Overview

The GOP dominates politics at all levels in the United States. The Democrats helped the GOP achieve this dominance, first, by not taking the 1994 election results seriously, and second, by pursuing tactics utterly inappropriate to trying to win back market share. The Democrats’ continued strategy of insulting the majority bodes ill for their future.

Background: Revolution or Temper Tantrum?

In the 1992 election, 258 Democrats were elected to Congress and only 176 Republicans, about the same as in the previous few elections. In 1994, the so-called Republican Revolution took place — a swing of about 100 total votes from Dem to Rep, with 230 GOP Congressmen elected versus only 204 Democrats. Peter Jennings on 11/14/94:

“Some thoughts on those angry voters. Ask parents of any two-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It’s clear that the anger controls the child and not the other way around. It’s the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week….Parenting and governing don’t have to be dirty words: the nation can’t be run by an angry two-year-old.”

Some temper tantrum. Ten years later the total of Congressional Republicans is 232, Democrats 201, a little better than in 1994; and this is after substantial Democratic counterattacks, which had reduced the GOP number to 221 two Congressional sessions ago. And yet, Jennings was more correct than many conservatives give him credit for; the 1994 election can fairly be seen as a protest against the Clinton decision to govern from the left, with gays in the military, HillaryCare, and a tie vote tax increase in the face of a Bush-Perot vote of 57% to 43% for Clinton, clearly more of a mandate for conservative rather than liberal policies.

Persistency of the 1994 results should have warned Democrats

1994′s 230 Republican Congressmen was followed by 1996′s 228, 1998′s 223, 2000′s 221 and 2002′s 229. You’d think that somewhere along the way, Democrats would have understood that the Republican majority was real and legitimate. Still, myths had to be debunked, such as that the GOP majority is a trick owed to redistricting. Charlie Cook:

In comparing House and presidential results, Abramowitz and his colleagues found that from the 1950s to the ’80s, the number of marginal House districts (ones that a presidential nominee won by 5 points or less) exceeded the number of safe seats (districts where the winning House candidate’s margin was at least 10 points). But from 1992 to 2000, the number of safe seats exceeded the number of marginal seats. In 2002 and 2004, that trend became even more dramatic. If redistricting were the prime cause of the lack of competitive House races, Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning argue, the number of safe seats would rise immediately after redistricting. Yet they’ve found that “redistricting did not cause a substantial increase in the number of safe districts or a substantial decrease in the number of marginal districts in 1982, 1992, or 2002.”

The Emory political scientists maintain that increased polarization along partisan and ideological lines is more responsible for the lack of competitive districts. They say that, as a result of “powerful social forces at work in American society, including internal migration, immigration, and ideological realignment within the electorate,” Democratic districts are getting more Democratic and Republican districts are growing more Republican. On the ideological side, they suggest that Stanford University’s Matthew Levendusky was correct when he substituted “sorting” for “polarization,” meaning that voters are bringing their policy and partisan preferences into alignment. Conservative Democrats, many of whom are in the South, are increasingly voting Republican, while liberal Republicans, many of whom are in the Northeast, are increasingly voting Democratic.

These voting patterns fit Walter Dean Burnham’s definition of realignment: “a sudden transformation that turns out to be permanent.”

Depth of the changes since 1994 should have warned Democrats

In business there’s something called the Dow Theory. Dow Theory posits a bull market trend as having several characteristics. Among them is a major leg upwards and survival of two bear runs on the market; an example of such a bear run in the midst of the upward Republican trend might be the 1998-2000 GOP Congressional and Senatorial losses. Another related concept is the confirming of the performance of one index (eg, the Dow Industrials) by another (eg, the Transport Average), the idea being if one part of the economy is doing well, you may see it confirmed in other sectors. Fred Barnes gives us some confirming data from the 2002 election:

The same Republican trend is true for state elections. In 1992, Democrats captured 59 percent of state legislative seats (4,344 to 3,031 for Republicans). Ten years later, Republicans won their first majority (3,684 to 3,626) of state legislators since 1952. In 1992, Democrats controlled the legislatures of 25 states to 8 for Republicans, while the others had split control. Today, Republicans rule 21 legislatures to 16 for Democrats. Governors? Republicans had 18 in 1992, Democrats 30. Today, Republicans hold 27 governorships, Democrats 23.

Clearly the trend continued at the national level into 2004, with net gains for the GOP in the House and Senate as well as governorships. So it’s pretty hard to deny that a serious and persistent trend has taken hold at all levels of government over a long period of time. Dow Theory would say that there’s been a bull market going for the Republican Party since 1994. The majority positions enjoyed by the GOP are not a fluke; they have been confirmed by the passage of time and their spreading throughout all layers of the American electoral structure.

In business terms, Democrats’ market share has suffered great losses

Imagine that Republicans are Ford, and that Democrats are Volvo. They are each trying to sell their Congressional candidates to the public. Here are the charts of your sales trends over the last two decades in S-Class (Senate) and C-Class (Congressional) units. You will see that the Democratic Party’s market share has declined precipitously in the last decade:

The sales trend is unmistakable. Ford continues to take share from Volvo in our example, even though Volvo outspent Ford $935 million to $822 million in last fall’s presidential sales drive. If politics were a business, the chief sales executives on the Volvo side would have been fired years ago, instead of being rehired again and again to lose.

The Democrats’ approach to getting market share back: insult the customer

Many Democrats will undoubtedly voice strong objection to the following. However, if you are a Republican, or one of the 3-4 million Democrats who voted for George Bush, this is the way Democratic opinion leaders often sound. We’ll continue a bit longer with our Ford/Volvo metaphor, since it seems to work well here:

The Ford/Republican sales pitch:
– Fords are stronger than Volvos
– Ford will save you money over Volvo
– You can’t avoid going to dangerous places, so you are better off going in a Ford
– Volvos have transmission problems which cause them unexpectedly to flip into Drive before they flop into Reverse
– Colin Powell, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudy Giuliani, Condi Rice, Zell Miller, Alberto Gonzales, and Mary Cheney drive Fords: so should you

The Volvo/Democrat sales pitch:
– Fords ruin the environment
– Ford executives are greedy, cruel and stupid
– People who buy Fords are ignorant
– Fords are not well respected in Europe
– Ford’s guidance system will take you to dangerous places
– Fords are so poorly designed that when you get in the dangerous places, you can’t get out
– Fords are not safe for women, gays and minorities

It is not an exaggeration to say that people who drive Volvos often hold precisely these opinions of both Fords and Republicans. This is the essence of the Democrats’ marketing problem.

Conclusion: the Democrats’ Lost Weekend

What is going on in the elite salons of the Democratic Party has almost nothing to do with Republicans. We don’t even figure into the universe that many of the Democrat thought-leaders now occupy, except as caricatures, as in “that crooked bunch.” One ought to credit the sincerity of things like the Boxer Rebellion — those were real tears — and Bob Herbert’s analysis-free, unhinged rant against “Alberto Gonzales, counselor to the president and enabler in chief of the pro-torture lobby.” Many among the Democrat elites honestly believe that their opposition is intellectually and morally inferior to them. Until these Democrats are ousted from positions of power, or until they begin to respect the customers they need to woo back, the Party will not have hit bottom.

We hope one of the two results comes reasonably soon; their act, while still entertaining, and great fodder for the New Media, is beginning to get tiresome.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 9th, 2005 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, New Media, Red Shift, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.