Unconventional Wisdom
Asterisks for the Political Rulebook
By JOYCE PURNICK
IF Democrats really do shake up Republicans on Tuesday, voters will have pulled off more than an upset. They will have turned that convenient tool of politics — Conventional Wisdom — right on its head.
We won’t know what the voters do until they do it, and this is a good time to recall that the accuracy of polls and prognostications depends on who votes. But so far, the electorate seems poised to reject a number of political tenets so entrenched that they are paraded as fact. And now — maybe not.
Remember the popular principle that all politics is local? That truism, often wrongly attributed to House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., is so old it originated with Finley Peter Dunne (1867 to 1936). But the polls reveal that the public’s anger over the administration’s policies in Iraq, and concern about illegal immigration and health care, has nationalized the election — a phenomenon that has political scientists borrowing from meteorologists.
“We’re seeing the tsunami of political waves hitting,” said Michael McDonald, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The Republicans built up really strong walls, and if this wave had not been as strong as it was it would’ve crashed up against the levee and that would have been that. But this one looks like it can top the levee.”
Those walls refer to another article of faith — the safe Congressional district, gerrymandered by both parties to protect incumbents, most recently and very effectively by Republicans. Their majority was supposed to be all but inviolate. As recently as last spring, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report and other analysts rated only 12 out of 435 House districts as “tossups” and 20 others as in play to some degree. Now, many of the same analysts rate 35 districts as tossups and consider 27 more to be in play.
Even the higher numbers are not startling as percentages of the entire House. Republicans did indeed build a strong protective structure, and much of it is expected to hold. But the chances of Democrats’ gaining the 15 additional seats they need to take the House — at the least — have grown sharply, and some optimistic Democrats are daring to dream of taking the Senate, too.
There is the matter of money, and the Republican Party’s customary advantage in fund-raising. The latest figures show they have once again bested Democrats. But Democrats have narrowed the gap compared with recent Congressional elections, largely because their Senate committee raised more than its Republican counterpart.
Another curiosity this year: Republicans haven’t been able to take full advantage of their fund-raising wealth because, victims of their own past success, they have so many seats to protect. Democrats have many fewer seats to defend, which lets them target their spending in opposition territory.
And to add a few more articles of faith now in doubt: voters were thought not to trust Democrats to defend the country; Democrats were considered chronically allergic to nominating centrist candidates; and the White House’s political wizard, Karl Rove, could commit no strategic wrong.
Some of them may hold up, as might another tenet — that the party in the White House loses Congressional seats in off-years. But what about all those conventional wisdoms? Were they wrong? Misunderstood? Were those who bought into them naïve, biased?
Political analysts say that some of the popular theories were oversimplified, some exaggerated, some tenuous, but that the predominant ones were accurate — once. Political theories hold as long as the circumstances underlying them hold. When circumstances change and the theories do not — welcome, it would seem, to campaign 2006.
“All politics is local, except when it isn’t,” said John Samples, an analyst with the Cato Institute. “National waves are unusual, but they do exist.”
They come about once every decade or two, the last time in 1994 when Republicans took Congress handily, capitalizing on public disaffection over the economy, the Clinton administration’s health care proposal and a controversy over gays in the military. Democrats had their turn in 1974, when the Watergate scandal forced Richard M. Nixon to resign.
This time it is the war in Iraq. “Iraq cost Bush 5, 6 percent of the vote in ’04,” Mr. Samples said. “It wasn’t noticed closely because he won anyway. But it has been a festering problem and now it is nationalizing the race.”
The seeds of today’s public discontent may well have taken root two years ago even as another piece of conventional wisdom — that the election was all about values — took hold. According to an Edison/Mitofsky survey of voters exiting the polls two years ago, 22 percent of those interviewed cited values as the issue that mattered most. But as The Economist noted recently, 15 percent cited Iraq, 19 percent cited terrorism — 34 percent combined.
Now Democrats are running against the war and the White House. The battle for United States Senate in New Jersey, between Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat, and Thomas H. Kean Jr., Republican, is a study in warring strategies. Mr. Menendez portrays his opponent as a Bush acolyte, while Mr. Kean characterizes Mr. Menendez as an active player in classically corrupt New Jersey politics.
