The Gop's Winning Streak

It’s always possible to win a battle and lose a campaign. Or to win the battle in such a way that the victor ends up so badly hurt, or so narrowly in charge, that in the long run it scarcely counts as a victory. Think of Bunker Hill. Think of the Alamo.

But does the same thing hold true in politics? There are many Republicans who, looking for a silver lining in November’s humiliating drubbing, are wondering if the election of Barack Obama really is some kind of Waterloo for the Republican party, heralding either (at worst) the shift of the United States from being a ‘center-right nation’ to a ‘center-left nation,’ or (at the mildest) the ungluing of the triumphant Reagan coalition of the 1980s. But there are others – most notably Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove -- who are unruffled by 2008 and who predict that “the GOP comeback” is already in the making. So, how do Republicans usually win…and how do they usually lose…and how does it all compare with the election of 2008?

We have the luxury of taking a remarkably long view of this question. Although the Democratic party traces its roots to Thomas Jefferson and the critical election of 1800, the Democratic party as we know it today is as much the heir of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s as it is Jefferson. Similarly, the Republican party did not run its first candidate until 1856 and elected its first president, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860. But much of the Republican party was made up of stalwarts from the old Whig party (including Lincoln), who first organized themselves under Henry Clay in opposition to Jackson in the 1820s. Lincoln, as he often confessed, remained very much “an old Henry Clay Whig,” and a good many of the ideas which form the core of Republican thinking even to-day were shaped in the hands of the Whigs. Thus, the continuities in party history allow us to run our comparisons as far back as the 1820s.

When we do, the first thing we’ll notice is that since 1824, when Andrew Jackson staged his first run for the presidency, Democrats have won twenty presidential elections; Whigs and Republicans have won twenty-five. But when Democrats win, they only rarely do it the old-fashioned way, by a majority of voters. James Buchanan (1860), Grover Cleveland (1892), Woodrow Wilson (1912), and Bill Clinton (1992 and 1996) all slipped into the White House largely because votes which might otherwise have handed the presidency to a Republican opponent were split by third-party candidates who peeled off just enough of the Republican vote to allow the Democrat to sneak through. In 1892, General James Weaver and the newly-formed Populist party shaved just over a million votes away from Benjamin Harrison and ended up electing Cleveland; in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt’s ill-starred “Bull Moose” Progressives actually outpolled the regular Republican nominee, William Howard Taft, and allowed Woodrow Wilson to slide past them both. And in more recent memory, Ross Perot’s Reform party stripped just enough votes away from George H.W. Bush and from Bob Dole to guarantee the election and re-election of Bill Clinton.

But even when Democrats do win by the numbers, the numbers are rarely very large. James K. Polk squeaked past Henry Clay by 39,000 votes in 1844. Grover Cleveland won his first term as president in 1884 by beating James G. Blaine by less than 26,000 votes. Woodrow Wilson won his second term in 1916 over Charles Evans Hughes by less than 600,000 votes – or, by a margin of 49.39% to Hughes’ 48.36%. And closer to the present, John F. Kennedy (in 1960) and Jimmy Carter (in 1976) won popular majorities, but only by very thin wafers – Kennedy won just 50.08% of the popular vote against Richard Nixon’s 49.91%, while Carter eked out a meager 51.05% majority of the popular vote over Gerald Ford’s 48.94%. Since the days of Andrew Jackson, only two Democratic candidates have enjoyed what we might call “blow-out” majorities at presidential election-time: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

By contrast, when Republicans win, they usually do it in nine-league boots. Ulysses Grant, whatever his failings as a president, was as formidable a candidate as he had been a general, and crushed his Democratic opponents twice. William McKinley, as well, twice battered the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, by 52.2% in 1896 and 53% in 1900, while his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, minced the hapless Alton Parker in 1904 by 60%. Even the taciturn Calvin Coolidge erased his Democratic opponent, John W. Davis, with 65% of the vote – despite a strong third-party showing from Republican Progressive Robert M. La Follette. Other Republican crushers have included Richard Nixon (victorious over George McGovern in 1972 with 61.6% of the vote), Ronald Reagan (59% of the popular vote in 1984), and the father of all Republican candidates, Abraham Lincoln (beating Democratic challenger George McClellan in 1864 with 55% of the vote).

Only twice in the last century has a Republican candidate benefited from divided houses among the opposition – in 1968, when George Wallace siphoned off 10 million votes which might have gone to Hubert Humphrey and opened the door to victory for Richard Nixon, and in 2000, when Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the sorely-needed electoral votes of Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico. (Had these states’ Nader-voters gone to Gore, and their 16 electoral votes gone to Gore rather than to George W. Bush, Gore would have won the electoral college as well as a popular majority; if just New Mexico or Iowa had gone Democratic, Gore would have won, while even little New Hampshire, if it had gone Democratic all by itself, would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives).

