Those who know me from the last Presidential election cycle (and admittedly, few on this website do) know that I am no blind cheerleader for a party even when I support it. I was nearly unrelenting in my conviction in the 2004 cycle, from as early as late 2003, that George W. Bush was going to be reelected. Several macro-factors were in his favor which spoke beyond the day to day polls and ups and downs of the campaign.
I believe that similiarly, to understand why the Democrats will retake Congress this year--at least the House, you have to look at the long term nature of American politics and how that balance has been upset in recent years.
Political scientists who have studied public opinion have found remarkable stability and consistency in our aggregate attitudes and stances on political issues over the decades. Others have written about a "vital center" in American politics which has protected us from the wild swings of other countries. The notion of the vital center has often been held up, even implies instrinsically, a normative good. Indeed, compared to nations where explicit class privilege and quasi-fascism contends with explicit socialism, the traditional left and right in this country have generally been held in check. But beyond a normative good it is also a positive fact of American public opinion-- one which as not changed in recent years.
Through the course of our history, only severe economic crises have even the potential to produce sharp ideological reversals in our national psyche. Even Ronald Reagan, who piggybacked on the stagflation crisis himself, knew when not to go too far, and that's half of the reason he was so successful. The big political upheavals we have had especially since World War II, have been deceptive in hiding the more fundamental stasis in American politics.
In the 1990s public opinion had found such a stasis. Most Americans had rejected the far left and far right politics which had emerged in the 1960s. With foreign policy temporarily out of the picture, politicians and the public carefully calibrated a center hemmed in with a Democratic President guarding the door to the right and a Republican House guarding the door to the left. Any attempt to upset this balance was defeated at the polls; each of the first four post-Cold War elections from 1992 to 1998 can be interpreted as a victory for centrism.
The conventional wisdom today is that the 1990s were a quaint time which has long been left behind, and the careful stasis created then has been radically upset by experience. Conventional wisdom now posits that Barry Goldwater's 1964 was a prerequisite for a conservative movement that will bring radical change to American politics. I disagree. The politics of the 1990s, neither far right nor left, represented the fundamental character of American public opinion. What happened in the 2000s was a set of accidental and temporary one-time factors that upset the balance at the polls.
The 2000 election
The most significant irony of this election is that it produced a radical result from an electorate seemingly determined to support the status quo. The radical result was unified Republican control of government for the first time since the 1930 election for a Republican party which in retrospect can be seen as dominated by conservatives. The electorate's verdict--a closely divided Republican House, a 50-50 Senate, and a 500,000-vote Gore majority/3 million vote left-of-center majority, with over 100 million votes going to two candidates which both ran on moderate platforms, was about as pro-status quo and centrism as any election returns could possibly be.
Two temporary classes of factors created this outcome.
The first was procedural--the fact that Gore's voters were inconveniently distributed in the Electoral College, the candidacy of Ralph Nader, and of course butterfly ballots, voter list purges, and whole the election controversy in Florida.
The second was environmental--in the 1990s, the conservative movement, with decades of work behind them and heavy infrastructural funding from the Scaife, Olin, and other foundations, was continually percolating itself into the popular vision with no real opposition. Of course, they had been doing this for decades, but by the turn of the century with networks like Fox News starting to break out and complimenting the talk radio networks and think tanks (yes back then they even dominated the Internet; Free Republic was a popular site before DU or DailyKos were ever even conceived of) finally started to reach a broad enough audience to significantly influence elections. That factor was critical in pushing Bush over the top.
The 2002 election
By 2002 George W. Bush was starting to show himself as a conservative Republican and not particularly bipartisan when the Democrats didn't agree with him. Despite the defection of Jim Jeffords, the balance of the 1990s had been upset--the country was moving further to the right than it would have tolerated in the 90s. To add to this the economy was going into the tanker, although the true bottom in jobs and income was not to be until 2003. Ordinarily this would translate into heavy Democratic gains in Congressional elections. However, three temporary factors combined to push in the other direction.
