| Realignment Refresher
Before turning to the look at what Cost and Rothenberg wrote, I want to provide a quick refresher on how I see realignment-a view that's primarily based on Walter Dean Burnham' work. The main points are:
(1) Realigning elections generally define the end of one party system and the beginning of another. The election of 1800 was the sole exception, as the first party system hadn't fully gelled at the time of the first partisan election in 1796.
Party systems are defined by a constellation of issues, political narratives, semi-stable party coalitions-usually with one dominant and one subdominant-and stable or slowly-changing methods of political organization and communication. They last roughly 32-40 years, before succumbing to an accumulation of new problems and issues that draw out new constituencies, typically manifest in increased third party activity. The following table summarizes the six party systems we have had so far:
Table 1:
Party Systems & Balance Of Victories:
House, Senate And President
Summary Table | | | Number of Victories | Percent of Victories | | Party System | Dem | Fed/
Whig/
Rep | Split | Dem | Fed/
Whig/
Rep | Split | | First: 1794-1822 | 12 | 2 | 1 | 80 | 13 | 7 | | Second:1826-1858 * | 9 | 1 | 7 | 53 | 6 | 41 | | Third: 1860-1894 | 1 | 9 | 8 | 6 | 50 | 44 | | Fourth: 1896-1930 | 3 | 12 | 3 | 17 | 67 | 17 | | Fifth: 1932-1966 | 13 | 1 | 4 | 72 | 6 | 22 | | Sixth: 1968-2006 | 3 | 2 1/4 | 13 3/4 | 16 | 12 | 72 | | * 1824 Election anomalous, not included. See text. |
The Sixth Party System, just concluding, is the only one without a clear dominant and subordinate party, as divided government was overwhelmingly more common.
(2) Realigning elections are not necessarily landslides, though they can be. More often, they are followed by landslides, which confirm the initial turn in direction signaled by the realigning election.
(3) Realignments are seen in the House as well as the Presidency. The House is where we see evidence of realignment closest to the people, requiring at least two consecutive wave elections. But it's Presidential elections that definitively alter the course of national politics. Realignment either appears first in the House, then the Presidential election, or in both simultaneously.
Rothenberg's Argument: On the One Hand/On the Other
Rothernberg begins his article by admitting the obvious: this was no mere hiccup. He then goes on to cite several different sorts of evidence of the gains Democrats have made, electoral, demographic, and in terms of issue support. He begins like this: The big question that everyone is asking is whether this month's general election marked the beginning of a political realignment that will create a new dominant party. Have Americans shifted their loyalties and fundamental assumptions about the parties and about the government, or did we just witness a short-term reaction to years of bad news?
Let's be clear: The election results in 2006 and 2008 constitute the kind of one-two punch that is rare in modern American political history. It would be silly to portray this year's election as a minor hiccup. The nation elected a liberal African-American Democrat from the North as president, and it gave him a majority of all votes cast.
Moreover, in the past two elections, Democrats gained at least a dozen Senate seats and at least 50 House seats, taking total control of Congress. At the state level, they now have 4,090 state legislators to the GOP's 3,221.
But after touching all the bases mentioned above, he says:
Democrats and liberals would prefer the story to end here, but it doesn't. Other data paint a different picture.
And then goes on to make four main counter-points:
First, in an election with a highly unpopular Republican president and a severely damaged Republican brand, the Democratic share of the presidential vote increased from 48 percent of the vote in 2000 and 2004 to 53 percent of the vote in 2008, hardly a landslide figure or evidence of a new dominant political coalition.
I, for one, think the Democrats seriously under-performed what they should have. Although much improved over their past performance, they were still far too cautious for my tastes. I think that Obama should have gotten 55% at a minimum, and could have gotten it by pressing McCain more forcefully for his decades-long deregulation mania, among other things.
But just because the Dems fell short of what they could have done doesn't mean this wasn't a realigning election. The three most frequently cited examples of realigning elections (see below) are 1860, 1896 and 1932. The winning percentages in those elections were 39.8, 51.0%, and 57.4%. If the Wall Street meltdown had begun in 2005 or 2006, it seems quite likely that Obama could have made up at least half the gap between his 52.7% and FDR's 57.4%. Maybe even all of it. As it was, Obama did better than two out of the top three examples. I said above, "Realigning elections are not necessarily landslides, though they can be."
