Because that is how much the candidate we support got in an election with high unemployment, tepid growth, and high gas prices. Rerun the election with Romney as the incumbent and Obama as the challenger and how does it go? Sort of depressing isn’t it? Want to feel better? Reagan began his electoral career in the aftermath of an election in which the Republican candidate lost the popular vote by over twenty-two percent. What both situations have in common is the rough demographic strength of the two parties. In 1964 as today, the marginal voter did not consider herself a Republican or a Republican-leaner and found herself unmoved by the kinds of appeals made by conservatives of the moment. There is no longer a latent majority Republican coalition at the presidential level absent unusually favorable circumstances and the demographic trends are in the direction of further weakening. We can take solace from Reagan. Even though LBJ’s winning margin was swollen by nearly ideal circumstances, Reagan faced a similar challenge. Regan was in the position of having to assemble a majority coalition that did not yet exist. The bad news is that it has been so long since the Republicans have had to create a new electoral majority that they have forgotten how or don’t even know that they have to do so.
Take Sharron Angle. Her ideological rationale was that she was a principled fighter who was one of us (real conservatives.) The problem was that, while being a decent enough person, she was incredibly terrible at fielding critical questions or explaining herself to people who didn’t already agree with her. When she didn’t go on right-leaning outlets that spoon fed her questions, she was a mess. Her nomination would have made a lot more sense if “real conservatives” were a preexisting majority in Nevada, but they aren’t. The best electoral rationale for Angle was that America is a “center-right” country and that the lousy economy would put her over the top. What else was the median voter going to do? Vote Democrat?
Karl Rove is a different version of the same problem. Rove is much more sophisticated than Angle about swing-voters. The problem is that he is sophisticated about the swing-voters of 1988. Rove has refined his campaign strategies so well that George H. W. Bush would have won by a couple more percentage points and picked up West Virginia and Wisconsin. Rove was able to turn many of the 1988 swing voters into part of the Republican base. The problem is that what Rove was doing was reassembling the coalition that Reagan constructed even as it was in demographic decline.
For the last twenty-eight years, Republican politicians and consultants have been spending down Reagan’s political capital. Our challenge is to do what Reagan did from 1965-1984. It is to create a majority coalition (under reasonably favorable circumstances) out of our present minority status. We need to see what Reagan did when he was in the minority.
December 21st, 2012 | 11:13 pm
Pete,
I am skeptical about the possibility of creating a new Republican majority under present circumstances – even if it is possible to call into existence a class of Republican politicians and political operatives more competent than Sharon Angle and more insightful than Karl Rove. In this regard, I commend to your attention the following excerpt from a recent blog post by Roger Kimball:
“Fifteen years ago I remember reading of a lifelong British republican who, confronted by the tsunami of public grief at the death of the Princess of Wales, announced that he was a convert to monarchism. The British people, in his opinion, had shown themselves to be not politically mature enough to live under a republican form of government. I myself felt a little bit the same way after the recent presidential election in this country. The American people had voted — and for the second time! — for someone who had based his appeal to them on a promise to stand in loco parentis to a childlike people, taught to expect that they could continue to receive ever more good things from government which they themselves would not have to pay for. Obviously enough, not only are we no longer the nation of mature, independent, self-reliant adults envisaged by the Constitution’s framers, we don’t even aspire to be that anymore.”
December 22nd, 2012 | 1:18 am
[...] Because that is how much the candidate we support got in an election with high unemployment, tepid growth, and high gas prices. Rerun the election with Romney as the incumbent Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
December 22nd, 2012 | 1:28 pm
[...] Lessons From Reagan Part II: We Are The 47% – Pete Spiliakos, PoMoCon [...]
December 22nd, 2012 | 1:45 pm
Pete,
I think that’s a spot-on analysis. Unpacking the Reagan wave, I believe he rode three major social trends, plus got a lucky break:
1. The great Dixiecrat realignment, kicked off by Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act (“I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come”), but solidified by the detoxification of the Republican brand in the South by Goldwater and Reagan.
2. The simultaneous rise of East Asian manufacturing and structured finance (the Honda Civic launched in 1972, Drexel Burnham in 1973), which created an enormous shift in political power from labor to capital.
