates won between 46 percent and 48.5 percent -- an unusually narrow range in American history. Clinton was re-elected with 49 percent of the vote in 1996; George W. Bush and Al Gore both won a rounded-off 48 percent in 2000; Bush beat John Kerry in 2004 by 51 percent to 48 percent, the narrowest percentage margin for a re-elected president since Woodrow Wilson beat Charles Evans Hughes 49 percent to 46 percent in 1916.
The electorate was divided primarily by cultural, even moral, issues: two armies in a culture war facing each other across the trenches. The bitterness of these divisions was exacerbated because the two men who occupied the White House -- Clinton and Bush, both born in 1946, the first year of the Baby Boom, and both graduating in the high school class of 1964, which had the highest SAT scores since the test was first administered -- happen to have personal characteristics that those on the other side of the cultural divide absolutely loathed. Elections became less a matter of persuading movable voters in the center and more a matter of turning out the party faithful on Election Day -- or even before, thanks to the increasing trend toward absentee and early voting.
The 2006 election was at least somewhat different. Most glaringly different in a partisan sense: Democrats won a clear-cut victory, gaining majorities in both the Senate and the House, for the first time since 1992. (The Democrats' 2001-02 Senate majority was attained by a party switch rather than an election.) The Democratic capture of the Senate last year owed something to luck, as is often the case; Democrats won six of the seven closest races, and their candidates won in Montana and Virginia -- both long shots at the start of the year -- by a total of 12,891 votes. But parties have captured (or put themselves in position to capture) Senate majorities by winning most of the close races before -- Republicans in 1980; Democrats in 1986 and 2000.
In House races, Democrats won 52 percent of the popular vote, compared with Republicans' 46 percent -- a contrast to the Republicans' 50 percent-to-47 percent advantage in 2004 and their 51 percent-to-46 percent advantage in 2002. This shift was similar in magnitude to many others in American electoral history when one party or the other seemed to have a dominant majority. But coming as it did in a time of near-parity, it resulted in a decisive change in party control. House Democrats' popular vote ratio in 2006 was very similar to the House Republicans' 52 percent-to-45 percent popular vote edge in 1994 -- the last year that either party got as much as 52 percent of the House vote.
Meanwhile, no presidential candidate has won as much as 52 percent of the popular vote since George H.W. Bush won 53 percent in 1988. The Democrats' 233-202 House majority after the 2006 election was nearly identical to the Republicans' 230-205 majority after the 1994 contest. (The majority grew to 235-200 after party switches and special-election victories later in that Congress; all numbers here count independent members as belonging to the party for which they voted to organize the House.) The Democrats' majority in the 110th Congress is also almost identical to the Republicans' 232-203 majority during most of the preceding Congress.
The contours of partisan support have not shifted greatly. Exit polls suggest that the Republicans' backing fell by similar percentages among just about every demographic group except those that have been mostly solidly moored to their party. The GOP's percentages fell more sharply among independents than among Democrats and Republicans, as one might expect, given the stronger partisan ties of the latter.
From 2002 to 2006, there was little difference in the parties' support among the elderly, many of whom have developed fixed preferences over the years, or among blacks, who have been voting overwhelmingly Democratic since 1964. Similarly, there was little change among demographic groups with large percentages of blacks -- including voters with incomes under $15,000 and those who have not graduated from high school. In 2006 the Democrats held 92 percent of 2004 Kerry voters; the Republicans held a lower percentage, 83 percent, of 2004 Bush voters.
One of the triumphs of the 2004 Bush campaign was the registration and voter-turnout effort that increased the president's popular vote tally 23 percent from 2000 (Kerry's popular vote was 16 percent higher than Gore's in 2000). But looking at the 2006 figures, one gets the feeling that many of the new voters who came out for Bush in 2004 voted for Democratic members of Congress in 2006. Unfortunately, the exit poll did not identify those who voted for the first time in 2004.
Looking at the 2006 results in specific districts, one finds Democrats beating Republicans in districts that Bush carried by large ratios, as much as 62 percent, in 2004. Some Republican incumbents had specific problems, but these results also suggest that when Democrats seriously contested such districts, many voters were much more willing to cross party lines than they had been in the five elections between 1996 and 2004.
A couple of other demographic points are useful. The AFL-CIO and other unions again conducted a major voter-turnout drive in 2006, and that effort seems to have paid off. Fully 23 percent of 2006 voters said they were either union members or part of a household in which someone was a union member, and 63 percent of them voted Democratic. This is a startlingly high number, because only 8 percent of private-sector workers (and 36 percent of the many fewer public-sector workers) are union members. The unions seem to have leveraged a rather small movement into a much stronger political force, one to whom Democratic politicians owe very much indeed.
