Not a Landslide

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will look at the 2024 election. 

Peter Baker at NYT:

With some votes still being counted, the tally used by The New York Times showed Mr. Trump winning the popular vote with 49.988 percent as of Friday night, and he appears likely to fall below that once the final results are in, meaning he would not capture a majority. Another count used by CNN and other outlets shows him winning 49.9 percent. By either reckoning, his margin over Vice President Kamala Harris was about 1.6 percentage points, the third smallest since 1888, and could ultimately end up around 1.5 points.

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Mr. Trump would not be the first newly elected or re-elected president to assume his victory gave him more political latitude than it really did. Bill Clinton tried to turn his 5.6-point win in 1992 into a mandate to completely overhaul the nation’s health care system, a project that blew up in his face and cost his party both houses of Congress in the next midterm elections.

George W. Bush likewise thought his 2.4-point win in 2004 would empower him to revise the Social Security system, only to fail and lose Congress two years later. And President Biden interpreted his 4.5-point win over Mr. Trump in 2020 as a mission to push through some of the most expansive social programs since the Great Society, then saw Republicans take control of the House in 2022 and the White House and Senate two years after that.
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Real landslides have been unmistakable, including Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1964 by 22.6 points, Richard M. Nixon’s in 1972 by 23.2 points and Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 by 18.2 points. In the 40 years since that Reagan victory, no president has won the popular vote by double digits.
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Mr. Trump’s 1.6-point victory is smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968. In addition, two presidents won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote: the second Mr. Bush in 2000 and Mr. Trump in 2016.

Moreover, Mr. Trump had limited coattails this month. With some races yet to be called, Republicans were on track to keep almost exactly the same narrow majority in the House that they already had. The party picked up four seats in the Senate, enough to take control, a major shift that will benefit Mr. Trump. But even then, in the places where Mr. Trump campaigned the most, he failed to bring Republicans along with him in four of five battleground states with Senate races.

Veep Leaks

Leaks about the vice presidential selection are not always accurate.  From 2004:

Will Recent Patterns Hold?

Michael Barone writes that recent elections have occurred within a very narrow range:

Some pollsters report an increasing percentage of voters identifying as independents. But fewer and fewer Americans vote that way. Straight-ticket voting, increasingly rare from the 1960s-1980s, has become more common today. In 2012, only 26 of the 435 House districts voted for a presidential candidate of one party and a House member of the other, the lowest number since 1920.

Presidential voting has become more predictable as well. Only three of the 50 states (Iowa, New Mexico and New Hampshire) voted for different parties' candidates in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Only two states (Indiana and North Carolina) voted for different parties' candidates in 2008 and 2012. You have to go back to the 1880s to find such partisan continuity.

A bigger swing in presidential voting occurred between 2004-08. But even then, only nine of the 50 states switched parties, and six of those had been carried only narrowly, with 50-52 percent of the vote, by George W. Bush. Of the other three, Indiana switched back to solidly Republican in 2012, North Carolina moved narrowly from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney and Virginia has, perhaps implausibly, become the national bellwether, with its percentages for the candidates matching national percentages more closely than any other state.

There is a big "however."

But what if the irresistible force scrambles the political map? This has always happened, sooner or later, in American politics. It has often been sparked by the rise of a disruptive candidate, running as an independent or as the nominee of a major party. Think Ross Perot, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Abraham Lincoln. A disruptive candidate raises new issues, breaks across old party lines, brings new voters into the electorate.

California Blues

At The Sacramento Bee, Christopher Cadelago reports that the California GOP may not even be able to field a full slate of credible statewide candidates in 2014.

In the last election alone, California Republicans surrendered supermajority control of the state Legislature, lost decisive congressional races and saw their voting ranks drop below 30 percent statewide.

“Their problem is that they don’t just lack a deep bench, their entire arena is empty,” said Jason Kinney, a Democratic political consultant. “California Republicans just don’t have anybody around who can move the needle. They’ve got to rebuild from the ground up, which is going to be a long-term play, and in the short term that’s going to hurt them.”

Ken Khachigian, a Republican strategist, said the 2010 clash between Harris and Cooley was an indicator of the GOP’s increasing challenges in statewide elections.

Harris, the district attorney of San Francisco, personally opposed the death penalty. Cooley, the district attorney of Los Angeles, supported the death penalty and challenged her commitment to enforce it. He also was a relatively well-known incumbent prosecutor in a county roughly 10 times the size of San Francisco.

