On the 2002 Election.
The Landslide?
By Alexander Bloom
Professor of History
There was a landslide in American politics this month, but it wasn't on Tuesday, Nov. 5. The landslide has been the heap of journalistic piling on about what the election results mean and what they demonstrate. The Bush administration has taken a "no gloat" stance in its response to Tuesday. It may not merely be modesty. They may be the only ones realistically evaluating the results.
There is no question that the GOP won on Tuesday and won big. Not big because of the numbers, but big because of the implications of the outcome. The Republicans now control the Senate, the only real important change in Tuesday's results. This eliminates the one roadblock to pushing through their decidedly partisan agenda. But, as of now, the net shift in the Senate is two seats (The Louisiana race, likely to go Democratic, is heading for a run-off. South Dakota, with the Democrat just a bit ahead, is heading for a recount). It is a measure of how evenly divided is the American electorate that this small shift proved decisive. And it is certainly decisive in terms of policy potential. It is not, however, a Republican mandate. (The gain of only four seats by the GOP in the House and the gain of three governorships by the Democrats suggest this as well.)
Much has been made of Bush bucking the "historic trends of off-year elections, when the President's party typically loses seats. In 1932, the Democrats swept to the White House and added 90 seats in the House and 13 seats in the Senate. In 1934, they won another nine seats in the House and nine more in the Senate. This is an example of bucking the historic trends. The argument about the "typical" losses in off-year elections is predicated on the notion that the winning presidential candidate has "coattails" that carry some of his party to victory in districts or states that might otherwise have gone to the other party. Two years later, some of those seats swing back.
But 2000 was not "typical." It is well known that Al Gore won the popular vote, losing the election because of George W. Bush's victory in the Electoral College, whatever one thinks of the justifications for awarding Florida's electoral votes to Bush. But every other election in the United States is decided by popular vote. If there were any coattails in 2000, they were Al Gore's. In that election, Democrats picked up four seats in the Senate and two in the House. Had Gore been elected president and had Republicans picked up those two Senate and four House seats last Tuesday, this would have been a "typical" off-year result. But as 2000 was the most atypical election in American history, 2002 must be evaluated in its own very unique terms.
The current situation is not nearly as dire for Democrats as the pundits suggest. In each house, the Republican majority is razor-thin. Democrats gained in the governorships and lost several crucial Senate seats by handfuls of votes. But then the Republicans also lost Senate seats in 2000 by the thinnest of majorities. Mel Carnahan beat John Ashcroft in 2000 by 49,000 votes; Jean Carnahan lost to Jim Talent by 22,500 votes. At this writing, several races around the country remain too close to call. And this after the 2000 election was branded the closest in history. The country remains as evenly divided as possible.
This is not to say there were not serious weaknesses in Democratic Party strategy, as well as extremely smart politicking by Bush and Karl Rove. The Democrats appeared leaderless, gutless, and unlucky. One can never know whether Paul Wellstone would have beaten Norm Coleman, but it is clear that Wellstone's vote against sanctioning war in Iraq a vote he thought might cost him the election actually moved him into a solid lead over Coleman in the polls.
The Democrats need to find a voice, a clear position, and face the possibility that a majority--albeit a very slim one--might vote for the Republicans. But at least they will have the satisfaction of standing for something, rather than offering themselves as a milder version of Bush Republicanism. In 1936, after the loss to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and the defeats in the off-year elections of 1934, Republicans tried to run a Roosevelt-lite candidate for President, Kansas governor Alf Landon. He went down to perhaps the biggest defeat in American presidential history, and the Democrats increased their Congressional majorities yet again. Republicans did not recapture the White House for another sixteen years.
This is the historic lesson the Democrats should learn. They were not buried under a landslide on Tuesday, but lost a few seats and with those losses went the control of the Senate. Offering little real choice against the party of a popular President, it is surprising they did not lose more. If history tells us anything it is that providing a serious alternative to the incumbent and his policies is the only reason the people will choose to turn back to a party out of power.