The Calm Before... Something?

So, there's been something very strange happening recently. For the last twenty years, that is. Specifically, we've now gone five Presidential election cycles in which the highest percentage of electoral votes any candidate has gotten was 70.4%, and no Presidential candidate has won a popular vote margin of more than 8.5%. This is only the second time this has happened, ever; that was from 1876 through 1900, when the biggest margin was 6.1% and the biggest share of the EVs was 65.3%, both in 1900. In fact, from 1880 through 1888, three consecutive Presidential cycles were decided by less than one percent of popular vote, and were within a 60-40 split in the Electoral College. Outside of that period and the current period, the longest we've gone with elections as close as the ones we've been seeing was... one election. That's right, there were no consecutive elections meeting both these criteria since the formation of the Republican party except for two exceptionally long competitive bursts.

There's something else, though: the landscape of Presidential elections has been absurdly stable these last twenty years. Specifically, thirty-one out of fifty states, plus DC, have voted for the same party in each of our last five elections. A further nine have voted for one party four of five times. Only ten states have been properly "swing," dividing their vote as evenly as you could ask for (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Florida, of which five are products of Clinton's being a Southerner). Overall, the fifty-one state-like regions that have voted in the past five elections have voted for their preferred party an average of 87% of the time; the similar stat for the post-Civil War era is only 83%. I have no idea if that's statistically significant, but this rough gauge of the stability of voting patterns suggests that we've been at least as set in our ways as that era.

I have a hypothesis to explain this, of course. Basically, I think that American politics, and American partisan politics, has spent a lot of time being unnatural, or not in equilibrium to put it somewhat more precisely. At the Founding, we had one giant cancerous problem, slavery (on which, more at some point in the future when I have time for a long rant), and two parties, Federalist and Democratic-Republican. But the Federalists became deeply personally unpopular, and the D-R's adopted most of their policies, killing that party system. Then we had the Second Party System, Jacksonian Democrats vs. Whigs, but this was the period when the Unions began to come apart. Actually, in some ways the partisan politics of this era were quite competitive, with five straight cycles with popular vote margins less than 7% from 1836 through 1852, but the Electoral College made a lot of those margins appear much bigger. Then there was this thing called the Civil War, and then we went into one period of natural equilibrium: Democrats were, basically, the party of the rural South, and Republicans were the party of the urban north, with the civil-rights implications that came with that, and they were both perfectly happy being that. No problems, no need to mix it up. Then came the Progressive Era, which was just weird in that the two parties didn't really disagree about all that much. Then were the 20s, when the Democrats just kept getting shellacked, but which were basically the same equilibrium of the late 19th century, just shifted +20 toward the GOP.

But then a couple of things happened, and I'm not talking about the Depression. Al Smith, a Democrat, finally managed to run an urbane campaign that appealed to, say, New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Simultaneously, I believe (though I can't now find confirmation of this, which is odd), the Republican convention voted down a resolution condemning the KKK, and Herbert Hoover definitely started the forerunner of the Southern Strategy, ditching black officials to win Southern white votes. The result of all of this was that the old equilibrium was disturbed, and as it happened, permanently so. Roosevelt's tent was big enough to fit urban blacks and Southern whites together, but that couldn't last, and when the natural tug of a two-party system toward competitive balance re-asserted itself, civil rights managed to be a winning proposition among Democrats.

The old equilibrium was dead; Southern white racists would never truly be comfortable in the Democratic party unless they could exorcise this new component. And they never could. Democrats walked irrevocably out of the shadow of states' rights and into the light of human rights, and Republicans filled the void. This all happened in stages: Strom winning the Deep South as a Dixiecrat in '48, Goldwater taking the Deep South for the GOP for the first time since Reconstruction in '64, Wallace in '68 and Nixon's Southern Strategy in '72, and then Reagan, Bush and Bush just plain winning the South, and that was all there was to it. Except, of course, that the Dixiecrat wing held on for a hell of a lot longer in Congress, dying a final death only in 1994 (that's what that election was all about!), and the Democratic dominance in nominal party ID and in governorships in the South may only have died this past year, though the former at least has been a pure fiction for over a decade.

The result of this gradual sloughing off of the Dixiecrat wing of the Democrats and the subsequent filling-in of that vacuum by Republicans, which was then accompanied by a sloughing-off of the Rockefeller wing of the Republicans and a filling-in of that vacuum by Democrats, is that we no longer have cognitive dissonance in our parties. For forty years, neither party really knew what it was. Were Democrats the party of Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey? Or Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and conservative committee chairs? Who knew? It was both; it couldn't decide. As for Republicans: Rockefeller vs. Goldwater. It couldn't decide. This was an unnatural state: we had two supposedly national political organizations that had no particular governing ideology between them, that did not represent genuine ideological coalitions.

Well, that's changed now. We know who the parties are. Republicans are the party of corporate interests, libertarian and/or small-government interests, military interests, conservative religious interests, and racist interests. Democrats are the party of worker's interests, social-democratic interests, internationalist interests, secular and/or culturally progressive interests, and minority interests. So we're at equilibrium, both parties know what they are, what they want to be, and they are both competitive on that basis. So there's no reason for them to change the formula; thus, the second Great Competitive Era of American politics.

Will it end? Yes, definitely before too long and possibly sooner than that. Sarah Palin could receive a drubbing in 2012; we're due for a proper landslide. Or, theoretically, the Republicans could genuinely split themselves in 2012, with Palin running as a third-partier. Or we could have another close election in 2012, and maybe even in 2016. It feels to me like the Republican party's ideological coalition is stranger bedfellows than the Democrats', but they also are happier to engage in blind partisanship against a common enemy, at least for the moment. What I do know is that being a party that routinely captures a whopping 35% of Hispanic votes in a decent year is not sustainable long-term. This means that eventually something will have to change, and the current holding pattern of the Presidential electoral map will shift again. I just don't know when.