Second, one of Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) biggest problems among core groups was a 5-point drop among white men. President Bush carried 62 percent of white men in 2004, while McCain won only 57 percent of them.
The drop easily could have been caused by growing concerns about the economy, as well as the lesser salience of national security concerns between 2004 and 2008, rather than a fundamental shift in partisan loyalties.
As Chris has pointed repeatedly, the GOP's greatest problem is not among their core groups-it's that their core groups are shrinking as a whole compared to ours. So even if this 5-point drop among white men was temporary, the longer-term drop in the relative size of the white male electorate is not.
Third, the lack of any statistically significant shift in self-described ideology of voters also argues against a fundamental realignment. In 2004, 21 percent of voters called themselves liberals, while 34 percent said they were conservatives. This year, 22 percent said they were liberals and the same 34 percent identified as conservative.
Unfortunately, we have very little evidence about how realignments affect people's ideological identifications, if at all. What is important, however, is party identification and voting-although even here that's not necessarily immediately true. When it comes to both those, Democrats are doing fairly well, but Rothenberg comes up with a new "problem":
Finally, the 2008 exit poll found far more Democrats turned out than Republicans. In the exit poll four years ago, self-identified Democrats and Republicans each constituted 37 percent of the sample, but this year 39 percent of voters were Democrats compared with 32 percent of Republicans. Fewer Republican voters meant fewer votes for Republican candidates.
And that's a problem for a Democratic realignment? How?
Rothenberg:
While this change could reflect a fundamental shift in self-identified partisanship, it could merely be a dip in GOP turnout caused by any number of factors (possibly dissatisfaction with McCain's candidacy, the selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate or the issue agenda of 2008) or a one-time shift in partisanship. Party ID, after all, reflects the popularity of the party at any moment, and the damage to the Republican brand certainly could have caused a short-term dip in GOP identification.
Except that Pew and Rasmussen both show long-term data telling us that the party ID gap opened up a couple of years ago:
Furthermore, the GOP only got party ID close for a few years. The future looks even better for Dems, given the demographic trends cited repeatedly by Chris, as well as the huge youth vote margin.
Rothenberg continues:
At this point, it is far too premature to claim that 2008 was anything more than a dramatic reaction to an unpopular president and to a party hurt by its own ineptness. Obama will have a chance to change the nation's political landscape. But his election, by itself, isn't necessarily a sign of a new partisan alignment.
But, of course, that's just the thing: no election by itself is a sign of a new partisan alignment. Realignments are creatures of larger historical patterns, along with more immediate occurrences that get folded into them. The truth is that 2004 was probably a much better candidate for realignment up through September 10, 2001. 9/11 altered the pattern, but did not obliterate it. History has patterns to it, but they are always loose enough to allow for significant variation, as well as human action, individual and collective, for good and ill. So it has been this time, too.
Cost's Cut-Rate Theorizing
Cost first sets out to muddle things by calling the very notion of realignment into question:
Barack Obama's decisive victory last Tuesday has some wondering whether this was a realigning election.
"Realignment" is an overused term, and some scholars have questioned whether it is a profitable category to apply to elections. Temple University's Robin Kolodny wrote this a few years ago:
Realignment has been in trouble as a theory for explaining party identification and electoral behavior for some time. The most obvious problem is that there has been no full realignment since 1932, and no consensus has emerged on what, if any, partial realignment has taken place in 1968, 1974, 1980, or 1994.
Yale University's David Mayhew wrote a cogent critique of realignment theory in 2004, arguing that the facts don't fit the story so well.
The problem with all the above is that it's written without regard to (a) the cycle of party systems, and (b) the combined importance of House and Presidential elections. Mayhew's arguments (which fill a book, but are summarized here) are election-centric, marginalizing the very historical context that's key to making sense of realignment.
Things become much clearer simply by keeping points (a) and (b) in mind. Viewed from this perspective, it should be evident that none the elections mentioned above--1968, 1974, 1980, or 1994-fit the second criteria for a realigning election. However, in terms of party systems, it's quite clear that from 1932 to 1966 the Democrats were the dominant party, while 1968 onward was an era dominated by divided government, unlike any other in our history. (See Table 1 above.) Therefore, it makes eminent good sense to refer to 1968 specifically as a de-aligning election, as what it produced was a dealigned electorate, rather than a realigned one. We cab also refer to it generically as a realigning election, but should only do so with respect to the characteristics it shares with the true realigning elections: those that come from its pivotal role in initiating a new party system.