“That was probably the canary in the coalmine that California is becoming so blue that it’s hard even for a high-name-ID Republican to win a race like that,” said Khachigian, who managed Dan Lungren’s successful run for attorney general in 1990 and Chuck Poochigian’s unsuccessful bid for the office in 2006.

The new voter-approved primary system, in which the top two vote-getters regardless of party advance to the fall runoff, may only exacerbate Republicans’ problems here.

Inevitability?

Sean Trende pushes back against the notion that long-term demographic trends favor Democrats:

At the end of the day, I remember the aftermath of the 2004 elections, when almost everyone was convinced that Democrats had to reach out to white “values voters” to win elections. God, guns, and gays were killing the Democrats, so the argument went, as was opposition to the Iraq War. Howard Dean was urging the party to send staffers to Mississippi and to learn to talk with voters who had Confederate flags in the back of their pickup trucks. Demographic analysts were trumpeting the fact that Republicans had won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties, and claimed that Democrats were in danger of becoming a regional party, concentrated on the coasts, if they didn’t quickly moderate their appeal.

How quickly things change. Democrats did focus on improving their vote share with working-class whites to some extent in 2006, with positive results. But the approach was largely abandoned in 2008 in favor of targeting the “coalition of the ascendant” we hear so much about today. The conventional wisdom about what Democrats had to do was completely, utterly wrong.

The thing is, it was wrong not because of its particulars. It was wrong in a more general sense: Parties always have an almost infinite number of coalitions they can target their pitch to and emerge successfully from elections if the overall environment is favorable to them. That hasn’t changed in the past 100 years, much less since 2004. Put differently, if Hillary Clinton had been the nominee in 2008, she probably would have done somewhat worse with young voters and African-Americans, but probably would have done better in Appalachia. Gordon Smith of Oregon might still be a senator, but Mitch McConnell might not be. As I’ve said here since 2009, there are no permanent majorities, because every action in politics tends to create an opposite one.

I suspect the current conventional wisdom will last only until the Republicans next encounter a favorable national environment, and win an election. (There actually hasn’t been an unambiguously favorable environment for them in a presidential year since 1988, so they’re due.) At that point, the conventional wisdom will likely shift, reflecting a belief that Democrats must undertake some major changes in their coalition if they are going to ever win another election. But that conventional wisdom will be badly flawed, just as the present conventional wisdom is badly flawed.

The Democratic Campaign Cultural Edge

At Slate, Sasha Issenberg offers some shrewd observations on the Democratic advantage -- and the GOP handicap -- in campaign innovation:

It is no coincidence that in both 2004 and 2012 the engines of radical innovation were the campaigns of incumbent presidents. We tend to underappreciate how radically different a presidential re-election is from any other enterprise in American political life. It is the rare chance for candidates to disrupt the cycle of short-term, election-year priorities and invest in their own research agendas instead of being forced to follow a consultant-driven marketplace.

For Bush, this proved a unique opportunity to synthesize information from consumer-data warehouses with voter registration records and apply some of the same statistical modeling techniques that companies used to segment customers so that they could market to them individually. In Obama’s case, the continuity provided by a re-election campaign encouraged a far broader set of research priorities, perhaps most important the adoption of randomized-control experiments, used in the social sciences to address elusive questions about voter behavior.

Following their 2004 loss, Democrats found it relatively easy to catch up with Republicans in the analysis of individual consumer data for voter targeting. By 2006, Democrats were at least at parity when it came to statistical modeling techniques, and they were exploring ways to integrate them with other modes of political data analysis. Already the public-opinion firms of the left saw themselves as research hubs in a way that their peers on the right didn’t, a disparity that stretched back a generation. When polling emerged in the early 1980s as a new (and lucrative) specialty within the consulting world, the people who flowed into it on the Republican side tended to be party operatives; former political and field directors who had been consumers of polls quickly realized that it was a better business to be producers of them.

Those who went into the polling business on the left were political consultants, too, but many of them also possessed serious scholarly credentials and had derailed promising academic careers to go into politics. Now that generation—Stan Greenberg, Celinda Lake, Mark Mellman, Diane Feldman, among others—preside over firms that see themselves not only as vendors of a stable set of campaign services but patrons of methodological innovation. When microtargeting tools made it possible to analyze the electorate as a collection of individuals rather than merely demographic and geographic subgroups, many of the most established Democratic pollsters in Washington invested in developing expertise in this new approach. Their Republican rivals, by contrast, tended to see the new tools as a threat to their business model.

