This is the first in a three-part series today that compares political conditions in 1993-1994 to our current environment. I argue that the current situation is much more favorable to Democrats than the one 16 years ago--Chris
Background Perot voters were an essential part of the 1994 Republican turnaround--perhaps the essential part. Forming 12% of the congressional electorate in both 1992 and 1994 (40% of Perot voters skipped the House vote in 1992), they swung from evenly split between the two major parties (see 38%-38% in the presidential and Rep 37%--32% Dem in the House) to voting 67% for Republicans in 1994.
By itself, this swing formed an overall 3-4% Republican gain in the national House vote. Given that the GOP went up a total of 5.1% from 1992 to 1994 in the national House vote (from 44.8% to 49.9%), their gains from Perot voters represented roughly two-thirds of all their gains that year.
The NAFTA Disaster The role of NAFTA in this swing difficult to overestimate. As I noted yesterday, just before NAFTA was passed in the House in late 1993, a plurality opposed it, 38%--46%. Notably, Perot voters opposed it overwhelmingly, 26%--63%. As Thomas Frank argued in What's the Matter With Kansas, Democratic support for NAFTA might have made both parties seem just as bad on economics to Perot voters. With equivalence on economic matters, Perot supporters may well have turned to Republicans because they tended to be populist, American-exceptionalist, cultural supremacists.
Granted, a much lower percentage of House Democrats voted in favor of NAFTA than House Republicans (40% for Dems, 75% for Reps). However, given that NAFTA was championed by the Clinton administration for months in the media, passed through a Democratic Congress, and climaxed with a famous CNN debate between Vice-President Al Gore and Ross Perot himself, Perot supporters would have had a justifiable sense of equivalence between the two major parties on NAFTA. Heck, given that Democrats were the public face of NAFTA, many probably blamed only Democrats for it.
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Are we in for a repeat? I consider this possibility in the extended entry.
Why were Democrats whitewashed in the 1994 elections? This seems like an odd question to ask in 2009, but it remains relevant. Many Democrats in Washington D.C., especially those Democrats who have been in professional politics for fifteen years or more, are constantly afraid of it happening again. Based on what I hear from numerous sources, the fear of repeating the 1994 elections is a regular, almost Jungian collective unconscious fear of many leading Democratic officials and staffers.
The problem with this is that I don't think many people, or possibly anyone, knows exactly why the 1994 elections went so badly for Democrats. There were, undoubtedly, multiple overlapping factors. Some rationales focus on the electoral circumstances of the time, including the maps drawn after the 1994 reapportionment concentrating African-American voters mainly into majority-minority districts; Republicans sweeping the close campaigns that year; the high number of conservative southern Democrats in the Democratic caucus at the time. There are the economic populist rationales, arguing that when Democrats pushed NAFTA, socially conservative but economically populist voters turned to the socially conservative party because there was no economic populist alternative anymore (Thomas Frank presents this argument in What's the Matter with Kansas?). There are the infrastructure rationales, arguing that progressives failed to build a counter to the Republican Noise Machine, which at the time was virtually unchallenged by any counter-veiling progressive institutions. There are the liberal over-reach rationales, arguing that through the 1993 budget fight and the 1994 health care fight, the Clinton administration tried to push the government much further to the left than it was at the time (a popular theory in D.C.). Many think that the Contract with America was a particularly smart bit of campaign messaging, or that Democrats were simply due for a big defeat after 40 years in the majority, or that Americans like split government, or at least a dozen other explanations for why Republicans took Congress that year.
The point is, no one knows exactly why 1994 happened, and yet fear of its repetition is still a constant worry for many Democrats in D.C. While it is not irrational for politicians to fear major electoral defeat, allowing such fear to influence your behavior when the causes of that defeat are unclear can lead to irrational, erratic behavior. This is certainly the case with many leading Democrats on Capitol Hill, and in other areas of professional politics. More often than not, it results in a tendency to eschew progressivism, for fear of over-reach.
I bring this up not to try and explain any specific Democratic behavior that seems either erratic or irrationally right-wing. Instead, I simply want readers to know that fear of repeating 1994 does in fact influence Democratic behavior from the leadership on down. Rarely is it the only factor influencing Democratic behavior, but it is often in the back of many minds. Fifteen years later, it remains a key component of D.C. psychology, and remembering that helps one better understand American politics.
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