Authors: Hedrick Smith
Subterranean changes were also taking place at the grass roots. In opinion polls, more voters were calling themselves Republicans than previously. In the heyday of Harry Truman, and even under Dwight Eisenhower, the Democratic party had been a clear majority, with fifteen to twenty percent greater support among voters than Republicans had. After Reagan’s 1980 victory, the Democratic advantage fell below ten percent in some polls. A temporary postelection surge is normal for the party that wins the presidency, but the Republican bulge persisted into mid-1981, suggesting that the long-predicted sea change among voters might be taking place. But with the deep recession of 1982–83, voter allegiances shifted back and the Democrats regained their traditional advantage.
Reagan’s 1984 landslide revived the Republican dream. “We’re on the threshold of a golden era in Republican politics,” Senator Paul Laxalt, the party’s general chairman, boasted. “We’ve got Ronald Reagan and the economy, plus a solid Sunbelt base, while the traditional coalitions in the Northeast are crumbling.”
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Even more than in 1980, the statistics behind Reagan’s 1984 victory showed a partisan shift among voters. The most striking evidence came in a mid-November 1984 poll for the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, conducted by Robert Teeter of Market Opinion Research. Teeter, a highly respected pollster, found that for the first time in half a century, Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters actually outnumbered Democrats and Democrat-leaning
independents by forty-seven to forty-one percent. Teeter cautioned that the Republican numbers would undoubtedly soften in the coming months. But he asserted that “there is no question that we are undergoing party realignment.”
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Other polls (Gallup,
The New York Times
/CBS News) showed the Democrats still ahead, but by only three or four percentage points—almost dead even. Democratic strength among blue-collar voters had fallen dramatically since 1980.
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Republican leaders were ecstatic about their strength among young voters, contending that allegiance won early in life could help cement a long-term realignment.
In short, even if the Republicans were not yet a majority party, there was ample evidence of dealignment—the loss of majority status by the Democrats. The two parties had become competitive, neck and neck. That in itself was a watershed.
But the Republicans could not turn this opportunity into victories up and down the ticket. A few exuberant Republican strategists called Reagan’s 1984 victory a “consolidating election” on a par with Democratic gains in 1934 and 1936, which nailed down Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. But the analogy was false. Down the ballot, Republicans were still not doing well. Even with Reagan’s 1984 landslide, the party was slightly weaker at the state and local levels than it had been with Eisenhower and Nixon. It still controlled the Senate, but elsewhere it lacked a springboard to convert Reagan’s victory into majority control of government. His reelection brought only 182 Republican seats in the House (compared to 201 under Eisenhower in 1956 and 192 under Nixon in 1972). Similarly, in 1984, Republicans held only sixteen governorships, compared to nineteen in the Eisenhower and Nixon reelection years, and only about forty percent of the state legislative seats across the nation.
“These are not the numbers of a party achieving grass-roots realignment,” Republican analyst Kevin Phillips candidly observed.
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The Democratic rebound in the 1986 Senate elections bore out Phillips’s analysis and dealt a hard blow to Republican dreams of realignment. In 1986, Republicans scored a net gain of eight governorships, heartened especially to win in Texas, Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina. But they also lost a net of eight Senate seats—and control of the Senate.
What made the Republican setbacks in 1986 so terribly painful was that President Reagan—the party’s great vote getter—had gone all out. Reagan traveled 24,800 miles to twenty-two states and raised $33 million for Republican candidates.
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In the homestretch, the “Gipper”
pleaded for voters to help him by keeping the Senate in Republican hands. He did personal appearances for sixteen Republican Senate candidates, but only four of them won. Polls showed that jitters about feeble economic growth, the skyrocketing trade deficit, and Japanese competition hurt Republicans. Bread-and-butter issues pushed the Republican dream of realignment further away, like a receding mirage.
“This year will go down in history as the year of the lost cause, when the Republicans snatched defeat from the jaws of victory,” complained L. Brent Bozell, president of the National Conservative Political Action Committee. “The Republicans lost a golden opportunity in the sense that they could have solidified the Reagan Revolution.”
