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Thursday, April 24, 2008
Great Democratic Divide Is No Problem
This is a column I put out on the wires at the beginning of April, before Pennsylvania. It still stands (except that I just added the sentence about Eisenhower):
Under the prevailing rules of opinion journalism, if you have a regular newspaper column, you are now supposed to write one that says Hillary Clinton’s persistence threatens to tear her party apart and give the presidential election to John McCain.
Every single columnist in the world has complied with this edict. Or so it seems, anyway.
Every one of them is flat wrong —- and in a way that demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of American democracy.
Our presidential election outcomes are not determined by such trivial matters as when a candidate gives up on winning a nomination.
We know this because the outcomes can be predicted without any reference to such trivia, indeed, before such trivial matters play out. Take 2008, just as an example: The Democrats will win. It’s a Democratic year. Period.
Can you think of a situation in which a president who is so unpopular has been succeeded by somebody of his own party? Doesn’t happen. If it did happen, there’d be no accountability for political parties.
But there is accountability. Put up somebody who works out (in the nation’s eyes) —- Ronald Reagan —- and you can hold on. Put up somebody who doesn’t, and prepare for a vacation from governmental responsibility.
Allan Lichtman, a professor of political history at American University in Washington, has a system for predicting the outcomes of presidential elections. It has arguably been successful every time it has been applied, starting with the 1984 election. (In truth, though, there’s a dispute about 1992.)
It can also be applied retroactively. If it is, it comes up with the winner in every election in the history of the current two-party system, that is, back to the Civil War.
He has isolated 13 factors that tend to distinguish between winners and losers. Each factor alone successfully predicts the outcome 60 percent or 70 percent of the time, or more. When you combine them, you get an overwhelmingly powerful system.
This year, these factors suggest the Democrats are on a roll: They made gains in the 2006 election; they don’t have to face an incumbent president; the economy has been growing more slowly in George W. Bush’s second term than it did in the previous eight years; he failed to enact any major change in the government’s direction in his second term; the Republicans have experienced a major foreign policy setback (being stuck in Iraq, with no end in sight); meanwhile they have had no great foreign policy success; and they don’t have a charismatic candidate or, alternatively, a national hero on the order of Dwight Eisenhower or Ulysses Grant.
That’s all the Democrats need.
But they might get still another “key” (as Lichtman calls them) if there’s a recession in the election year.
As for this business about the Democrats’ divisions, there is simply no evidence that such things matter. Bill Clinton won in 1992 despite not wrapping up the nomination until June. Franklin Roosevelt won in 1932 after a four-ballot convention. Woodrow Wilson’s nomination took dozens of ballots. Dwight Eisenhower’s nomination in 1952 came at a deeply divided convention and angered the conservatives who supported Ohio Sen. Robert Taft.
Intraparty divisions are harmful only for the party that already holds the presidency. Such division reflects and suggests widespread dissatisfaction with the country’s direction even within the governing party.
Division in the “out” party is taken for granted and has no such import. Some pundits point to polls showing that McCain now leads, though he didn’t a month ago, suggesting he is benefiting.
Polls, schmolls. Bill Clinton was behind in 1992 much later than this because he hadn’t wrapped up the nomination. In 1988, Michael Dukakis was ahead later than this, because he had wrapped up the nomination.
Anyway, the pundits who are so certain they know what the future holds are the same ones who were talking about Hillary Clinton’s “inevitability” last fall and her political death in New Hampshire.
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