The GOP continues to owe a debt to white evangelical and born-again Protestants, who despite some grousing by leaders turned out strongly enough to form 24 percent of the electorate, and who voted 70 percent Republican. In contrast, people who said they never attend church services (15 percent of voters) voted 67 percent Democratic.
The 2006 election may turn out to be the beginning of a long period of Democratic dominance. Or it may not. The election was more a verdict on competence than on ideology, and it gave the Democrats an opportunity but, on most issues at least, not a mandate.
As the liberal columnist E.J. Dionne wrote, Democrats got their votes on loan. It was a negative verdict on the conduct of the military struggle in Iraq and on the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. It was a negative verdict on a Republican Congress that seemed casual about corruption and complacent about wasteful spending. It was a victory won after a campaign that was conducted largely in an idea-free zone. Republicans campaigned on pretty much the platform that Bush ran on in 2000 and 2004, though many of his promises had already been fulfilled, and others -- such as Social Security reform -- had been set aside as unachievable. Democrats campaigned pretty much as opponents of Bush, with a platform made up of planks that were minimalist (raise the minimum wage) or lacking in specifics in voters' minds (enact all the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, whatever they were).
The talented chairmen of the Democrats' House and Senate campaign committees, Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois and Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, came out with books just before and after the election (Emanuel's was co-authored by Clinton White House domestic chief Bruce Reed) that advocated innovative and attractive ideas for changes in public policy. But Emanuel and Schumer did not press these ideas on their candidates. Instead, they shrewdly recruited and financed candidates who were out of line with the majority of the Democratic caucuses but in line with their districts and states, and the campaign chiefs had the satisfaction of seeing many of them win on Election Night.
This was quite a different victory from the Republicans' win in 1994. Then, the GOP largely defeated those Democrats who had supported liberal policies (the 1993 tax increase; the Clinton health care plan) in districts where majorities were considerably more conservative than their representative's voting records. In 2006, in contrast, as political scientist David Brady has pointed out, Democrats tended to defeat Republicans generally, especially those with relatively moderate records in relatively liberal districts and those who had scandal problems.
The 1994 election was a clear indication that voters would not have re-elected Bill Clinton had he been on the ballot that year; and he won his re-election in 1996 by changing his course on issues (most notably by signing the 1996 welfare reform act) and by campaigning as a champion of consensus against the kind of "angry white men" who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. The 2006 election was a clear indication that voters would not have re-elected George W. Bush had he been on the ballot that year. But he wasn't, and he won't be in 2008. Republicans have the chance to nominate a presidential candidate who will perhaps be in a different place on issues and will be able to argue, persuasively or not, that he has the competence that last year's voters believed that Bush lacked.
Voters in 1994 knew they could elect a Republican Congress without getting an entirely Republican government; they would just get a check on, or a goad to force a change of course on, Clinton. Voters in 2006 knew they could elect a Democratic Congress without getting an entirely Democratic government; they would just get a check on, or a goad to force a change of course on, Bush.
In 1996, as it turned out, voters decided they didn't want an entirely Republican government (though the margin in House races was exceedingly close). In 2008, voters may or not decide they want an entirely Democratic government. And it seems that they will be faced with that question, given that most political experts, looking at the lineup of Senate and House seats likely to be seriously contested, expect the Democrats to hold their congressional majorities in 2008. So the presidential election of 2008 will probably raise the question, more so than the 2000 presidential election did (because Democrats then had high hopes, which they nearly achieved, of winning a majority in the House), of whether voters want to turn the whole government over to one party.
The Democratic majorities in the 110th Congress emerged with a mandate, arguably, to end U.S. military involvement in Iraq. But they did not, given Bush's decision to "surge" additional troops into the conflict, have the means to put that mandate into effect, at least not immediately. They had the additional problem that a larger percentage of the public -- 59 percent versus 51 percent in the 2006 exit poll -- believe that Republicans would make America safe from terrorism than would Democrats. The lingering reputation of the Democratic Party as weaker on protecting the nation and asserting U.S. interests -- a reputation that dates from 1972 and was quite a reversal from the Democrats' reputation for being stronger on defense and more assertive in foreign policy that prevailed from 1940 to the 1960s -- is a potential handicap for 2008, no matter how strong the party's position on Iraq was in the last half of 2006 and the first half of 2007.