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The Republican setback in 1986 may signal that their drive for realignment has crested. Obviously, pocketbook appeal to voters is crucial to long-term Republican strategy. In many opinion polls in the 1980s, Republicans have won better marks than the Democrats had for managing most aspects of the economy. Low inflation and five years of growth under Reagan have given the Republican party a good name. But the economic slowdown of the past two years, and the stock market plunge of October 1987 blurred the lustre of those GOP advantages.
To become the majority party, the Republicans must put down the image that they are the protectors of class and privilege. Reagan’s tax-reform proposal, dropping six million poor off the rolls and offering everyone lower rates, was geared for populist impact. But Democrat Dan Rostenkowski shrewdly neutralized the Republican appeal by helping pass tax reform. Reagan’s record leaves Republicans vulnerable to the charge that Reagan built his electoral victories on support from the economic “haves” over opposition from the “have-nots.” Compared with Eisenhower, for example, pro-Reagan voting was notably more class based. Ike had majority support from all economic groups, but Reagan lost at the low end of the economic scale.
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The economic fate of the middle class is pivotal to Republicans.
Second, Republicans now carry the onus of the “in party,” which undercuts the popular appeal that Reagan and the conservative movement built by playing heavily on anti-Washington populism. Reagan vilified the Democrats as the political establishment, and alienation from establishment politics gained partisans for the Republican cause. But in the 1980s, the Reaganites became the political establishment. Investigations of influence peddling targeted such Reagan intimates as Michael Deaver and Lyn Nofziger. Also, the fresh political shock troops who mounted the 1980 Reagan campaign (Ed Rollins, Roger Stone, Lee Atwater, and Charlie Black) became $450,ooo-a-year political
campaign consultants—the kind of affluence that robs realignment of recruits and dynamism.
There have been other signs that the original Reaganite thrust has lost élan. In 1981–82, for example, the Republican party arm that focuses on House races raised nearly $58 million. Donors were pouring money into the dream of realignment and taking over Congress. But by the 1985–86 election cycle, after twice failing to generate a majority, this same Republican committee raised just $39.8 million. Obviously some donors had lost heart. In mid-July 1987, the Republican National Committee had to fire forty of its 275 staff members, because of alienation among small donors over the Iran scandal.
Third, even if Republicans win the White House again in 1988, they have no real chance of getting control of Congress, especially without Reagan as a charismatic leader to head their ticket. Many Democrats discounted Reagan’s 1984 landslide; they saw it as a personal victory, not a party victory, arguing that the pro-Reagan surge of Republicanism was bound to fade after his departure. Indeed, the bad publicity of the Iran-
contra
affair in 1987 caused a drift away from the Republican party and enabled Democrats to regain a popular advantage of several percentage points over Republicans. Looking ahead, the youth vote, a source of special Republican pride in 1984, is far from settled in its loyalties. Young voters are typically changeable. In the 1986 elections, polls showed, congressional Democrats broke even with the Republicans among under-thirty voters.
Finally, to lead the Republican party to majority status, the new standard bearer must manage the centrifugal elements in the Republican coalition: southern rednecks and country-club Republicans; supply-side tax cutters (Jack Kemp) and deficit-minded budget balancers (Bob Dole); the born-again fundamentalist followers of television evangelist Pat Robertson and high-tech suburban yuppies; corporate executives and farmers from small-town mid-America. Protectionist issues have already sown rifts in the business community. Reagan’s new accommodation with Moscow and his agreement with Gorbachev to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear forces sharply split Republicans loyal to Vice President Bush and the ideological anti-Communist wing led by Senator Jesse Helms. Reagan juggled all these constituencies with personal chemistry, for example, placating the New Right with fiery rhetoric (though little action) on its social agenda. But the battle to succeed Reagan inevitably set Republican factions at odds; over the long run, the Reagan coalition is already splintering.