2004, 2008, and the House Elections of 2012

At National Journal, Josh Kraushaar writes that the GOP is in a strong position to hold the House:

With Mitt Romney running ahead of Obama nationally, 2004 is shaping up to be a much more instructive baseline for the upcoming elections than Obama’s historic win in 2008. Indeed, only eight House Republicans hold districts that John Kerry won in 2004. That, more than anything, explains how the Democratic expectation of being within striking distance of the majority is falling far short of reality. Call it the 2008 illusion.

He explains that the Illinois gerrymander is likely to fall short.  Pennsylvania will disappoint Dems, too.

It’s not just Illinois. This week, Democrats canceled costly ad reservations in the Philadelphia media market originally designed to use against suburban Philly GOP Reps. Mike Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., and Jon Runyan, R-N.J., districts that usually go Democratic in a good year for the party. The party and outside groups also withdrew attack ads against Rep. Scott Rigell, representing the one (Tidewater) bellwether district in the battleground state of Virginia. In Florida, even Democratic operatives are now sounding pessimistic about their prospects of defeating outspoken conservative Rep. Allen West, despite early predictions that he’d be one of the most vulnerable Republicans from the freshman class. These are all districts Obama carried in 2008.

If Democrats want to regain the majority, they’ll need to dominate in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas. The fact that Republicans are holding their own there isn’t a good sign for the party, or for the president.

Democrats are looking good in California and some other places, but...

The lasting legacy of the 2012 election could end up being the unexpected stability of the House Republican majority over the next decade, thanks to gerrymandering and key elements of the Obama coalition (minorities, college students) clustered into districts overwhelmingly favoring Democrats. Democrats continue to struggle in predominantly white districts, only contesting 14 of the 110 districts, according to an analysis from House Race Hotline Editor Scott Bland. The GOP wave ushered in 84 freshman House Republicans, but relatively few of them are in trouble.

Democrats have been crowing that polls show the GOP party brand is in the toilet, which makes it all the more significant that they are not in striking distance of taking the majority. But to understand why a promising environment isn’t translating into results, they’ll need to recognize that it’s not 2008 any more.

The Partisan Shoreline

At The New Republic, William Galston looks at Gallup and Pew data.  Although he has noted differences between the current election and the one that gave Bush a second term, he does see a "partisan shoreline" that looks more like 2004 than 2008.

Not that much has changed for Republicans since then. Today, their favorable rating stands at 44 percent, and unfavorable at 50. The big shift has come for Democrats, whose edge over Republicans has completely disappeared. Only 43 percent of registered voters have a favorable view of the Democratic Party (down 13 points), while 52 percent have an unfavorable view (up 13 points). The erosion has been especially severe among men (15 points), whites (17 points), voters 35 to 54 years old (17 points), and Independents (12 points). Only nonwhite voters are more favorably inclined toward the Democratic Party than they were four years ago. And while a successful convention can provide a boost, history suggests that any such improvement in public perceptions of a political party is likely to disappear by Election Day.

On August 23, the Pew Research Center released a report entitled “A Closer Look at the Parties in 2012”, backed by more than 20 pages of detailed tables. Pew’s findings are consistent with Gallup’s. In 2008, Democrats plus Independents who lean Democratic constituted fully 51 percent of registered voters, versus only 39 percent for Republicans plus Independents who lean their way. But now, the 12-point Democratic edge of four years ago has shrunk to only 5 points, 48 to 43, statistically indistinguishable from the split in 2004. Among whites, the Republican edge has expanded from 2 points to 12; among white men, from 11 points to 22. While Democrats have lost ground in every age cohort, they still maintain an edge of 19 points among Millennials, down from 32 points in 2008.

Drilling down more deeply, Pew finds finer-grained trends. Republicans have made only modest gains among college-educated men, and none at all among college-educated women. But among men with less than a BA, Republicans have turned a 6-point deficit into a 3-point edge; among less educated women, the Democratic advantage has been pared from 20 points to 8. Relative to 2008, Republicans have made no gains among registered voters with household incomes of $75,000 or more, but they are doing much better among those making less than that. And all of these changes are more pronounced among white voters.

As Galston pointed out in November, the Republicans might have thrown away a potential victory by nominating an incompetent candidate.  But in spite of his many faults as a candidate, Romney easily clears the competence threshold.

2012 Does Not Equal 2004

Some have compared 2012 to 2004.  At The New Republic, William Galston writes:

The basic structure of the 2004 campaign differed fundamentally from the one we’re now enduring. The available evidence suggests that even in the short-term, the attacks on Romney have been measurably less successful than were those on Kerry. And Obama’s supporters seem to have forgotten that the reason Bush prevailed was because enough Americans ended up approving of his record and leadership in the areas they cared about the most.