As for domestic policy, here indeed is an open field. The issue is no longer, as it was from the 1920s to the 1980s, macroeconomic management. Voters in that era who remembered the Depression of the 1930s were ready, at the slightest sign of recession, to vote once again against Herbert Hoover's fecklessness and for Franklin Roosevelt's penchant for improvisational intervention. Voters who remembered the stagflation of the 1970s were ready, at the slightest sign of inflation and torpor, to vote against Jimmy Carter's dolorous insistence on sacrifice and for Ronald Reagan's optimistic faith that once the shackles were off, America's best economic times were ahead.
But almost none of today's voters remember the 1930s and fewer than half of them remember the 1970s. In the quarter-century since 1983, Americans have lived in a country that has enjoyed noninflationary economic growth 95 percent of the time. They have come to think of this as the norm. They give politicians, particularly Bush, no credit when the economy performs this way, and they complain querulously about the slightest irritations, such as gasoline prices that in real dollar terms are far lower than they were in the early 1980s.
Polls show that public opinion on the state of the economy is so highly correlated with party identification that one must conclude it is less an assessment of objective conditions and more a matter of supporting the home team. Republicans complained about the vibrant economy in Clinton's second term; Democrats complained about the vibrant economy in Bush's second term. Macroeconomic numbers no longer move political numbers.
What does divide the parties is the way they frame economic issues. The Democrats want to redress economic inequality. The Republicans want to stimulate economic activity. But the Democrats haven't advanced policies that would reduce inequality substantially, nor have they answered the objection that policies that do -- such as those adopted in Western Europe -- also tend to produce economic stagnation.
The Republicans, meanwhile, went into the 2006 elections with a record of not holding down spending as much as taxes. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, faced with the need to hold together a small Republican majority, used money as his glue. Appropriators and Transportation Committee Republicans poured money into their districts (and let committee Democrats do the same) with increasing liberality. The ultimate earmark was Transportation Committee Chairman Don Young's $230 million "bridge to nowhere," an earmark in the 2005 transportation bill for a bridge to connect Ketchikan, Alaska (pop. 7,410) with its airport on the island of Gravina (pop. 50).
At the same time, neither party has come to terms with the looming long-range problem of entitlements. The Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare programs are on a trajectory to eat up an ever-larger share of gross domestic product, to the point that in the lifetimes of many current members of Congress they will require far higher levels of taxation or borrowing to sustain them. Bush addressed Social Security in his 2000 and 2004 campaigns and tried to put it on Congress's agenda in 2005. He failed.
Young voters, the presumed beneficiaries of any change, seemed totally unmoved: Reagan and Clinton strengthened their parties among young voters, but Bush signally failed to do so. In response to his initiative, congressional Democrats were, almost to a member, prepared to entertain no changes. House Republicans were visibly reluctant to advance any proposal and gladly used the excuse of Hurricane Katrina to duck the issue in September 2005. Bush and members of Congress have come forward with arguably constructive approaches to changing health care finance. But in early 2007 none of those seemed ripe for passage.
In any event, the 2006 election was not a mandate for major domestic policy changes. It was an opportunity for congressional Democrats to demonstrate competence. The election may prove to be the harbinger of a long Democratic era. But it is scarcely a guarantee of one. And as the months go on, the struggle between Bush and the Democratic Congress -- or the agreement they may reach on some serious issues, such as education and immigration -- seem likely to be increasingly overshadowed by the competition between presidential candidates and, by some point in 2008, by the positions taken by the two parties' nominees.
The Open-Field Presidential Race
There was plenty of evidence by early 2007 that the 2008 presidential race was going to be starkly different from the races in 2004 or 2000. Partly, of course, because neither the president nor vice president was running. Voters were faced not with a choice between an incumbent and an alternative, but with a wide variety of alternatives. And initial polling suggested that voters were not as tightly moored to party labels as they were in recent years.
In 2004 polls matching Bush and Kerry, taken before Kerry clinched the Democratic nomination, the results changed little from week to week and month to month. The vast majority of voters were clearly on one side or the other, and both the Bush and Kerry campaigns concentrated on motivating and mobilizing their supporters to get to the polls on Election Day, or, better yet, to vote early.
Early polls on the 2008 contest were different. They showed the best-known potential candidates for both parties -- Hillary Rodham Clinton, Al Gore, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain -- running well above 50 percent against little-known candidates of the other party. Voters who had never considered crossing party lines in the 2000 and 2004 cycles were apparently ready to do so. No more trench warfare: We were now in an open field.
