Authors: Hedrick Smith
What is not well understood is that our electoral system of single-winner
districts automatically results in a “seat bonus” for the winning party: a larger percentage of seats than votes. Members of Congress represent districts, not numbers of people. At the extreme, imagine the Democrats having a slim fifty-one percent majority in every single district: They would win one hundred percent of the seats with fifty-one percent of the votes. At lower percentages, the winner’s bonus is smaller but it still exists. Republicans had a seat bonus when they had a House majority back in the early 1950s.
That inevitable result of our election system is exacerbated by the fact that, on average, the Republicans turn out more votes per winner than Democrats do. Congressional districts must all have roughly the same population. But Democrats win more urban districts—where turnout is relatively low among poor, minority voters; whereas Republicans win more suburban districts—where turnout is much higher among well educated, well-heeled voters. So on average, Republicans get more votes per House seat, regardless of who draws the lines.
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Above all, the Democratic lock on the House reflects the enormous advantages of incumbency. For what is striking about recent election returns is the public’s tendency to reelect members of Congress. Throughout the postwar period, an average of ninety-one percent of the House incumbents who sought reelection were reelected. (In the more volatile Senate, it was only seventy-five percent.) Reelection of incumbents reached an all-time high in 1986 when 394 House members sought reelection; only nine lost. The other 97.7 percent were reelected—and mostly by overwhelming numbers; eighty-five percent of them had no serious contest. The overall trend of lopsided incumbent victories has been increasing.
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Most House incumbents are so well entrenched that they scare off serious opposition long before the campaign begins. Marcia Hale, former political director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, reckoned that at least 190 Democrats and 120 Republicans had safe seats going into the 1986 election. Indeed, Linda DiVall, a pollster who used to work for the National Republican Congressional Committee, estimated that in 225 districts, no Republican has won since Watergate—a pattern that guarantees Democratic control of the House.
The key lies in the enormous resources available to incumbents and their ability to localize elections, insulating themselves from national trends. The Democrats made big gains in 1974, many in suburban, normally pro-Republican districts, and then protected them shrewdly. Their cushion rests heavily on the skills of new-breed Democrats at the
techniques of the constant campaign: constituent case work by their staff, campaigning at home practically every weekend, mass newsletters and sophisticated computerized direct mailings financed by taxpayers, and high visibility through radio and TV satellite feeds. In money terms, political strategists reckon the “incumbency advantage” to be worth the equivalent of half a million dollars in campaign contributions to each incumbent.
Name recognition is the first requirement for any political candidate. Most incumbents have it, and most House challengers are virtually invisible unless they get heavy TV exposure. The old-breed technique of knocking on doors is too slow and inefficient to fill that need of becoming known. The challenger desperately needs media time, and unless he is extremely adept at generating news coverage, that means lots of expensive television ads. Such media advertising has driven up the costs of congressional campaigns astronomically: from $99 million in 1976 to $450 million a decade later.
In the crucial game of fund-raising, most challengers are licked before the race begins. Political money has been a prime protector of incumbent House Democrats—Republicans, too, but mainly Democrats since they are a solid majority of the incumbents. A study by Common Cause, the public-affairs lobby, showed that in the 1986 election, House incumbents on average raised more than three times as much money as their challengers, and that in the critical two-week homestretch of the campaign their cash on hand was twenty times that of their challengers.
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That meant the incumbents were sitting pretty to finance their final media blitzes and lock up their seats for two more years.
The greatest incumbent advantage in the money game is among Washington-based PACs, whose contributions to congressional races tripled from 1976 to 1986.
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The continuous floating fund-raising game in Washington and the symbiotic relationships between members of Congress on one side and lobbyists and PAC managers on the other side all play to the advantage of incumbents. “PAC Money is and will remain the easiest money for most incumbents to raise,” Michael Malbin of American Enterprise Institute asserts. “Tens of thousands of dollars typically change hands in any of the hundreds of Washington fund raisers held every year.… The members [of Congress], clearly on top of the situation, use the events to raise $250 or so in quasi-tribute fees from people who might not otherwise support them.”
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Unless an incumbent has deeply angered some group of PACs, or unless a member retires and both parties have an equal scramble over an open seat,
the incumbency bias of PACs leaves all but a handful of challengers out in the cold. This is more true in the House than in the Senate. In 1986, for instance, House incumbents received six times as much PAC money as did their challengers.
In short, the cards are stacked in favor of continuing Democratic control of the House—unless changes are made in the current system of campaign financing or challengers are given some new means of access to television exposure. Democratic control of the House obviously spells divided government for every Republican president. Moreover, the existence of a permanent majority and a permanent minority in the House has a corrosive effect on the two-party system and on the process of governing. Permanent minority status is not only demoralizing to House Republicans but drives them toward the negative tactics of obstructionism, because a permanent minority scores political points with the voters by loud criticism and by playing the spoiler role, rather than by developing responsible, constructive proposals, which it cannot pass. And on the other side, being a permanent majority can make Democrats fat, satisfied, and so cocky that they do not feel pressure to work together.
“Large, stable majorities tend to become divided and self-centered,” observed political scientist Thomas Mann. “They take for granted the rewards of majority status and lose sight of the importance of the party’s collective performance.”
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Both tendencies reinforce the ills of divided government.
Ticket Splitters: New-Collar Voters
With Reagan’s great personal appeal, the built-in advantages of incumbency would have been seriously tested if voters were still casting party-line ballots. But ticket splitting obviously helped protect House Democrats. Most political observers attribute ticket splitting to the increased independence of voters, rather than to any conscious decision by voters to keep government divided.