The first was obviously 9/11 and the high approval ratings Bush had garnered from them. While they'd fallen considerably, Bush still had a 63 percent approval rating from Gallup on the eve of the election, tying Ronald Reagan in 1986 for second-highest of a President facing an off-year election (Clinton '98 was the highest) and he campaigned aggressively for GOP candidates. This factor would push big Democratic gains to small Democratic gains.
The second factor was the same environmental factors which existed in 2000; in 2002 they blossomed to their fullest, with Karl Rove working full gear with the Christian right to turn out their voters. I won't rehash what I wrote for 2000, except to say that the environmental factors in the media that narrowly pushed Bush over the top in 2000 was pushing even more heavily for Republicans in 2002. This factor would push small Democratic gains into a wash.
The third factor was redistricting. Gary Jacobson notes in his Politics of Congressional Elections that redistricting alone was sufficient to explain Republican gains in 2002. In the wake of the 2000 Census, the Republicans had unified control of state governments in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other states which were gerrymandered to maximize partisan advantage. The Democratic-controlled states, especially California, decided to maximize incumbent advantage instead. This factor pushes a wash into moderate Republican gains, which is what happened.
The 2004 election
By November 2004 the environmental conditions had improved for Democrats. While the economy was recovering, albeit slowly, redistricting would no longer be the issue that it was in 2002, and, in the heat of a controversial war and Presidential campaign, the media environment had begun to restore its equilibrium.
Starting in the summer of 2003 an aggressive left-of-center opposition began to rally around people like Howard Dean and MoveOn.org. The media environment did begin to right itself with pushback. The liberals might not have had an answer to Fox News, but for at least for Ann Coulter there was now a Michael Moore. For Bernie Goldberg there was now Kevin Phillips. IMO, it's important to understand that the readjusting of the dialogue disequilibrium that exploded in 2000-2003 was inevitable.
Furthermore, the 9/11 factor was fading. It was no longer as much an issue as it had been in 2002, with a further two years away from the event.
But most importantly, the nation had moved far to the right in just four years, especially with the Iraq war and other aspects of foreign policy. We were now governed by an unabashedly ideological conservative President and a unified, conservative and compliant Congress, which had embarked on an especially radical transformation of U.S. foreign policy. These factors pointed to big Democratic gains in 2004, by an electorate turned off at the radicalism of the Iraq war.
However, just as in 2002, a number of temporary factors prevented this from happening.
First of all, the factors listed above must be qualified. As it turned out, redistricting did turn out to be an issue after all when Tom Delay initiated mid-decade redistricting in Texas. Outside of Texas, on Election Day 2004, the Democrats actually picked up a net gain of two seats, despite the (admittedly weak) Bush coattails. Secondly, a disproportionate number of open Senate seats were in deeply red states, such as Oklahoma, Alaska, and the Deep South. This would turn big Democratic gains into still big, but smaller gains, especially in the Senate.
Secondly, the 9/11 factor was still significantly present, especially as George Bush was now at the top of the ticket, and many Americans still felt, I think, an understandable and respectable desire to repay him personally for his immediate response; the Republicans certainly played this factor up heavily at the convention, though much of this impact was admittedly compromised somewhat after Bush's poor debate performance. Still, I believe 9/11 was still decisive for a small percentage of voters (a large fraction of the ~10% of who listed `terrorism' on the CNN exit poll). This would turn somewhat big Democratic gains into moderate Democratic gains.
