It’s common knowledge that when the US Democratic Party forms a firing squad they stand in a circle. And all the signs are that the party’s warring factions are gearing up for another round of internal bloodletting. As Peter Beinart, editor of the Democrat-supporting New Republic magazine suggests: ‘Before the Democrats can confront President Bush, they must confront one another. The coming fight within the party will be much like the fight on crime, welfare, race and defence in the 1980s. It will be ugly.’ It is, however, just what the party needs right now if it is to mount a credible challenge to Bush in 2004.
The Democrats need not, however, accept the line peddled by the Republicans that the elections represent either a sweeping personal mandate for Bush or a massive endorsement of his rightwing agenda. Since the mid-1990s, the US has been a ‘50-50’ nation, split evenly between its support for Democrats and Republicans.
In this year’s elections, the Republicans regained control of the Senate and strengthened their position in the House of Representatives thanks to a net loss by the Democrats of only two Senate seats and five House seats. The Democrats also made overall gains of three governorships – leaving each party in control of the running of 25 states. The Democrats were exceedingly unlucky, with a number of ‘battleground’ Senate seats breaking narrowly for the Republicans on election day. They lost Missouri 50 percent to 49 percent, Minnesota 50 percent to 47 percent and New Hampshire 51 percent to 47 percent.
Thus, as pollster Ruy Teixeira argues, ‘the very evenness of the partisan division in the country lends itself to sudden lurches in political power driven by only small switches in public sentiment. And that’s what we had in this election.’ Compare 2002’s results with the 1994 mid-term elections when, two years into Bill Clinton’s first term, the Republicans gained 52 House seats, nine seats in the Senate and ten governorships.
None of this, however, escapes the fact that the Democrats have suffered an historic defeat. Since Lincoln’s day, the incumbent president’s party has only three times added seats in the first mid-term election. Since 1946, in each such election, the party of the incumbent president has lost an average of 25 seats in the House and four in the Senate. Not since Dwight Eisenhower, moreover, have the Republicans controlled the Senate, House and presidency for a full two-year term (as they will undoubtedly do now until the general election in 2004).
Even more damningly, the Republicans made their gains at a time when the country’s economic woes should have benefited the Democrats as the ‘out party’. On election day, polls found that 70 percent of voters thought economic conditions were only fair or poor. With good reason: since Bush came into office less than two years ago, the budget surplus he inherited from Clinton has been frittered away, the stock market has collapsed, unemployment has risen sharply and economic growth is anaemic. Consumer confidence is at its lowest level since 1993 when Clinton entered the White House.
The reason that the results came as a surprise to so many reflects the fact that few opinion polls picked up the swing towards the Republicans which occurred in the final few days of the campaign. That surge, moreover, coincided with, and was intimately related to, President Bush’s five-day, non-stop tour of battleground states to campaign for Republican candidates. The President has, in fact, been on the campaign trail for his party’s candidates for most of the year – raising money and hoping that his strong personal popularity can be turned into votes for them.
The White House, in the form of Bush’s political and policy svengali, Karl Rove, has been more closely involved with the running of these elections than any administration in living memory. Rove not only seized control of the national party machine in order to distribute campaign dollars to preferred candidates, he also worked behind the scenes in internal party elections to support those candidates whom he calculated had the best chance of holding Republican seats and defeating Democrat incumbents.
Bush’s stump speech for Republican candidates was shameless in its bid to capitalise on the ‘war on terrorism’, urging voters to send him a Congress which would, in his view, help, not hinder, his attempts to make the US more secure. The strategy paid off: polls indicated that the prime reason people gave for considering voting Republican was to ‘support the war on terrorism and a strong military’. The second most important reason was ‘to support President Bush’. The Republicans were picked by 39 percent more voters than the Democrats as the party most likely to make the US more secure.
The result of this strategy, according to the Los Angeles Times’ political correspondent, Ronald Brownstein, was that ‘the central elements of the Republican coalition surged to the polls to support George W Bush.’ Republican voters, he believes, have developed ‘an electric personal connection’ with their President’. By contrast, Democrat supporters didn’t turn out in anywhere near the same numbers in their strongholds – urban areas – while the party lost some ground in the suburbs, which had been attracted by Bill Clinton during the 1990s and which, for the most part, had remained loyal to his Vice President’s bid for the top job in 2000.
But the Democrats did not simply falter in the face of a patriotic wave which carried Republican voters to the polls. The party adopted what might be termed the ‘Basil Fawlty strategy’ in 2002, which can be summed up in just four words: ‘don’t mention the war’. Instead, it attempted to turn the focus onto domestic issues, in a manner which is now provoking a heated debate between the party’s left and the centrist ‘New Democrats’ who crafted Clinton’s rise to power. According to the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, it is clear the Democrats suffered from a pointless pursuit of the ‘mushy middle’. Bob Borosage, director of the Campaign for America’s Future, reiterated this message, arguing that, ‘concerned about placating the conservative and money wings of the party, the Democratic leaders consciously chose to put forth no national agenda at all.’
The New Democrat Democratic Leadership Council agrees with liberals that the party needs to adopt ‘a bigger, bolder, clearer agenda and message.’ However, the DLC disagree that this clarity should be achieved by ‘moving to the left, creating partisan differentiation at any cost, and engaging in more negative campaigning against the Republicans and the President in order to energise the Democratic base.’ Floating voters, according to the DLC, are sick of the negative campaigning and shrill style of politics adopted by the Republicans against Clinton in the 1990s and will punish the Democrats if they try to adopt a similar strategy now.
The DLC believes the party’s concentration on individual government programmes rather than values, themes and broad national agendas on, for instance, national security and reviving the economy, cost it dear: ‘After four straight election cycles of campaigning on an agenda pretty much limited to promising the moon on prescription drugs and attacking Republicans on social security, it’s time for the congressional wing of the party, and the political consultants who have relentlessly promoted this message as an electoral silver bullet, to bury it once and for all.’
The Democratic Party is notoriously fractious. However, it should be remembered that its last major bout of ideological infighting in the late 1980s allowed Bill Clinton, its only successful presidential candidate in the past quarter of a century, to emerge. Together with the DLC, Clinton developed a message that united the party and carried him to victory in the 1992 election. Based on the values of opportunity, responsibility and community, and policies to revive the economy, invest in education and training, reform welfare, extend healthcare and tackle crime, it proved not only good for the political fortunes of the Democratic Party but also for the social and economic fabric of the United States. The Democrats don’t have to reinvent the wheel, they simply need to cast their minds back ten years.