Michael Barone suggests two other differences between 2004 and 2012:

One is that the 2004 election occurred during a period of unusual stability in American voting behavior.

In the preceding four congressional elections, Republicans won between 48 and 51 percent of the popular vote for the House and Democrats won between 46 and 49 percent. In 2004 the parties' percentages in both the presidential and congressional popular vote were within the same narrow ranges.

Since then voting behavior has been much more volatile.

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There's another difference between 2004 and 2012 that is salient. In 2004 George W. Bush's Republican base was pretty much united on issues. Foreign policy realists and neocons were all on board.

Cultural conservatives supported the Bush tax cuts. Few economic conservatives had much problem with Bush's stands on abortion or embryonic stem cell research.

Barack Obama's Democratic base is more heterogeneous. ...

Blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada pleased gentry liberals who embrace every green cause. But private sector labor unions don't like it a bit.

Bashing Romney's record at Bain and Company may be helping him with some modest-income voters. But it risks antagonizing the affluent, which is a problem for a candidate who last time ran even, 49 to 49 percent, among those with incomes over $100,000.

Angry Money

At Real Clear Politics, Michael Barone writes of a most useful term:

What's really interesting is that, if current projections are right, this will be the third election in a row in which the party holding the White House will be outspent by the opposition. In 2004, incumbent Republican George W. Bush's side was outspent narrowly by those opposing him and favoring Democrat John Kerry. One reason is heavy spending by billionaire George Soros, about which we heard few complaints from those now decrying the billionaire Koch brothers' spending as a threat to democracy. In 2008, Barack Obama broke his promise to rely on public financing and raised and spent about $750 million. About half as much was spent on behalf of John McCain, who accepted public financing. Now, despite the clout any incumbent president has, Democrats are likely to be outspent by Republicans.

Obama 2012 and Bush 2004

Richard W. Stevenson writes at The New York Times that the Obama team has figured out that Karl Rove was pretty smart after all:

Can Mr. Obama overcome the bad economy, and perhaps even turn it to his advantage in certain ways, in the same way President George W. Bush overcame and in a sense turned to his advantage the bloody, expensive and increasingly unpopular war in Iraq eight years ago?

And can Mr. Obama do to his opponent – for now let’s say Mitt Romney – what Mr. Bush did to Senator John Kerry in 2004?

The parallels are sufficient enough that Mr. Obama and his team have studied, and to a striking degree are replicating, the Bush re-election playbook.

Already they are building a narrative in which Mr. Obama made politically brave decisions to do what was right for the economy, even if those decisions were unpopular. It’s a theme that echoes Mr. Bush’s argument in 2004 that he did what it took to keep the country safe, and that even if you disagreed with him, you knew where he stood.

As for defining the opponent, Mr. Obama’s supporters are already hard at work hammering home the idea that Mr. Romney is an inveterate flip-flopper, a man without core or convictions who says and does whatever is necessary to advance his political interests. It’s an approach that bears a passing similarity to the Bush re-election campaign’s efforts to paint Mr. Kerry as an inveterate flip-flopper, a man with core or convictions who. … You get the idea.

But the circumstances are very different. In the fall of 2003, Bush's Gallup approval ratings ranged between 50 and 63 percent. By comparison, Gallup reports today:

President Barack Obama's 11th quarter in office was the worst of his administration, based on his quarterly average job approval ratings. His 41% approval average is down six percentage points from his 10th quarter in office, and is nearly four points below his previous low of 45% during his seventh quarter.

These results are based on Gallup Daily tracking from July 20-Oct. 19, 2011. During this time, Obama's approval rating ranged narrowly between 38% and 43% for all but a few days of the quarter. The 38% approval ratings, registered on several occasions, are the lowest of his presidency to date.

Other numbers also bode ill for the president. Reuters reports:

An unofficial gauge of human misery in the United States rose last month to a 28-year high as Americans struggled with rising inflation and high unemployment.

The misery index -- which is simply the sum of the country's inflation and unemployment rates -- rose to 13.0, pushed up by higher price data the government reported on Wednesday.

The data underscores the extent that Americans continue to suffer even two years after a deep recession ended, with a weak economic recovery imperiling President Barack Obama's hopes of winning reelection next year.

And at the Christian Science Monitor, Ron Scherer reports a number that will outweigh just about anything the Obama campaign could say:

Think life is not as good as it used to be, at least in terms of your wallet? You'd be right about that. The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the US government began recording it five decades ago.