Indeed, some Republican strategists such as Kevin Phillips suggest that the recent Republican realignment began not with Reagan, but
with Nixon in 1968, and it has already run its most dynamic twenty years. In Phillips’s view, President Reagan is the end—rather than the start—of the conservative Republican trend. “Reagan may be remembered less as the engine of late 20th Century U.S. conservatism than as its jaunty, if somewhat wayward, caboose,” Phillips wrote after the 1986 elections.
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Following the old cyclical swings of the pendulum, Phillips’s theory points to another national partisan watershed in the 1990s—away from the Republicans.
The Democratic Lock on the House
While the long-term Republican future is uncertain, what is well established is the unbreakable Democratic lock on the House of Representatives for thirty-four straight years.
The Senate has become the swing element in our government, going under Republican control in 1980 and switching to the Democrats in 1986.
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The Senate shifts reflect changing voter views, rising with the Reagan tide and ebbing with that tide.
But the House has become insulated from national partisan trends. It has become the Gibraltar of the Democratic party. For seven successive presidencies—starting with Eisenhower in 1954 and then under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan—the Democrats have had a majority in the House. That is by far the longest span of control in American politics since the Civil War.
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Even New Deal Democratic control of the House, from 1932 to 1946, does not match the current Democratic hegemony.
In part, this reflects the fact that vast numbers of American voters no longer conceive of their government as a unit or vote a straight ticket for president, vice president, Senate, and member of Congress. People used to vote that way. In the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the custom was to vote a straight ticket. Back then, there were only five or ten congressional districts where a majority of voters selected a president from one party and a congressman from the opposite party.
By contrast, in 1984, the year of Reagan’s crushing landslide, there were partisan splits in forty-four percent of the districts. In 192 of 435 congressional districts, voters chose one party for the White House and the opposite party for the House. Many people think of this as common in the South; but this is no longer a regional phenomenon; the Rocky Mountain West has many split districts as well. In fact, ticket splitting happens nationwide. The result, after Reagan’s smashing reelection,
was that he had only 182 Republicans in the House to carry out his program—thirty-six votes shy of the needed majority.
Walter Dean Burnham, a political scientist from MIT, pointed out that the House Republican strength after the 1984 election was the lowest proportion of party supporters ever recorded for a victorious presidential candidate in the fifty presidential elections since 1789.
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Obviously, this outcome was a blow to Reagan’s hopes for a dynamic second term; it was also a blow to a cohesive and durable governmental policy. And unless some dramatic changes are made in our election system, any Republican president will probably face a similar disadvantage.
The causes of the Democratic lock on the House are imbedded both in political habit and in how the modern power game is played. First, inertia is a powerful force for continued Democratic control. For most of the thirty-four-year Democratic reign in the House, Democrats were the majority party, demonstrating strength at all levels. They won the presidency three times, held the Senate twenty-six years, dominated state governorships and legislatures. Second, Republicans, perceived by voters and political aspirants as the minority party, had difficulty recruiting strong candidates and financing campaigns. The Republicans’ losing record became a vicious cycle, until the 1980s’ surge.
Some Republican officials contend the electoral system is stacked against them. They blame gerrymandering of congressional districts by state legislatures under control of Democrats and by Democratic state governors. In 1986, Republican officials charged that their party was deprived of twenty-three rightful seats in the House, by the way congressional district lines were drawn. As evidence, they asserted that the Republican share of House seats does not match the party’s share of the popular vote. In 1984, for example, Republican candidates won forty-seven percent of the popular vote for the House, but only forty-two percent of the seats.
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In the redrawing of congressional district lines in 1981 (after the 1980 census), Republicans were probably gypped out of five seats in California, and perhaps of a couple of seats elsewhere in the country, through crafty Democratic remapping of districts. But several nonpartisan studies assert that nationwide, political gerrymandering has had minimal effect on the overall balance of power in the House. In Indiana and Pennsylvania, for example, the Republican tilt in state government in 1981 gave Republicans an advantage in drawing district lines, to balance off the Democratic tilt in California.