Within the parties, the rules seemed to change as well. Early 2007 polling showed remarkable symmetry on the two parties' nominations. Leading in most polls were two candidates who were in opposition to or in tension with their parties' bases on issues that were or have been of great importance to the base -- Giuliani (abortion and other cultural issues) and Clinton (the war in Iraq).
In second place in most polls were two candidates whose seeming lack of partisan edge was in contrast to the strong visceral feelings of both parties' bases -- McCain (who worked with Democrats on campaign finance regulation and other issues) and Barack Obama (whose keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention stressed what Democrats and Republicans have in common rather than what divides them).
In third place were two candidates whose views and partisan edge seemed very much in line with their parties' bases, but who had arrived at those positions only recently -- Mitt Romney (who changed his views on abortion and other issues) and John Edwards (who came out as a strong opponent of the Iraq war he had voted for).
Democratic voters seemed pretty pleased with their field of candidates and fairly confident that their party was headed to victory. Republican voters seem less pleased with their field and less confident of victory -- and two possible candidates with potentially wide followings, Gingrich and Fred Thompson, hovered over their field tantalizingly. But voters in both parties seemed willing to consider candidates who did not meet all of their litmus tests. And in spring 2007 many voters in both parties -- in national polls and in polls in such potentially pivotal states as Iowa and New Hampshire -- seemed to be moving from one candidate to another, with no firm commitment to any.
No candidate in either party seemed to be running as a clone of either of the two previous presidents, Clinton and Bush. Not even Hillary Rodham Clinton. She left behind the centrist tone of her husband's 1992 campaign and instead campaigned in line with the tone and substance of a party that has moved perceptibly to the left since he left the White House in January 2001.
Partly, this shift is simply because the issues are different: Reducing welfare and crime were the great public policy successes of the 1990s, for which the Clinton administration could take some credit. But Hillary Clinton, like most of her Democratic congressional colleagues, had moved away from the Clinton administration's staunch support of free-trade agreements and had not called for the kind of military interventions that Bill Clinton ordered in Bosnia and (without United Nations approval) in Kosovo.
The other Democratic contenders -- Edwards, Obama, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, former Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson -- all called for more or less immediate withdrawal from Iraq. In the 2004 cycle, all of the Democratic candidates except Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt denounced the Bush administration in vitriolic terms, and those two quickly fell by the wayside. No Democratic candidate in the 2008 cycle seemed to be taking such an approach. Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner and Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, who might have been expected to, decided not to run.
Among the Republicans, none was running as a clone of Bush. Sens. Bill Frist and George Allen had been expected to do so and had taken issue positions similar to Bush's (except, in Allen's case, on immigration). But Allen lost re-election to the Senate and Frist, shortly after returning to Nashville, announced that he would not run. All of the candidates actively running took positions at odds with Bush's on some issues, and some criticized his performance on Iraq and other matters. Giuliani, McCain, and Romney all disagreed with Bush on important issues. Tommy Thompson, though he served four years in the Bush Cabinet, talked more about his 14 years as governor of Wisconsin. Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, and Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado campaigned as believers in various forms of conservatism, with different emphases. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas campaigned as a libertarian, against government intervention at home and abroad.
All of this has made the 2008 presidential race different from any other recent presidential race. So does the fact that, although voters expressed a generic preference for a Democratic president over a Republican president, at the same time in many polls respondents preferred Giuliani and, less often, McCain over Hillary Clinton and Gore, the best-known Democrats -- and the ones most closely associated with the generally positively regarded Clinton administration. It does look like an open field.
One way to suggest how open is to advance three possible scenarios for the 2008 results, scenarios that are based on previous election results but are plausible extensions of trends apparent in early 2007. In each case, however, some differences exist between the historical example and the factors in the 2008 race.
The Blair Scenario. In the early 1990s, Britain's Conservative Party was regarded as nasty but competent. Then in September 1992 Britain was forced to exit from the European Rate Mechanism; interest rates and mortgage payments shot up, and the Conservatives' reputation for economic competence vanished. The Labor Party went ahead in the polls, to remain there until 2006, an impressive 14 years. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, New Labor, as he called it, won a sweeping victory in 1997. The House of Commons shifted from 343-273 Conservative to 419-165 Labor. Prime Minister Blair's party won a similarly sweeping victory in 2001 and won by a slightly reduced margin in 2005.