As for the other elections listed above-1974, 1980, and 1994-these are all significant elections on the time-scale within a particular party system. Again, referring back to Table 1, we see that all party systems involve some back-and-forth, with subordinate parties holding power some of the time, along with divided government. Therefore, the shifting of power within a party system is not unusual. Such shifts in power do not alter the underlying dynamic. The closeness of the 1976 presidential election after the Democratic House wave election in 1974 indicated that the basic dynamic of divided government had not been overturned, but merely disrupted. Likewise, the Democrat's wave election victory in the House in 1982 was a normal corrective indicating that 1980 had not fundamentally altered that dynamic either. Similarly, Clinton's easy re-election in 1996 negated any thought that 1994 could have been a realignment away from the dynamic of divided government.
In short, Cost has tossed out a barrage of objections for which answers do indeed exist, answers which take us beyond the perspective of merely looking at one election in isolation, which is the key to understanding realigning elections. Interestingly, however, it is just such a larger perspective that Cost then returns too-but not one that is fully integrated across time. Instead Cost chooses to look at three of the five realigning (plus one dealigning) elections in our history, not in terms of the party systems they ended or began, but simply in terms of certain big issues they involved.
This sort of arbitrary choice of three of the most extreme examples naturally has the effect of distorting all the conclusions drawn from it. It's perfectly legitimate to use extreme examples to highlight certain aspects of any phenomena, but such an approach always carries with it risks and blindspots. If used consciously, with the awareness of its inherent limitations, such an approach can be quite valuable. But if used in isolation, even in denial of a larger context, it was easily lead us far astray, which is what Cost proceeds to do, however unintentionally.
I'll skip quickly through the brief particulars of each, then focus on how he ties them together. First, 1860:
Upon James Polk's election in 1844, the Union was equally balanced between slave and free states. The addition of so much territory during his term disrupted that balance. The South wanted to extend slavery to the Pacific. A growing segment in the North wanted to limit it to existing slave states...
By 1860, the stage was set....
Lincoln won less than 40% of the popular vote, not having appeared on the ballot in most Southern states, but his Electoral College victory proved how politically powerful a unified North could be: 180 for Lincoln, 72 for Breckinridge, 39 for Bell, and 12 for Douglas.
Lincoln's 40% "landslide" (actually, 39.8%, but who's counting?) should forever remind people that realigning elections and landslides are anything but synonymous. What is significant is not the size of the victory, but the change in direction, the irrevocable close of a door on the past. That, however, is not Cost focuses on, as we shall see.
Next, 1896:
By the 1880s, the Democrats had returned to electoral competitiveness by accepting many of the political premises of industrial development. The end of Reconstruction and the Panic of 1873 ultimately gave them control over the House for eight of the next ten Congresses. The lone Democratic President of the era - Grover Cleveland of New York - favored the gold standard, which was good for industrial interests in the East but hard on farmers in the South and Midwest.
The grievances of farmers and rural people found expression via the Populist Party.... in 1896 [when] William Jennings Bryan captured the Democratic nomination, promising "free silver." His opponent, William McKinley, supported the gold standard. The election of 1896 was fought over the currency issue, and the result produced a sharp industrial-agrarian divide.
Though the South is joined this time by the Mountain West and the Great Plains, the divide again favors the North. McKinley won 271 electors to Bryan's 176.
This was yet another stunning "landslide"-McKinley won 51.0%, of the popular vote. Note that two examples in a row have a sectional theme that proves decisive in the electoral college.
Now, 1932:
This was a significant election not simply because the Depression began under the GOP's watch. It also had to do with the party's response. President Herbert Hoover failed to address the crisis to the public's satisfaction. Meanwhile, the Democrats nominated New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt, who had a great last name and a solid reputation of his own, having mobilized his government to fight the Depression in the Empire State.
Unlike in 1860 or 1896, a very broad transregional consensus emerged. As famed newspaper editor William Allen White later observed, the election of 1932 signaled "a firm desire on the part of the American people to use government as an agency for human welfare."
