The New Republicans: 50% of the voters, 95% of the power.
Conventional wisdom has it that Democrats are out of touch and unfit for electoral combat. But in a recent Slate column (Kick Me, I’m a Democrat), Michael Kinsley challenges that growing perspective, pointing out that Democrats are not being shut out in massively one-sided elections, they are being edged out, and just barely at that. Even in deepest red-state America, he reminds us, blue voters are only a little less common than red voters. And beyond that, if you poll people about the national agenda, on an issue by issue basis, the country solidly backs most Democratic objectives, and rejects the Republican alternatives. So, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Democrats are very much in the hunt—given a slightly better strategy or a small shift in the landscape, the tables might easily be turned.
It’s a hard position to argue with. Much of it is beyond question. This graphical analysis, for example, bears out the demographic point with mind-blowing clarity. And Kinsley is, of course, right about the broad scale support for Democratic issues as well. In fact, he undersells it a little.
Strong support for ‘progressive’ programs has been there all along. It didn’t waver in 1980, the moment when Reagan’s election first promoted that progressive streak to the status of paradox. And the apparent contradiction has remained with us through all the rightward lurching the country has done in the decades since. In that context, it is hard to know what to make of those longstanding and deep-seated beliefs. But any trend that completely overlaps the period of Republican ascendancy can hardly be taken as a positive political sign, no matter how logical the connection appears.
Sadly, for reasons that Democratic Party leaders seem perennially incapable of explaining, issues no longer seem to matter. And the paradoxes don’t end there. Empirically speaking, thin Republican margins have been more than enough to invert the nation’s course, and to defend that reversal against a quarter century of Democratic attempts to right the ship of state.
It is that very tendency of Republicans to uncouple the normal rules of logic that justifies the gravest concern and casts the deepest doubt on Kinsley’s hopeful premise. In fact, the sheer magnitude of the power imbalance between the parties is sufficient reason for Democratic panic. The Republicans have tapped into some higher order truths that transcend the axioms of Democratic stoicism. Indeed, the fact that so many contests are won by Republicans on razor thin margins says a great deal more about thriftiness and sophistication on the part of the radical right than it does about the potential for meaningful Democratic victories in the near term.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Democrats won’t win more elections. They will. What I am saying is that victories won in the foreseeable future will be like Bill Clinton’s victories—they will succeed only in slowing the pace of the rightward slide, not in reversing it. In order to reverse course, the Democrats would need to make widespread gains and to sustain a sizable majority for a good long time. After all, it took the Republicans decades to do all this damage, and doing damage is quick work compared to building. Unfortunately, broad, sustained victories just ain’t in the cards for the left.
Here’s why:
In the modern incarnation of our democracy, votes can, in a sense, be purchased. Not directly, of course, but for a price, facts can be spun, opponents can be smeared, journalists can be cultivated, voter attitudes can be probed, and ads can be televised. Perhaps most importantly, swing constituencies can be promised a small measure of the power that flows from victory. It’s staggeringly expensive at one level, but swaying voters in this way is also a bargain given the vast sums at stake in governmental activity (or inactivity, as is more often the case).
But like all such pursuits, the search for capturable votes—or more accurately, the quest for favorable changes in the net totals—is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Weather operatives are cultivating apathy in opposition voters, winning ‘hearts and minds’ or motivating the faithful to turnout, the greater the margin of victory, the more it costs per voter. So naturally, the Republicans are reluctant to squander more treasure and political capital on a given race than that race demands. Sure, all else being equal, they would prefer that any given contest be won by a landslide. But all else is never equal. Mandates are expensive and most provide only a small measures of extra power. In any case, large margins do not provide a good return on investment compared to spending the surplus funds on some other race where a loss can be converted to a win. And so it goes, a more or less ‘global’ calculation : optimizing the real power returned on the dollars invested.
How well are the Republicans doing at this game? Analyses focused on electoral margins suggest that Republicans are doing better than the Democrats, though only slightly. But all such analyses are suspect because they are unable to explain the utter dominance of the Republican agenda throughout the last quarter century. The fact that the pendulum swung right in 1980 and just kept going suggests that the two parties are no longer in the same league. And indeed, the apparent imbalance must be real, for if the parties were truly in a dead heat, then luck, in the form of statistical noise and unpredictable events, would tend to throw equal numbers of close races and surprise victories to Democrats and Republicans.
But that’s not the way it works. An evenly divided nation has produced a very unevenly divided government because, when races are close they tend to go one way and not the other—barely, perhaps, but they go. Republicans have seemingly cornered the market on luck, which is to say, it isn’t luck at all. As events in a campaign favor Democrats, money is infused and tides turned. That process doesn’t even stop when the polls close anymore. In a sufficiently close race, the recount represents a fresh set of opportunities for money to be heard.
If the imbalance were an anomaly, that would be one thing. But it isn’t. The G.O.P. has had sufficient power to set the national agenda for 25+ years, and they have never had more power than they do today. This analysis at least provides a means to reconcile the fact that Republicans constitute only half of the voting electorate, with the observation that elected Republicans wield the vast majority of the power in the system. Margins cost, power pays. Consequently, the imbalance of power tells the real story, and margins say very little.
Obviously, this analysis does not bode well for the future. The profits reaped as a product of all that Republican power are staggering. It’s hard to know where to stop counting, but hundreds of billions of dollars are clearly won in this game over the course of an average election cycle. And surely, should the country show signs of changing course—something that has not occurred since Reagan’s first election—those core Republicans could easily afford to double or triple (or whatever) their investment in winning elections. And why wouldn’t they? When political power is a commodity, expect it to behave like one.