In a Democratic ad against Representative Christopher Shays, a moderate Republican from Connecticut, disapproving men and women shake their heads as they invoke the president and the war over and over again.
There are other factors that could lead to change. Some weak candidates emerged from primaries, and some incumbents got into political trouble — among them Representative Bob Ney of Ohio and Tom DeLay of Texas, the former House leader, both Republicans shadowed by their links to Jack Abramoff, the convicted lobbyist. Democrats will most likely succeed them. Some candidates were hurt by their connections to the Congressional page mess or personal scandals, and in the Florida Senate race, the Republican candidate, Representative Katherine Harris, has been running a problem-plagued campaign from its inception.
“Some of it is just bad luck,” said Amy Walter, who analyzes Congressional races for the Cook report. She also cited the flipside of long-term success in strong Republican districts represented by loyal elected officials. “As the party’s fortunes started to fall,” she said, “there was no way for these candidates to distance themselves from their party.”
Gerrymandering has a flip side, too. To carve out the largest number of partisan districts, officials run the risk of spreading their loyal voters too thin. G. Terry Madonna, who runs the Keystone Poll at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, said that Pennsylvania Republicans who controlled the last round of redistricting “got greedy” — creating some districts with favorable balances too small to survive a wave of discontent.
Gerrymandering is not always effective anyway, says Bruce Cain, an expert on redistricting who heads the University of California’s Washington Center. “There were people exaggerating the effects of redistricting, largely because they wanted redistricting reform,” he said. And no redistricting plan can accurately anticipate demographic shifts that change a district’s makeup, or whether voters will change their minds.
“It’s never exactly static,” said Mr. Cain. “People shift from being independent to moderate or back to independent. Redistricting is good only as long as preferences are stable.”
Maybe that’s why both parties are already talking about 2008. Republicans are saying any Democrats who might sweep into office Tuesday will, as freshmen, be vulnerable to defeat in just two years. And Democrats are saying hold on — if they run a strong presidential candidate in two years the party could be just fine. It could be in power for a decade. Maybe two.
Ah, politics. How better to start the next election cycle than with two more pieces of conventional wisdom?
By JOYCE PURNICK
IF Democrats really do shake up Republicans on Tuesday, voters will have pulled off more than an upset. They will have turned that convenient tool of politics — Conventional Wisdom — right on its head.
We won’t know what the voters do until they do it, and this is a good time to recall that the accuracy of polls and prognostications depends on who votes. But so far, the electorate seems poised to reject a number of political tenets so entrenched that they are paraded as fact. And now — maybe not.
Remember the popular principle that all politics is local? That truism, often wrongly attributed to House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., is so old it originated with Finley Peter Dunne (1867 to 1936). But the polls reveal that the public’s anger over the administration’s policies in Iraq, and concern about illegal immigration and health care, has nationalized the election — a phenomenon that has political scientists borrowing from meteorologists.
“We’re seeing the tsunami of political waves hitting,” said Michael McDonald, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The Republicans built up really strong walls, and if this wave had not been as strong as it was it would’ve crashed up against the levee and that would have been that. But this one looks like it can top the levee.”
Those walls refer to another article of faith — the safe Congressional district, gerrymandered by both parties to protect incumbents, most recently and very effectively by Republicans. Their majority was supposed to be all but inviolate. As recently as last spring, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report and other analysts rated only 12 out of 435 House districts as “tossups” and 20 others as in play to some degree. Now, many of the same analysts rate 35 districts as tossups and consider 27 more to be in play.
Even the higher numbers are not startling as percentages of the entire House. Republicans did indeed build a strong protective structure, and much of it is expected to hold. But the chances of Democrats’ gaining the 15 additional seats they need to take the House — at the least — have grown sharply, and some optimistic Democrats are daring to dream of taking the Senate, too.
There is the matter of money, and the Republican Party’s customary advantage in fund-raising. The latest figures show they have once again bested Democrats. But Democrats have narrowed the gap compared with recent Congressional elections, largely because their Senate committee raised more than its Republican counterpart.
Another curiosity this year: Republicans haven’t been able to take full advantage of their fund-raising wealth because, victims of their own past success, they have so many seats to protect. Democrats have many fewer seats to defend, which lets them target their spending in opposition territory.