3. The rise of evangelical political activism (as exemplified by the Moral Majority), in reaction to progressive victories in the culture wars (notably, Roe).
The lucky break was the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini, in two respects. First, there was the humiliation of the hostage crisis, and particularly the failure of Operation Eagle Claw (aka “Desert One”). Secondly, there was the economic effects of the oil supply shock caused by the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war three months before the election.
As I look at the current landscape for anything out there from which a similar wave might be constructed, I’m coming up empty (although, in fairness, that’s really your job). However, I do observe the following:
1. In the consumer technology / new media sector (a key economic driver for the next twenty years), the Republican brand is nearly a complete writeoff. Look at this, it’s astonishing:
http://peninsulapress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Screen-Shot-2012-11-06-at-8.54.45-PM.png
2. Amongst the Millennial Generation (an increasingly important electoral demographic), Republicans are at an 18% to 45% party-ID disadvantage to Democrats.
3. California, the 1970′s launching pad of the Reagan Revolution and the Howard Jarvis tax revolt, has just elected a Democratic supermajority to the state legislature. Historically, there is a tendency for California political trends to spread nationwide, sooner or later.
4. Progressives have won the culture wars. Hot-button topics that were political suicide just a decade ago–gay marriage, pot legalization–are now mainstream.
5. Broad trends are working against American exceptionalism. Demographic: kids these days have no memory of the post-war American colossus, only a couple morally-ambiguous failed wars. Technological: the Internet has shrunk the world dramatically; the Gangnam Style phenomenon would have been incomprehensible to the foot-soldiers of the Reagan Revolution. Economic: 30 years of Chicago School nostrums have resulted in declining real wages for most workers, culminating in a spectacular near-depression (and most people aren’t buying the story that the economic collapse was caused by liberals forcing the banks to lend money to Black people).
This last trend, the decline of exceptionalism, I think may prove to be the most influential over the next 20 years. Amongst leading developed economies, American politics and policy currently is an extreme right-wing outlier. Consider that, of the major Western European powers, the UK has the most right-wing social, economic, and foreign policy. Yet the Conservative Party in the UK has social, economic, and foreign policy that is to the left of the Obama administration. Mainstream Democratic Party politics in the U.S. is already very much to the right, by the measure of nearly every industrialized democracy on the planet.
If Americans ever start looking around at how other societies work, they may start thinking about how it is, for example, that the heavily-taxed, heavily-regulated Danes are the happiest people on the planet.
In any case, I look forward with interest to seeing your counter-trends.
December 22nd, 2012 | 6:13 pm
Oh, djf, it’s worse than Roger Kimball supposes! Remember the Pony-Tailed Guy at the faux townhall style presidential debate in 1992? I do. That ups the count to 4 times the American people went loco for a candidate who’d be their daddy-president.
December 22nd, 2012 | 7:51 pm
Micha Elyi – I see your point. But I think the paternalism of the current president goes far beyond anything offered by Bill Clinton (or, for that matter, George W Bush, who was no rugged individualist himself).
December 22nd, 2012 | 8:00 pm
djf (and Michael too here), my impression is that there a nontrivial number younger and/or nonwhite Americans who have opinions on say abortion and taxes that are closer to the Republican than the Democrat. There is another group that is basically ideologically unformed. What the two groups have in common is a Democrat identity rather than a Democratic policy orientation. The understand that Democrats as the party of their interests and the Republicans as the party counter to their interests and these are unconnected (or sometimes even negatively correlated) with their policy preferences. this isn’t getting into peer effects. When Republican are a small enough population within a group there are social consequences to a member of a group not being on board. Sometimes it manifests as a vocal minority of the group hissing and a silent majority visibly seething – and it isn’t because they are hardcore opponents of premium support Medicare. Not entirely new. Think Reagan talking to employees who seeing FDR as a savior and who associate the Republicans with Herbert Hoover.
These are people to whom the Republicans have never spoken in any comprehensible way. Ideological positioning as such can’t do much here. Scott Brown is no better off with these voters than Todd Akin. He seems like he is more attractive to “swing-votes” but these were (white, older) swing-voters who voted for Reagan in 1984 and Bill Weld in 1990. Policy positions can help, but only if they are communicated effectively and only if they are relevant to people’s lives.