Today's Republicans, like the British Conservatives in the 1990s, have lost their reputation for competence. If things unfold here now as they did in Britain then, the result would be a 40-state presidential victory for the Democrats, a magnitude they have not achieved since 1964. It would also result in a considerably more Democratic Congress than at present, with Democrats winning seats previously regarded as utterly safe for Republicans -- results that seemed as inconceivable in America in 2006 as they did in Britain in 1992.
But the two situations are not exactly parallel. Labor won in Britain only after Tony Blair rebranded the party as New Labor, with a renunciation of socialism and an embrace of market economics. If the old Labor Party's leader, John Smith, had not died suddenly in 1994, to be succeeded by the 41-year-old Blair, Labor might well have won in 1997 but probably by a much smaller and less durable margin.
America's Democrats in early 2007 didn't seem to be rebranding themselves as New Democrats, as Bill Clinton did in 1992. Moreover, it's not clear that the Republican nominee in 2008 will have the reputation for incompetence that Bush did in 2006. Giuliani's strength came not only from his response to the September 11 attacks but also from his well-known success in cutting crime and welfare dependency by more than half in New York City. Other possible Republican nominees had records that supported their claims of competence, and they will have the opportunity in the 2008 campaign to demonstrate that quality.
The Ike Scenario. In 1952 the United States was mired in a deadly conflict in Korea -- a conflict that took 10 times as many lives as Iraq has and that President Truman could not end. There emerged a candidate with a record of making life-and-death decisions in war: Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike captured the Republican nomination from "Mr. Republican," Robert Taft, and then defeated a refreshing new face from Illinois, Adlai Stevenson, who had little military experience. At a time when Democrats had a big advantage in party identification, Eisenhower won the election solidly, and Republicans captured small majorities in both houses of Congress.
This scenario does not fit perfectly with the situation in 2008. None of the Republican candidates can claim experience anything like Eisenhower's. But Giuliani did command a uniformed force of 40,000 that reduced crime in New York City by 64 percent. McCain served in combat and has had a record of close attention to military affairs ever since. None of the leading Democrats has comparable experience. Clinton has been a conscientious member of the Armed Services Committee. Obama is, like Stevenson, a fresh face from Illinois. Edwards was a senator for six years and has been a candidate for president for more than five. Perhaps the closest to Ike is Richardson, who has conducted serious negotiations with the North Koreans and served as ambassador to the United Nations.
There is another difference. Eisenhower was the nominee of the opposition party and was critical of the policy of the president. Today's Republicans have mostly supported Bush on Iraq. Yet a straight-line extrapolation from some of the early 2007 polls produces a result that looks something like the Ike scenario -- that is, the election of a Republican president by a decisive margin, with Democrats holding narrow congressional majorities (or, as in 1952, narrowly losing them).
The Perot Scenario. In February 1992 a short billionaire from Texas told CNN's Larry King that he might run for president. Perot had enough money (he ultimately spent more than $60 million of his own money) and enough celebrity to make an independent candidacy plausible. What made Perot appealing to voters tired of stale, bitter division were his calls for reform and an end to partisan wrangling.
The short billionaire who is in a position to do something similar in 2008 is Michael Bloomberg, who spent $160 million getting elected mayor of New York City in 2001 and 2005. Bloomberg ranks 142nd on Forbes's list of the world's billionaires with a personal fortune of $5.5 billion, and he has demonstrated a willingness to spend unprecedented sums on campaigns. He can also argue, in a time of bitter partisanship, that he has a record of nonpartisan achievement. His job ratings from New Yorkers have been higher than Giuliani's were, and the Manhattan media elite, which appreciated Giuliani's success in cutting crime but was uncomfortable with his sharp challenges to conventional liberalism, find Bloomberg's less-confrontational style more congenial.
Of course, the two situations are somewhat different. For one thing, Bloomberg has no military experience or credibility. Perot's Texas twang enabled him to straddle cultural issues and to appeal to voters on both sides of the cultural divide. Bloomberg's Boston accent (he grew up outside the city) and self-assurance are perhaps not as broadly appealing. Bloomberg's chances as an independent would probably be highest if the Republicans nominated an unapologetic cultural conservative and the Democrats put forward a radical-sounding war opponent. But it's not clear that either party will do so.
In fact, in early 2007 it wasn't clear what either party, or any candidate or potential candidate, would do. What did seem fairly clear was that they were all running in an open field, with voters more liable than they had been to consider candidates different from those they supported in the past, and more ready to change their minds. Any of the above scenarios, or something like them, could conceivably happen -- or at least one could see how they could happen by making straight-line extrapolations from the political facts in early 2007. But not all of them can happen. We have moved from trench warfare to open-field politics, and we don't know what's ahead.