Bottom line: The average individual now has $1,315 less in disposable income than he or she did three years ago at the onset of the Great Recession – even though the recession ended, technically speaking, in mid-2009. That means less money to spend at the spa or the movies, less for vacations, new carpeting for the house, or dinner at a restaurant.

Bachmann = Dean?

At Politico, Jonathan Martin compares Michele Bachmann to Howard Dean, who had an early surge in the 2004 Democratic nomination contest, only to fade behind John Kerry.

“Like Dean, she fits the mood and moment of her party,” said veteran Republican strategist Tucker Eskew.

The challenge for Bachmann is to avoid the same questions that plagued and ultimately undermined the former Vermont governor’s upstart campaign. In other words, if Mitt Romney represents John Kerry in the “Dated Dean, Married Kerry” bumper sticker slogan, how does Bachmann escape playing the role of Howard Dean?

As demonstrated by Dean’s failure in 2004 and Obama’s success four years later, there’s a difference between attracting large crowds and creating a campaign infrastructure that can turn out voters to win caucuses and primaries. One can start a movement with the first, but winning the nomination requires both.

Bachmann faces the same fundamental problem as Dean: the force powering her into contention — the base’s unalloyed contempt for a president they consider illegitimate — contains the seeds of her undoing.

“[Democratic primary voters] were still so afraid of what Bush could do in a second term that in the end they got pragmatic,” recalled Joe Trippi, who managed Dean’s campaign. “Obama engenders that same anxiety and fear within the Republican base.”

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“Two years before the Dean campaign, there was not a tea party movement that had started organizing in communities and raising money online,” Trippi said. “We didn’t have anywhere near the head start, this sort of uprising within our party. We started it.”

Even so, the desire to beat Obama among Republicans is as intense now as it was with Democrats and Bush eight years ago — and GOP regulars will still play an important, if somewhat diminished, role in the nominating process.

“We aren’t the establishment party that we were for 30 years, but we haven’t lopped those voters out of the coalition,” said Eskew. “We’re more layered. It’s a hybrid model. And our nominee is going to fit the mood of insurgency with a proveness to win elections and govern that Republicans still want.”

A couple of weeks ago, Jay Newton-Small covered the same ground at Time:

You have a frontrunner who is playing it safe and betting that his credentials will give him a leg up on the key issue of the cycle: In 2004, John Kerry’s foreign policy experience and military service were supposed to give him the edge on Iraq, and in 2012, Mitt Romney’s private sector background is suited for an electorate concerned about the economy. You have an old timer shooting high on his last lap: Dick Gephardt played that role in 2004 and Newt Gingrich seems to be after something similar this time around. You have the young, telegenic challenger whose resume looks great on paper: John Edwards and Tim Pawlenty. There’s the Beltway darling with the potential to soar if he can ignite a spark – and has the energy to see it through: Wes Clark and Jon Huntsman. And you have the populist firebrand: Howard Dean in 2004 and Michele Bachmann in 2012.

As in 2004, the challengers’ base is similarly discontented with the field. The GOP base arguably hates Barack Obama about as much as Democrats loathed George W. Bush. But will that inspire pragmatism in the form of picking Romney, the guy with perhaps the best credentials to beat Obama, or will the Tea Party energy of 2010 carry over to boost an insurgent the base truly loves, like Bachmann? In 2004, many Democrats’ slogan was ‘Dated Dean, Married Kerry.’ It’s hard to imagine folks saying, ‘Dated Bachmann, Married Romney,’ in 2012′s climate.

Obama's Victory & 2004 Bush Voters

In a forthcoming article in PS, Arthur Lupia suggests that the behavior of 2004 Bush voters was key to President Obama's victory in 2008:

Barack Obama’s success in bringing millions of new voters to the polls was an impressive achievement. But these new voters were not a necessary condition for his victory. When considering whether or not to support John McCain in 2008, a number of Bush voters decided, “No We Can’t.” The number of 2004 Bush voters who decided to stay at home, or to support a Democrat, in 2008 did not grab the same kinds of headlines as new voter stories, but they were a sufficient condition for Obama’s Electoral College victory. Hence, future presidential hopefuls’ attempts to draw lessons from the 2008 campaign should focus not only on how the Obama campaign got so many new people to the polls, but also on why so many people who voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 2004 chose to do something different in 2008. If 2008’s new voters are less energized in 2012, the story of that election may turn on whether voters who once supported a Republican can be convinced to do so again.