Thirdly, Bush's greatest weakness, Iraq, was also his greatest strength. If you are a sailor on a ship, and the captain goes in a path you strongly disagree with, putting the ship in grave danger, you may think it was a radical decision and a terrible mistake. But once the decision is made, you would paradoxically stand by that captain with twice the fervor and loyalty than if you had been sailing in clear waters--at least initially. It's the common sense knowledge that you stick by the leader in a crisis even of the leader's own making for self-preservation, and the very rational logic behind the "stay the course" slogan. I believe many voters felt that after 9/11 and Iraq, Bush had taken America down a very particular course and, though they felt unsure about it, didn't feel it was wise at that particular moment to have a vote of no confidence in the leader. It was this factor I think that wiped out the Democratic advantage in 2004 into a small Republican advantage.
Finally, there were specific campaign dynamics. Karl Rove's 72-hour turnout plan was simply more successful, especially in key states such as Florida, than the Democrats. But more important was the Democrats' choice of John Kerry as a weak candidate. Kerry, although his muted antiwar stance never satisfied the true party base that year, also failed to convince the electorate that he was a moderate candidate in the Clinton mold, due to his voting record in the Senate and his state of residence. This turned a small Republican advantage into a still small, but solid 2.5 point popular vote majority.
2006
The turbulent upheavals of the past six years have convinced many that a great deal has changed about the basic character of the American electorate in terms of where it stands on a left-right position; it is said that America has moved right. My argument isn't to refute that because the 2004 map looked so much like the 2000 map; as my argument makes clear, I think that the dynamics of the two races were very different, and the factors just happened to cancel out in such a way that the maps looked similar.
However, while the world has clearly changed a lot in the past six years, the basic character of the American electorate indeed has not changed. Level of religiosity, views on particular issues, etc. etc., when you look at the best academic surveys, have remained remarkably consistent for decades, and continued to do so in the most recent decade. This is, at the most basic level, the same electorate that we had in the 1990s. The remarkable string of three straight Republican victories in 2000, 2002, and 2004, are, as I have shown, a product of unique and unusual circumstances, which happened to line up in their favor in those years, but which in their basic nature were temporary, not fundamental. In 2006 we do not face the bulk of those circumstances; the ground games in 2006 will be once again different. Democrats do not have a Massachusetts liberal at the top of the ticket, and Republicans do not have a President with a 9/11 halo. We have put enough distance from the Iraq conflict to live with a change in Congress, which will have more impact on domestic policy anyways--an area where the President has been increasingly divisive and secretive. There is no significant Republican redistricting going on. The media environment has changed, even more so than in 2004, to represent more of a complete balance, (albeit unfortunately with more partisan hackery than we've seen since perhaps the days of yellow journalism).
The one thing that has not changed is that our government, in whatever area of policy, has moved its direction harder to the right today than it has been in any time in the living memory of any person alive today, (with the one exception of course of government spending): In foreign policy, social policy, Presidential power, economic policy balance between more and less well-off. The American people know this and feel uncomfortable with it; though their actions have enabled such a government to come into being, it was not for these reasons that they enabled it to do so.
1964 was an unusual year because of an unusual assassination and because the Republican Party nominated an unusual candidate. 1980 was an unusual year because of unusual economic problems compounded with an unusual hostage crisis. Both temporarily upset the balance of American politics, and both were mediated over time. The past six years have been very unusual.
But special circumstances never perpetuate themselves indefinitely. That is why they are special. To say that thre is a centrist stasis on American politics is not to say of course that change is impossible. The presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and even the current one will undoubtedly make enduring marks in the nation's political DNA. Attitudes on issues such as economic regulation or race have changed significantly and enduringly. But no events in the past six years, including the September 11 attacks, revolutionized Americans' views on social security, health care, the environment, the minimum wage, Presidential power and bipartisanship, the Constitution and legal rights, culture warriorism and religious preference as law, and corruption, or created an endless mandate to continue failed policies in Iraq and elsewhere abroad.
I make no secret of my desire for the Democrats to retake the House. But I write this not for those reasons. The Democrats deserve, and will, take the House this year not on a wave but on a backwash, as the basic centrist character of the American electorate--in all its medians and distributions--which has lasted for decades, reasserts itself after six very unusual years.