But some voters are quite deliberate about ticket splitting. In 1984, I heard Democratic candidates in heavily pro-Reagan districts from Texas to Pennsylvania openly appeal to voters to keep government divided, to elect Democrats to the House to “keep a check on Reagan.” In two touch-and-go districts outside Philadelphia, for example, Democrats Bob Edgar and Peter Kostmayer adopted this tactic as a matter of survival, for they took President Reagan’s reelection as a foregone conclusion. They also saw evidence in opinion polls that people liked
Reagan as a national leader but did not agree with all his policies and did not want to give him free rein. Edgar and Kostmayer argued that ticket splitting gave voters the best of both worlds: Reagan as chief of state with a partially Democratic Congress to restrain him. With that pitch, Edgar, Kostmayer, and slews of other Democrats stayed in office in 1984.
Pollster Lou Harris told me that his surveys found this motivation for ticket splitting as far back as the mid-1970s. Harris felt that voters had grown so wary of both parties that they were hedging their bets. “People don’t want any one party to be dominant,” Harris told me. “We’ve asked people, ‘Would you rather have divided government or one party in control?’ And they will say, sixty to thirty-five percent, they prefer divided government. They just don’t want one party of scoundrels in there. It’s born of the cynicism toward politicians. We first got that under Ford in ’75–’76. The more Congress stands up to the president, the more they like it. People believe in checks and balances.”
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Other polltakers will not go that far. They attribute divided government to the rise of independent voters who go by the code: “I vote for the candidate, not the party.” That embodies the erosion of party allegiance at the grass roots. In 1952 at Eisenhower’s reelection, a regular biennial nationwide survey found that only twenty-five percent of the electorate were independents, the rest identifying with one of the two big parties. In 1986, independents had risen to thirty-five percent.
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Except for the Republican surges around Reagan’s two elections, independents have outnumbered Republicans for a decade or more.
The rising mass of independent voters reflects social and economic changes in American life. For growing millions of suburbanites, well educated and well off, are issue oriented and proudly independent. Yuppies especially—young upwardly mobile professionals—do not take political cues from parties. Indeed, as life-styles and values change, even workers of the new high-tech service economy have moved away from the big-city politics of their blue-collar parents. Some sociologists have coined a term for them:
new collars
. They are neither industrial blue-collar workers nor white-collar workers, but the service technicians of the computer age. By some reckonings, they are fifteen percent of the adult population, roughly twenty-five million strong.
“You can have a picture in your mind of a guy in his early thirties—running shoes, work pants, a Miami Dolphins T-shirt, a handlebar mustache, and a baseball cap,” explained Ralph Whitehead, Jr., a
University of Massachusetts political scientist. “Young enough to be influenced by baby boom culture and so roughly 45 years old or younger. A family income in the range of $20,000 to $40,000. And a job in that expanding range that stands between traditional blue collar work and a career in upper-middle management or the professions.… Blue collars base their identity on their work, if they’ve got it. New collars tend to base it on their leisure.”
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Most new collars refuse to be pigeonholed as Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Along with yuppies, they are among the biggest political switch hitters, who produce crazy-quilt results in elections—at the state as well as at the national level. In 1986, for example, Florida and Alabama elected Democratic senators and Republican governors. As MIT political scientist Walter Dean Burnham noted, Governor Mario Cuomo of New York easily won reelection, but his Democrats failed to gain even one seat in the Republican-controlled state senate. In Illinois, Republican James Thompson won an unprecedented fourth term as governor while the Democrats held control of the state senate.
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This free-floating independence of voters has encouraged the individualism of new breed politicians. Since the party brand name lacks its old punch, some candidates run away from their party when it suits them. They sell themselves, not their party. In many marginal districts, I have found plenty of candidates in both parties playing down party labels in order to woo voters across party lines. On billboards, bumper stickers, and lapel buttons, they often drop their party identity entirely, implying nonpartisanship. In his excellent book,
The Rise of Political Consultants
, Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, quoted the play on words of a campaign ad for Republican Senator John Heinz: “If you think Pennsylvania needs an
independent
senator, elect John Heinz.”
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Moreover, the new cadre of campaign consultants have accelerated the antiparty trend. The expertise for hire of strategists, pollsters, media advisers, and direct-mail and phone-bank specialists has made politicians less dependent on the party apparatus than they were in the old days. Most consultants usually work for candidates from only one party, but many of these political mercenaries have little commitment to party building or to building policy coalitions. A few firms work both sides of the street. In 1986, for example, the brassy, highly touted consulting firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly ran into bad publicity when the press learned that Democrat John Kelly and Republican members of the firm were helping raise money for the opponents
in the Louisiana Senate race, Democrat John Breaux and Republican Henson Moore. But the main impact of consultants, moving in on the turf of party bosses and other party officials to run campaigns, is to help political newcomers bypass both the party apparatus and the party hierarchy, by helping them build their own individual organizations.
“We have enabled people to come into a party or call themselves independent Democrats or Republicans and run for office without having to pay the dues of being a party member in a feudal way,” Republican media consultant Bob Goodman boasted to Larry Sabato. “Meaning kiss the ass of certain people and maybe down the line they’ll give you a shot at public office.”
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In turn, candidates have sometimes become creatures of their campaign Svengalis. In
The Candidate
, a movie in which Robert Redford plays a media-manufactured candidate for the U.S. Senate, Redford turns to his campaign manager the morning after his victory and asks rather pathetically, “What do I do now?”
If that lampoon was an exaggeration, real politicians have their own bitter assessments of the harvest of the current campaign system. Warren Rudman, an able and outspoken Senate Republican, offered this tart judgment: “One third of the members of the U.S. Senate know why they’re here, know what they want to do, and know how to do it. The second third know why they’re here, know what they want to do, but don’t know how to do it. And that last third—I’m not sure why they’re here.”
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