The most remarkable feature of America’s election this autumn was perhaps just how unremarkable it was. True, the media – and the conservative movement – have deemed the election a triumph for George Bush, for ‘moral values’ and for the Republican party. And there is, of course, no denying that election night provided much for Republicans to cheer. In 2000, the Democrats could at least console themselves with winning the popular vote for president and small gains in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. This time, the Republicans upped their majorities in both houses of Congress and secured a 3.5m lead in the popular vote.
And it may seem like the Democrats have been conclusively shut out of power in Washington for the first time since Dwight Eisenhower sat in the White House in the 1950s. The Democrats may have suffered worse electoral defeats at the hands of Richard Nixon in 1972 or Ronald Reagan in the 1980s but, even at their nadir, the party still managed to keep control of at least one – and usually both – houses of Congress.
In reality, however, the picture is a little more complex: America remains a deeply divided, ‘50/50’ nation, the Democratic party is down but definitely not out, and there is little evidence to suggest that the mandate for a conservative revolution, which the president’s acolytes are claiming, actually exists.
Indeed, the manner in which some – on both left and right – have marvelled about Bush’s ‘triumph’ ignores some crucial facts. First, compared to the last three incumbent presidents who have won re-election, Bush’s performance – 286 electoral college votes and 51 per cent of the vote, was weak. In 1972, Richard Nixon polled 61 per cent of the vote and carried 520 electoral votes. In 1984, Ronald Reagan took 59 per cent of the vote, winning 525 electoral votes. In 1996, Bill Clinton won 379 votes in the electoral college and 49 per cent of the vote.
Clinton’s 49 per cent exposes the second somewhat disingenuous claim about the scale of Bush’s victory: that he is the first presidential candidate since 1988 to win a majority of the popular vote. This is, of course, true. However, it ignores the fact that this was the first election since 1988 where there was no effective third-party competition – Ralph Nader polled only a negligible number of votes compared to both his performance in 2000 or Ross Perot’s highly impressive 19 per cent of the vote in 1992 and eight per cent in 1996. Indeed, academics calculate that in a two-party race, Clinton would have polled a majority of the vote in both 1992 and 1996. In the year of his re-election, this has been estimated at nearly 55 per cent.
Finally, the Republicans have been talking about 2004 in terms usually reserved for the kind of watershed elections – Roosevelt’s victory in 1932 or Reagan’s in 1980 – which usher in a new political era as large number of voters shift from their previous allegiance to a new one. In reality, the number of voters identifying themselves as Republican (37 per cent), Democrat (37 per cent) and independent (26 per cent), hardly shifted dramatically from four years ago, when the figures were 35-39-27. The Republicans achieved parity with the Democrats this year – not domination.
It is, therefore, continuity rather than change that was the hallmark of the election. Put another way, over at least the past two years the Republicans and Democrats have engaged in a fundraising arms race – spending, by election day, $750m between them – registered millions of new voters and set up hundreds of proxy organisations to spread their messages. The result? While turnout rose to 59.5 per cent (its highest level since 1968), the electoral map of the United States was left virtually unchanged.
This should give the Democrats some cause for hope. The Republicans have not attained the kind of ‘lock’ on the electoral college that the Democrats cannot pick. Thus, while the 29 states that Bush carried in both 2000 and 2004 equal 274 of the 270 votes needed to secure the presidency in the electoral college, the 18 states that Kerry carried constitute 248 votes and have now voted for the Democrats in the past four presidential elections.
By and large, Bush’s victory was built on mobilising more of his base support. As the pollster and strategist Ruy Teixeira has shown, about half of the net gain of four million votes won by the president (which took him from 500,000 votes behind Al Gore four years ago to 3.5m ahead of John Kerry this year) came from those solidly ‘red states’ which he won by more than six per cent in 2000. And about half of these gains (a quarter of his total) came in just four states: Texas, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia. Following on from this, about a third of Bush’s gains came in solidly ‘blue’ states that had backed Gore by more than six points in 2000 (and three-fifths of these were in the two states most deeply affected by 9/11: New York and New Jersey). The final fifth of Bush’s net gains came from states that were decided by less than six points in 2000 – and half of these gains came in Florida.
The success of Bush’s core votes strategy has been widely attributed to the support of evangelical Christians. However, it appears that the role of this group may have been somewhat over-played. As Steven Waldman and John Green of Beliefnet have suggested: ‘There was indeed a flood of evangelicals to the polls, but it now appears that the shift in the Catholic vote was just as important and, in crucial states, probably more so.’
Catholics, a vital swing group heavily concentrated in battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, had oscillated between Bush and Kerry throughout the year. On polling day, however, they shifted decisively to Bush by 52 to 47 per cent. Al Gore, by contrast, had carried them by 50 to 46 per cent four years ago. Moreover, in both Ohio and Florida the swing of Catholic voters to Bush appears to be around the margin of the president’s victories. However, while Bush’s support was much higher among regular attenders of all faiths than those who worship either less frequently or not at all, the president’s largest gains between 2000 and 2004 actually came from the least religious.
There was a particularly strong swing to the president among non-college educated voters (a critical group constituting 58 per cent of voters). Coupled with the increase in support that the president received from white women (Bush carried this group by eleven per cent, as opposed to a single point four years ago), this suggests that white working-class women were probably the critical swing group.
This lack of white working-class support was a fatal weakness for John Kerry. In both of Bill Clinton’s successful races for the White House, he managed to carry the white working-class (that is, non-college educated) vote by a single point. In 2000, Gore lost this group by 17 per cent. Given that overall white support for the Democrats fell by five per cent and that Kerry fared worse than Gore by about four per cent among the non-college educated, that 17-point deficit is, if anything, likely to have grown in 2004. Teixeria, whose book 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, suggested that long-term demographic and socio-economic trends should provide an opening for the Democrats, says simply: ‘The fact of the matter is that Democrats cannot win when they do so badly amongst this very large constituency.’
Despite the headlines in the days leading up to the election, the final result was not as close as had been widely predicted. Indeed, for a time the narrowness of Bush’s margin in Ohio, and its effective role as kingmaker in the electoral college, disguised the president’s rather more comfortable popular vote margin. Nonetheless, Bush’s 51 per cent suggests that this election is probably more akin in character to the closely fought elections of the past decade. It may not, therefore, usher in a new era of one-party dominance.