And to add a few more articles of faith now in doubt: voters were thought not to trust Democrats to defend the country; Democrats were considered chronically allergic to nominating centrist candidates; and the White House’s political wizard, Karl Rove, could commit no strategic wrong.
Some of them may hold up, as might another tenet — that the party in the White House loses Congressional seats in off-years. But what about all those conventional wisdoms? Were they wrong? Misunderstood? Were those who bought into them naïve, biased?
Political analysts say that some of the popular theories were oversimplified, some exaggerated, some tenuous, but that the predominant ones were accurate — once. Political theories hold as long as the circumstances underlying them hold. When circumstances change and the theories do not — welcome, it would seem, to campaign 2006.
“All politics is local, except when it isn’t,” said John Samples, an analyst with the Cato Institute. “National waves are unusual, but they do exist.”
They come about once every decade or two, the last time in 1994 when Republicans took Congress handily, capitalizing on public disaffection over the economy, the Clinton administration’s health care proposal and a controversy over gays in the military. Democrats had their turn in 1974, when the Watergate scandal forced Richard M. Nixon to resign.
This time it is the war in Iraq. “Iraq cost Bush 5, 6 percent of the vote in ’04,” Mr. Samples said. “It wasn’t noticed closely because he won anyway. But it has been a festering problem and now it is nationalizing the race.”
The seeds of today’s public discontent may well have taken root two years ago even as another piece of conventional wisdom — that the election was all about values — took hold. According to an Edison/Mitofsky survey of voters exiting the polls two years ago, 22 percent of those interviewed cited values as the issue that mattered most. But as The Economist noted recently, 15 percent cited Iraq, 19 percent cited terrorism — 34 percent combined.
Now Democrats are running against the war and the White House. The battle for United States Senate in New Jersey, between Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat, and Thomas H. Kean Jr., Republican, is a study in warring strategies. Mr. Menendez portrays his opponent as a Bush acolyte, while Mr. Kean characterizes Mr. Menendez as an active player in classically corrupt New Jersey politics.
In a Democratic ad against Representative Christopher Shays, a moderate Republican from Connecticut, disapproving men and women shake their heads as they invoke the president and the war over and over again.
There are other factors that could lead to change. Some weak candidates emerged from primaries, and some incumbents got into political trouble — among them Representative Bob Ney of Ohio and Tom DeLay of Texas, the former House leader, both Republicans shadowed by their links to Jack Abramoff, the convicted lobbyist. Democrats will most likely succeed them. Some candidates were hurt by their connections to the Congressional page mess or personal scandals, and in the Florida Senate race, the Republican candidate, Representative Katherine Harris, has been running a problem-plagued campaign from its inception.
“Some of it is just bad luck,” said Amy Walter, who analyzes Congressional races for the Cook report. She also cited the flipside of long-term success in strong Republican districts represented by loyal elected officials. “As the party’s fortunes started to fall,” she said, “there was no way for these candidates to distance themselves from their party.”
Gerrymandering has a flip side, too. To carve out the largest number of partisan districts, officials run the risk of spreading their loyal voters too thin. G. Terry Madonna, who runs the Keystone Poll at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, said that Pennsylvania Republicans who controlled the last round of redistricting “got greedy” — creating some districts with favorable balances too small to survive a wave of discontent.
Gerrymandering is not always effective anyway, says Bruce Cain, an expert on redistricting who heads the University of California’s Washington Center. “There were people exaggerating the effects of redistricting, largely because they wanted redistricting reform,” he said. And no redistricting plan can accurately anticipate demographic shifts that change a district’s makeup, or whether voters will change their minds.
“It’s never exactly static,” said Mr. Cain. “People shift from being independent to moderate or back to independent. Redistricting is good only as long as preferences are stable.”
Maybe that’s why both parties are already talking about 2008. Republicans are saying any Democrats who might sweep into office Tuesday will, as freshmen, be vulnerable to defeat in just two years. And Democrats are saying hold on — if they run a strong presidential candidate in two years the party could be just fine. It could be in power for a decade. Maybe two.
Ah, politics. How better to start the next election cycle than with two more pieces of conventional wisdom?
posted by greenpagan at 5:12 PM
1 Comments:
If the Republicans want to recover they'll have to run someone strong that can take them in a more positive direction in 2008.
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