And a word about communicating. the center-right is just lost. The obviously lost think something like “Well, surely they heard about the Tea Party rally on the Hannity show. What more can we do? the country has turned into a bunch of takers, etc. ” The less obviously (but just as) lost think “Well, I gave Karl Rove one million dollars to run thirty ads against cap and trade. What can we do? The country has turned into a bunch of takers etc.
December 22nd, 2012 | 8:37 pm
Michael, on your first set of points,
1. I wouldn’t press that point too much. A lot of those Southern white Democrats who voted for Reagan in 1980 were cheering for Nixon’s wage and price controls in the early 1970s. There were a lot of ways that constituency could have gone (as National Review’s James Burnham pointed out at the time.) And Reagan also won in states like New York and New Jersey (not hotbeds of Dixiecratism.) I do think there are populations that Republicans can make gain among – though it will be very hard.
2. I just don’t see how this helped Reagan win votes in 1980 and 1984 or why he did unusually well (for a Republican) among union members (which I think was also the case in his California races.)
3. Definitely something there, but still a lot unexplained when it comes to how well Regan did among non-evangelical working-class and suburban (and young!) whites outside the South. A lot of our memories of the Reagan coalition is colored by the more Southern and evangelical Protestant coalition that reelected Bush in 2004.
Lucky break: The hostage crisis is hugely overrated in its impact on the 1980 general election. Check out Carter’s job approval ratings from mid-1979 to November 1980. You see an Omega formed by the public reaction to the hostage crisis as Carter’s job Approval goes up and then goes down to the pre-crisis levels. All the forces that were driving Carter’s job approval rating in 1979 were still there in 1980 along with a recession in the early part of the year. Carter was on track for exactly the kind of general election defeat he got prior to the hostage crisis. The main effect of the crisis was to help Carter hold off Ted Kennedy. I believe Austin Ranney made just that point right after the 1980 election. The invasion of Afghanistan probably did help as it moved public opinion (and Carter administration policy) closer to Regan’s views on matters like defense spending levels.
On the second set,
1.& 2. The Republicans are presently lost in this area (see above comment.) Utterly lost. That doesn’t mean it will stay that way. the right of the Republican party was just as lost in 1964. This is something they need to work on. I hope that amid the farce of the GOP House infighting, someone at the RNC is thinking these media messaging problems through. When the Republicans get better (which means recognizing their problems) they will do better within those two sectors.
3. I’m not sure I would stake the future of the Democratic party on the success of Democratic governance in that state – which I fear may become a cautionary example. Though California example is important for what happens to the Republican party that fails to market itself to rising population groups.
4. Prior to this election, younger voters were more pro-life than their immediate elders. The total incompetence and lack of interest of the Republican party (and allied groups) in making an argument (other than the odd idiotic act of theodicy) seems to have reversed that trend. I think that is a winnable issue. I don’t think the marijuana issue is a problem for the Republicans.
5. I’m not fan of American Exceptionalist rhetoric, but I think Ross Douthat had some good arguments about why the US is not going to adopt the full policy aparat of Scandinavian countries and why it probably wouldn’t work out so well if we did (though that doesn’t mean there aren’t distinct policies we should adopt. http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/21/can-we-be-sweden/
Whatever happens, America will, for better and worse, be very different from Denmark (or whoever) in policy and political culture. I just don’t know what those differences will be.
December 22nd, 2012 | 9:26 pm
Pete – You make some good points, but I’m still not particularly optimistic. In particular, I don’t think Kimball’s reference to people who want to be taken care of was limited to those who don’t pay taxes, or even to people in the middle class or lower. The desire to be taken care of can be seen in affluent women who demand that the cost of their birth control be covered by insurance, and by businessmen who are pleased to pay higher taxes and to submit to more reglation if the government will protect them from failure, to give two examples.