Here the pattern of the two previous elections is broken twice-First, FDR won a true popular landslide, 57.4% of the popular vote (as well as winning xxx in the electoral college). Second, as noted by Cost, it was not a regionally-based consensus.
So what do these elections have in common, then? According to Cost:
While the particulars of these elections are different, they tell a similar story about the political parties. In all three, the parties had to manage issues of great importance that could not be ignored. This is why we remember Lincoln's "House Divided," Bryan's "Cross of Gold," and Roosevelt's "New Deal." They each took clear stands on issues whose resolutions would determine the course the nation would set.
What's more, there was little room for common ground those years. Either slavery would expand or it wouldn't. Either the government would authorize the free coinage of silver or it wouldn't. Either it would take a more active role in the economy or it wouldn't. Practically speaking, the differences could not be split.
This is not quite true, however. Bi-metalism was not the only issue in 1896-the tariff and government regulation and relief were also major issues raised by Bryan. And while supporters of the gold standard insisted it was all or nothing, there certainly could have been a limited allowance for silver-backed currency. It didn't have to be an all-or-none proposition.
Likewise, in 1932, the issue of government activism clearly could have been a matter of degree, scope and purpose. In short, the expansion of slavery was by nature a lot more inflexible than the issues underlying the elections of 1896 and 1932-and this was so in past because the preceding decade had been dominated by failed attempts to find some workable compromise for controlled expansion of slavery. Yet, it should be noted that the issue of the expansion of slavery was itself an evasion of the underlying issue of slavery itself. In short, these were elections of great moment, when great change was afoot and could not be avoided. Yet, that did not mean that it was straightforwardly addressed.
Lincoln's "House Divided," speech had been given in 1858. In 1860, he secured the Republican nomination by striking a more measured tone. It was the South's hysterical reaction to his election that made it seem far more sharp and decisive than it actually might have been. Roosevelt's "New Deal" was little more than a placeholding phrase in his acceptance speech until after the election, and even then it was extremely fluid, changing substantially from the first to the second incarnations.
Many commentators here have raised the point that Roosevelt ran on a balanced budget and didn't say much about what he intended to do, striving to portray him as a more Obama-like figure. They have a point that Cost's presentation tends to obscure, even though Roosevelt also had a clear record as Governor of New York that spoke of sweeping, progressive government activism. Thus, both Lincoln and Roosevelt were undeniably figures of fundamental change who campaigned in a way that downplayed the scariness of change that some people always feel more than the hope and opportunity. The same can clearly be said about Obama.
Bryan, on the other hand, failed to win, in part because he represented a weaker political coalition, and in part because he did not seek to temper his message of fundamental change. 1896 is still legitimately seen as a realigning election, but it remains difficult to explain why, unless one considers the party system perspective.
What Cost says next is certainly true, and indeed it's an important part of what happens when the old party system starts to run out of steam, and can't respond to new issues as they arise-which is why third parties tend to become more active before most realignments. However, it needs to be tempered by what I've just said. Cost:
So, these issues upset the normal functioning of the parties. By their nature, parties select issue positions and emphases in pursuit of electoral majorities. Obviously, no party can undertake a full-scale reinvention of itself. However, in pursuit of a majority, it can frequently "finesse" matters. It can slightly alter some positions, it can equivocate or obfuscate on others, and it can emphasize particular issues or personalities depending upon the audience. The goal is to string together an electoral majority among the diverse elements of our large Republic.
In these years, this process was disrupted to some degree. Issues of great salience dominated the political discourse and forced the parties to stake out relatively clear positions. There was little room for finessing. Thus, votes from those years can be seen as opinions on the critical issues more directly than votes from other years.
One can clearly see where Cost is going with this. There was little room for finessing then, but differences were blurred in this campaign. Yet, as I've argued above, both Lincoln and Roosevelt did take the edge off their campaigns-knowing full well that this would not mitigate the objective needs once they took office. Bryan did not take the edge off, and he lost. McKinley won in part because his candidacy was sufficiently blurry-it was a victory progress, and Bryan was cast as a voice of the past. Thus, McKinley was a "progressive" without all the reformist aspects that term would soon acquire. And, indeed, the very blurriness of what McKinley's win meant, and what "progressive" meant was to haunt the entirety of the Fourth Party System.
