Fascinating analysis
There is much to ponder in Michael Barone’s most recent analysis of electoral trends. You could chew on this sampling from a large, dense piece for a month:
The results of the 2006 election were significantly different from those of the five biennial elections between 1996 and 2004. For a decade, we seemed to be an almost evenly divided and deeply politically polarized country. From the 1995-96 budget showdown between President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich until after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the political balance across the country remained very much the same. We were a 49 percent nation, as was written in this space six years ago.
In the five House elections between 1996 and 2004, Republican candidates won between 49 percent and 51 percent of the vote, and Democratic candidates won between 46 percent and 48.5 percent — an unusually narrow range in American history. Clinton was re-elected with 49 percent of the vote in 1996; George W. Bush and Al Gore both won a rounded-off 48 percent in 2000; Bush beat John Kerry in 2004 by 51 percent to 48 percent, the narrowest percentage margin for a re-elected president since Woodrow Wilson beat Charles Evans Hughes 49 percent to 46 percent in 1916.
The electorate was divided primarily by cultural, even moral, issues: two armies in a culture war facing each other across the trenches. The bitterness of these divisions was exacerbated because the two men who occupied the White House — Clinton and Bush, both born in 1946, the first year of the Baby Boom, and both graduating in the high school class of 1964, which had the highest SAT scores since the test was first administered — happen to have personal characteristics that those on the other side of the cultural divide absolutely loathed. Elections became less a matter of persuading movable voters in the center and more a matter of turning out the party faithful on Election Day — or even before, thanks to the increasing trend toward absentee and early voting.
The 2006 election was at least somewhat different. Most glaringly different in a partisan sense: Democrats won a clear-cut victory, gaining majorities in both the Senate and the House, for the first time since 1992. (The Democrats’ 2001-02 Senate majority was attained by a party switch rather than an election.) The Democratic capture of the Senate last year owed something to luck, as is often the case; Democrats won six of the seven closest races, and their candidates won in Montana and Virginia — both long shots at the start of the year — by a total of 12,891 votes. But parties have captured (or put themselves in position to capture) Senate majorities by winning most of the close races before — Republicans in 1980; Democrats in 1986 and 2000…
The AFL-CIO and other unions again conducted a major voter-turnout drive in 2006, and that effort seems to have paid off. Fully 23 percent of 2006 voters said they were either union members or part of a household in which someone was a union member, and 63 percent of them voted Democratic. This is a startlingly high number, because only 8 percent of private-sector workers (and 36 percent of the many fewer public-sector workers) are union members. The unions seem to have leveraged a rather small movement into a much stronger political force, one to whom Democratic politicians owe very much indeed.
The GOP continues to owe a debt to white evangelical and born-again Protestants, who despite some grousing by leaders turned out strongly enough to form 24 percent of the electorate, and who voted 70 percent Republican. In contrast, people who said they never attend church services (15 percent of voters) voted 67 percent Democratic.
The 2006 election may turn out to be the beginning of a long period of Democratic dominance. Or it may not. The election was more a verdict on competence than on ideology, and it gave the Democrats an opportunity but, on most issues at least, not a mandate.
As the liberal columnist E.J. Dionne wrote, Democrats got their votes on loan. It was a negative verdict on the conduct of the military struggle in Iraq and on the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. It was a negative verdict on a Republican Congress that seemed casual about corruption and complacent about wasteful spending. It was a victory won after a campaign that was conducted largely in an idea-free zone. Republicans campaigned on pretty much the platform that Bush ran on in 2000 and 2004, though many of his promises had already been fulfilled, and others — such as Social Security reform — had been set aside as unachievable. Democrats campaigned pretty much as opponents of Bush, with a platform made up of planks that were minimalist (raise the minimum wage) or lacking in specifics in voters’ minds (enact all the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, whatever they were).
There’s much more where that came from, and it points to considerable uncertainty as to what lies ahead, at least in our view.