But, if Republicans are so routinely successful at summoning up big majorities when they win, why do they ever lose? Because lose they obviously do. In part, Republicans have lost through bad timing – Herbert Hoover had the misfortune to be elected one year before the great stock market crash of 1929, and though many of his policies for coping with the onset of the Great Depression differed little from Franklin Roosevelt’s, Hoover was the man on the bridge at the time of the crash, and politically speaking, he went down with the ship. Jimmy Carter might never have been more than a small-time Southern governor had it not been for Chappaquiddick and Watergate. George H.W. Bush, who looked unstoppable after the first Gulf War in 1991, turned unelectable when a recession settled over the country in 1992.

But even then, Republican defeat has occurred less because Democratic candidates succeeded in convincing more people to vote for them, and more because Republican voters have stayed at home, unconvinced by their party’s candidate to vote at all because the regular nominee was too colorless. The key figure here is not the rival percentages within the total number of votes cast, but the number of votes cast as a percentage of the voting population. The first trace of this pattern occurred as early as 1840, when the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, was elected in a race which saw 80.2% of eligible voters marching to the polls; four years before, when the Democrat Martin Van Buren won the presidency, voter participation was only 57.8%. Grover Cleveland’s victory over James G. Blaine in 1884 co-incided with a slump in actual vs. eligible voters from 79.4% (in 1880) to 77.5% in the 1884 contest. When Woodrow Wilson won his first election in 1912, he did so, not only in the face of a splintered Republican party but a downturn in the percentage of eligible voters casting ballots, from 65.4% in 1908 to 58.8% in 1912. In 1948, when Harry Truman defeated a supposedly invincible Thomas Dewey, 53% of the eligible voters turned out – and Dewey lost. Four years later, when Dwight Eisenhower ran against Adlai Stevenson, the percentage of actual voters leapt up to 63.3% -- and Eisenhower won. In 1972, when Nixon steam-rolled George McGovern, the percentage of actual voters out of the eligible voting population was 55.2%; when Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter four years later, the voting percentage likewise dipped, to 53.5%. In 1984, when Reagan mopped-up Walter Mondale, 54% of the eligible population voted; in 1996, when Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton the invisible spoiler alongside Ross Perot was the dip in the percentage of actual voters to 49%.

How much of a role did the stay-at-home Republicans play in the defeat of John McCain? A good deal more of a role than “Obamania” played among the eagerly-heralded freshet of new college-age and black Democratic voters. When the numbers were tallied up, the actual increases in new Democratic voters among young people and blacks were surprisingly minimal. In the first place, although voter turnout in 2008 increased from 122 million to 127 million in 2004, that increase was short stuff compared to the increase – some 20 million – who showed up at the polls in 2004 over 2000. The number of black voters in 2008 nudged up, but only slightly, from 11% of voters in 2004 to 13%; and the under-30 vote moved upwards, but only marginally (less than 1%). The significant number was the fall in turnout by Republicans. In Ohio, the election’s bellwether state, Obama outscored McCain by 51% to 47%. But Obama’s majority was not a product of more or newer voters (in fact, he tallied only 45,000 more than John Kerry in 2004). It was because 275,000 Ohio voters who had voted for George W. Bush failed to vote for McCain, as overall voter participation in Ohio dropped 13% below the predicted level of 80%. “There seems only one plausible explanation,” concluded Michael Massing, “Many Republicans stayed home on election day.” The same trend prevailed nationally. While more minority and under-30 voters turned out in 2008, “this increase was offset by a drop of several million in the number of white voters.” They saw nothing to vote for, and they stayed home.

So here’s the moral of the story. The Obama victory falls pretty squarely in the middle of the spectrum of Democratic presidential victories – it was not a fluke, but it was not the hinge of fate, either. In the long historical view, we really have been a ‘center-right nation,’ and that works to the long-term advantage of Republicans. There has been, and remains, a broad reservoir of American political conviction which resonates much more with the message of the Republicans than the Democrats. But Republicans can lose by taking that advantage for granted -- by running candidates for the presidency who cannot connect policy agendas with the ground-level ideology of the party, who cannot make a room spontaneously explode with enthusiasm, and who cannot, when they prick the electorate, make them bleed. These are the candidates the ‘center-right’ Republican nation will simply fold their hands and sigh over. The party of Lincoln can do a lot better. And when it does, it wins.

Allen C. Guelzo (Gettysburg College) normally writes about Abraham Lincoln. He was induced to write this for David Frum only by the most unstoppable forms of persuasion.