True, a person who is “ideologically unformed” does not go around reciting talking points he read in an E.J. Dionne column, but, by the same token, neither does that person aspire to live in the kind of country the US used to be (no, I’m not claiming there was ever a “golden age”). Since that kind of common ground no longer exists in the culture, you need a particular ideological orientation to have those kind of aspirations (this is a problem Reagan did not face). You eventually might be able to get through to some significant fraction of younger voters through better communication, but I doubt it would be a large enough number, for a long enough period of time, in a sufficient number of states, to effect a big change in the nation’s trajectory.
Well, I’m just an amateur at this sort of thing, so maybe my pessimism is unwarranted. Hope so.
December 23rd, 2012 | 5:31 pm
djf, I think you are taking too hostile a view of the motivations and policy preferences of some classes of Obama voters. A lot of them don’t want to go back to the way America “used to be”, but more because of the thought that there was an informal prohibition against someone like them being president than because they think IPAB is swell. There is room to work with in there.
December 24th, 2012 | 12:05 pm
Well, Pete, I was talking, not about minority voters, but about white, middle-class/working-class voters, who are drifting away from the Republicans and back towards the Democrats or staying home. I don’t think I’m being hostile toward these voters (who are victims of the misgovernment of this country by both parties over the last two generations), just realistic. And, as I had hoped to convey, the hostility to what used to be the consensus view of the American way (on both sides of the aisle) is pretty strong among the educated upper middle class and wealthy. What is new is not support for a federal safety net and prudent federal regulation in the public interest (that has been with us since WWII, and has never been repudiated), but the belief that the government ought to pull all of the important strings in the entire economy – to be the “Godfather” of the market (recall the logo of the Godfather books and movies – that’s how Obama sees himself and how he sold himself to voters), and what seems to approach actual celebration of dependency and dysfunction. I’m not a historian, but I don’t think the latter was hinted at by anything in old-time Progessivism, in the New Deal (even FDR’s first term) or midcentury consensus liberalism.
Incidentally, people of middle class origin were never excluded from political power in this country. Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton all came from, at best, middle class backgrounds (those are just presidential examples). If younger Americans are unaware of this, it is partly because they are massively misinformed about the country’s history, and partly because social advancement is increasingly difficult for young people. The Left is at least as responsible as the Right for the latter change.
If you are suggesting that Republicans can come back by marketing themselves specifically to blacks, Latinos, Asians and women, I would respectfully suggest that you are indulging a pleasant fanatasy.
December 26th, 2012 | 8:53 pm
djf,
“Incidentally, people of middle class origin were never excluded from political power in this country.”
I think is more about a seeming (emphasis seeming) nostalgia for a time when presidents were white. People hear things differently especially when the rhetoric is to take the country back from the first African-American president. One can argue that Howard Dean used the take out country back rhetoric too, but notice he never got to be president.
“If you are suggesting that Republicans can come back by marketing themselves specifically to blacks, Latinos, Asians and women,”
I’m not entirely sure what that means. Certainly I don’t think that Republicans should have an African-American platform, an Asian-American platform, etc. I do think Republicans are doing a terrible job of making themselves heard to large swaths of the population and haven’t had much to say to people who are already socialized into the center-right narrative.
Some people out there thought Romney was going to raise taxes on the middle-class. Another, probably much larger group heard Romney’s tax message as:
1. Cut taxes on somebody else.
2. XXX
3. A better life for you.
That is a problem that they can do better with.
“but the belief that the government ought to pull all of the important strings in the entire economy – to be the “Godfather” of the market (recall the logo of the Godfather books and movies – that’s how Obama sees himself and how he sold himself to voters), and what seems to approach actual celebration of dependency and dysfunction. ”
I don’t think that is a fair description of the beliefs of a substantial number of Obama voters who would be either hostile or uncomprehending of such an approach to government much less that Obama believed in it. And some who might agree with it (couched in less hostile terms – public-private partnerships to Win The Future) might be argued out of that position.
“white, middle-class/working-class voters, who are drifting away from the Republicans and back towards the Democrats or staying home.”
I dunno. Lots of things going on here. Young white voters really have different opinions on same sex marriage and many haven’t been socialized into any right-leaning narrative. Henry Olsen pointed out that working-class white weren’t given much to vote for by Romney. And for all that, the Republicans still did better among whites than they have in over twenty years.
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