Cost continues:
So, examining the parties and the issues they handled this cycle might help us understand how 2008 stacks up against these three elections. Did the parties behave similarly this year as they did then? Were the issues similar?
I think the answers to both questions are negative, which cuts against the hypothesis that this election was a "realignment." For starters, there was no central, defining issue that disrupted the normal party process. Instead, both candidates covered a variety of issues, few in any depth. There was also a scarcity of clear contrasts between Obama and McCain. Indeed, on the subject that might have emerged as a realigning issue - the financial bailout - they voted the same way.
Relatedly, both candidates made the search for common ground a defining feature of their candidacies. McCain would cite Hillary Clinton just as often as Obama would mention Richard Lugar. There was no House Divided, no Cross of Gold, no New Deal. There was the promise of pragmatic governance and a change in tone toward bipartisan conciliation.
This evidence disfavors the idea that 2008 was like these previous elections.
The evidence Cost sites is certainly true. But does it mean what he thinks it means? I would argue not, and for one simple reason: it ignores the nature of the party system we've been living under, a party system dominated by divided government. Divided government has had a paradoxical result: it fails to accomplish much in dealing with fundamental problems, but it manages to project the blame onto "partisan extremism" when it is actually the lack of a strong dominant party that's primarily at fault, if we look at how our political system usually operates.
Under this divided setup, it is relatively more difficult for voters to assign praise and blame, which is why the generic claims of "partisanship" and "polarization" are so rhetorically appealing. The fact that Obama and McCain both ran as "trans-partisan" "reformers" was thus a reflection of the limitations of Sixth Party System. Both were trying to break out of its limitations, but doing so by accepting the flawed logic that the system itself has generated to excuse its failings. Thus, Cost is correct that the pressing issues were suppressed, but what he ignores is the degree to which suppression of the issues has been structurally reinforced throughout the Sixth Party System. One cannot understand realigning elections without understanding the party systems that precede them, and differences in party systems will produce differences in realigning elections.
The most dramatic proof of this is the dealigning election of 1968. It was so different from other realigning elections that it doesn't deserve to be called one in any meaningful sense except that it brought one era to an end and began a new one. And yet, this difference is perfectly understandable, in that the New Deal coalition, which dominated the Fifth Party System, combined Northern liberals and labor with Southern conservatives. As the South gradually industrialized, and more and more blacks moved north, and as the Cold War took hold, and America had to compete with Russia in appealing to the Third World, it was inevitably that eventually this odd-couple pairing would fall apart.
Yet, the longstanding decentralized and regionalized nature of American politics effectively decoupled the presidential and congressional trajectories, resulting in a presidential realignment, without a congressional one-something never seen before. Furthermore, once established, this divided government structure took on a life of its own, as accountability became increasingly difficult for people to assign. And thus, we had divided government under most of Clinton's term, as well as during all of Nixon, Reagan's and Bush I's.
The fact that the dealigning election of 1968 can only be understood in a party system context holds an important lesson for us in thinking about 2008. It is far more different from 1860, 1896 and 1932 than 2008 is. It did not produce-even fleetingly-a unified dominant political party. And yet, it did produce a distinct break with all that went before it. If it belongs to the family of realigning elections-however qualified that belonging may be-then we need to approach 2008 in similar terms, viewing it in the context of the party system preceding it.
In effect, Cost is rejecting 2008 as a realigning election because he rejects realignment itself. Seeking clarification by looking at extreme cases, he essentially abandons the sort of contextual approach that really gets at the heart of the matter.
Of course, Cost is hardly alone in this. Quite the opposite: Cost's ready abandonment of theoretical frameworks is directly analogous to the "transpartisan" abandonment of "ideological rigidity" and "partisan extremism." It represents the kind of small-bore pragmatism that is incapable of successfully grappling with problems on a systematic basis adequate to actually solving them.
This is the basic mindset of the old order, brought in by Nixon and the Southern Strategy. It is a mindset that is dying, even though Barack Obama still embraces it himself. The problems looming now are simply and obviously too big for such an approach. Even apart from their differing political philosophies, John McCain was simply incapable of ever recognizing this. Obama, I believe, is not. And thus, the practical necessities of governing and dealing with the outsized problems we face will move Obama forward toward the more systematic-and hence "ideological"-thinking that a new order requires. |
