History’s Hurdle for the Democrats

According to the conventional wisdom, the odds are in favour of the Democrats winning back the White House this year. With the country mired in an unpopular war in Iraq and perhaps in a prolonged recession, voters will treat the November election as a referendum on George W. Bush and punish his party. Some even see the disarray among Republican hawks, social conservatives and economic libertarians as evidence that the reign of the Grand Old Party is over and that a new Democratic majority is dawning.

That is one possibility. But it is worth considering the possibility that US politics has not changed much at all. The era of Republican presidential hegemony that began with Richard Nixon may not be over.

Consider the performance of the Democratic party in contests for the White House since Nixon ran against Hubert Humphrey in 1968. In that period, Democrats have won only three out of 10 presidential elections -- Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.

And those victories were in highly unusual circumstances. Mr Carter ran against an unelected, appointed vice-president, Gerald Ford, who had angered many Americans when he pardoned Nixon for his Watergate crimes. In 1992 and again in 1996, a slight majority of Americans voted against Mr Clinton, who nevertheless won only because each time third-party candidate Ross Perot siphoned off Republican presidential voters. If not for Watergate and Perot, the Republicans might have enjoyed an uninterrupted string of presidential victories since the late 1960s.

Mr Carter is the only Democrat to have won a popular-vote majority since the election of Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and then only by the slightest of majorities, 50.1 per cent. Meanwhile, this has been achieved by Republicans five times: Nixon in 1972 (60.7 per cent), Reagan in 1980 (50.7 per cent) and 1984 (58.8 per cent), George H.W. Bush in 1988 (53.4 per cent) and George W. Bush in 2004 (50.7 per cent).

The enduring Republican presidential majority originated in 1968, when the populist Democrat George Wallace won 13.5 per cent of the popular vote as an independent who drew his strength from the white working-class backlash against the civil rights revolution and cultural liberalism.

By welding white, working-class Wallace Democrats (later called Reagan Democrats) to the Republican party, Nixon created the GOP lock on the White House that has been broken only by freakish circumstances in 1976, 1992 and 1996. Deprived of the white working-class voters that were the mainstay of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, the Democrats by 1980 became what they remain today -- a party of socially liberal white professionals allied with blacks and Latinos on the basis of targeted racial patronage policies, such as affirmative action, and race-based congressional districts for blacks and amnesty for illegal immigrants from Latin America.

Lyndon Johnson in 1964 was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win a majority of the white vote, in a country where roughly 70 per cent of the population is “non-Hispanic white” and where half of Hispanics identify themselves as white. The white working-class deficit of the Democrats in presidential elections is worsening. Mr Clinton carried the white working class by 39-38 per cent in 1992 and again by 44-43 per cent in 1996 -- but only because Mr Perot, who was popular with this group, reduced the Republican numbers. In 2000, Mr Gore lost the white working class by 17 points and in 2004 John Kerry lost it by 23 points.

In recent years, the quickest way to become a celebrity pundit on the American left has been to argue that the Democrats do not need white working-class voters any more and should write them off. The Democrats can be swept into a majority by appealing to single women, or to Latino immigrants, or by mobilising the black “base”, or by winning over upscale white professionals, or a combination of all of these.

But the constituencies that are supposed to save the Democrats have been part of the post-McGovern coalition since the 1970s -- and yet the Democrats have lost the White House repeatedly.

The Democrats won back Congress in 2006 because Democratic strategists ignored progressive pundits and supported socially conservative or moderate candidates who appealed to the white working class in contested districts and states. The Democrats have a one-vote majority in the US Senate only because of the victory of one such candidate: Virginia Senator Jim Webb, a populist who served as Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy.

To win back the White House this year, the Democratic presidential nominee, whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, must win the votes of millions of Webb Democrats -- the heirs to the Wallace and Reagan Democrats. If many voters return to the practice of dividing their votes for president and Congress between the two parties, then the future may hold Republican presidents facing Democratic Congresses, as in most of the period from 1968 to 1994.

The Reagan coalition of libertarians, hawks and the religious right is indeed cracking up -- but it is not clear that Republican ideological wars will help the Democrats. As long as the Republicans appeal more than Democrats to the white working-class populists whom George Wallace led out of the Democratic Party in 1968, then even in disarray they may be able to shut Democrats out of the White House for the eighth time out of 11 elections.