Defying the Odds

by James W. Ceaser

  Two members of the Freedom Caucus went down. In a GOP primary in Kansas, physician Roger Marshall defeated Tim Huelskamp, who had lost his seat on the House Agriculture Committee after fighting with the party leadership. Marshall said that he would put local interests ahead of ideology, and he got a boost when mainstream Republican super PACs poured money into the district. “The establishment’s position was always . . . [focused] in competitive seats, in situations where we believed [a different] candidate gave us a strategic advantage. It was never ideological. But now you’re seeing more and more activity in these safe seats,” GOP operative Brian O. Walsh told Politico. “It’s like when you have a health problem. First, you try to ignore it, see if it gets better. Then you try to treat it with meds. Now you just have to radiate it.”69 In New Jersey, Scott Garrett lost the general election. He had refused to pay dues to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) because it had supported gay candidates. When this position got him into trouble at home, NRCC declined to bail him out.

  Unlike in 2012, when Democrats could complain that they had lost the House despite winning more combined votes in House races than Republicans, the GOP’s 2016 candidates outpolled Democrats by more than a million votes in total.70 In the Senate races, Democrats held the edge in total votes, but only because the nation’s largest state had two Democratic candidates for Senate and no Republicans owing to its peculiar “top-two” primary. Without that anomaly, Republican Senate candidates also outpolled their Democratic rivals nationwide.71

  STATE GOVERNMENTS

  A dozen governorships were up for election in 2016. Among these contests, Republicans extended their winning streak by making a net gain of two. Republicans would now hold thirty-three governorships, their greatest number since 1922. The story of 2016 was a bit more complicated than a simple Republican sweep, however.

  Governors handle practical service-delivery issues that often do not always fall into neat partisan or ideological categories. Working under the constraints of the bond market, or state constitutional balanced-budget requirements, Republican governors have acceded to tax increases that would be anathema to their co-partisans in Congress. Similarly, competition among states can make Democratic governors as business-friendly as any Republican. So whereas congressional elections have featured increasing levels of party polarization, red states have elected Democratic governors and blue states have elected Republicans. Though serving overwhelmingly Democratic states, GOP governors Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Larry Hogan of Maryland both had 2016 approval ratings of more than 70 percent.72 Louisiana, which has become ruby-red in the past decade, chose a Democratic governor in 2015.

  In 2016, Republican gubernatorial candidates took Democratic-held seats in three states. Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL who had never held elected office, won the open seat of Missouri’s term-limited Democratic governor Jay Nixon. Greitens ran as a political outsider who decried lobbyist influence and promised ethics reform.73 In New Hampshire, Chris Sununu benefited from name recognition: his father had been governor and his brother had served as a U.S. senator. In Vermont, lieutenant governor Phil Scott ran as a pro-choice, pro-gay moderate who would work across party lines.

  Democrats picked up a red-state governorship in North Carolina, but this party turnover had a radically different tone from Vermont’s. Republican Governor Pat McCrory signed a “bathroom bill” requiring transgender people to use public restrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates. Various national organizations boycotted the state, and businesses pulled back on expansion plans: by one estimate, the bathroom bill cost the state up to $395 million.74 The economic repercussions hurt McCrory, and Democratic attorney general Roy Cooper defeated him by a very narrow margin. Complaining that there may have been fraud, McCrory did not concede the bitter race until December. To hobble Cooper, the state’s GOP-controlled legislature then passed a measure to strip the governorship of much of its power.

  Two other red states voted to keep their governorships in Democratic hands. In West Virginia, incumbent Earl Ray Tomblin was term-limited. Jim Justice, a billionaire businessman who had never held office, ran as a conservative who would promote the state’s coal industry. Justice, who had recently been a Republican, emphasized that he was an outsider with no ties to the national Democrats. In Montana, Steve Bullock narrowly won a second term. As the 2020 election approaches, Democrats will probably give Bullock some consideration for the national ticket. The 2016 election showed that the party needs to appeal to rural voters, and Bullock has won three successive elections in this very rural state (once for attorney general, twice for governor). He is relatively young (born in 1966) and well credentialed (Columbia Law), and he has potential ideological appeal as a longtime advocate of campaign finance reform.

  In state legislative elections, Democrats largely failed to repopulate their depleted farm club. In 2016, eighty-six of the nation’s ninety-nine state legislative chambers held elections, and Republicans made a small net gain, ending up with 57 percent of the nation’s 7,383 legislative seats. They concluded with a “trifecta”—control of the governorship and both chambers—in twenty-five states. Democrats had trifectas in just six. This continued Republican dominance in state government has implications far beyond the parties’ respective ability to field strong candidates for federal office. Though largely out of the national media spotlight, a great deal of American public policy is decided at the state level.

  THE SPECIAL CASE OF CALIFORNIA

  California was an outlier in the elections of 2016. Clinton won the state by 4.3 million votes while Trump was winning the rest of the country by 1.4 million. California Democrats gained legislative seats to win two-thirds supermajorities in the state Senate and Assembly, even as Republicans maintained their dominance of state legislatures nationwide. In House races, the state GOP did hold onto several House seats that Democrats had targeted, but the U.S. Senate race was an embarrassment for the party. In a year when the U.S. Senate Republicans defied the odds to keep their majority, California Republicans failed to get a Senate candidate on the general election ballot. Because of its immense size (10.4 percent of the total national vote) and divergent political path, California is worth a closer look.

  Contrary to myth, California was not a thoroughly Republican state in the late twentieth century. In nearly every year after 1958, with some brief exceptions, Democrats controlled the state legislature and most of the state’s U.S. House seats. During this period, Democrats almost always held at least one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats. (The exception came between the elections of 1964 and 1968, when Republicans Thomas Kuchel and George Murphy were both serving.) Two Democratic Browns bracketed the Reagan governorship: Pat Brown won in 1958 and lost to Reagan in 1966, and then his son Jerry succeeded Reagan in 1974. Nevertheless, Republicans were competitive. They carried the state in every presidential election between 1968 and 1988, albeit with California-rooted candidates in four of the six races (Nixon in 1968 and 1972, Reagan in 1980 and 1984). Reagan twice won the governorship by substantial margins, and Pete Wilson won four statewide races: for the U.S. Senate in 1982 and 1988, and for governor in 1990 and 1994.

  By the late 1990s, Republican fortunes were slipping. In 1992, Democrat Barbara Boxer succeeded Democrat Alan Cranston, and, in a special election at the same time, Dianne Feinstein easily dispatched the Republican appointed by Pete Wilson to fill his vacant seat. Feinstein won a full term in 1994. Bill Clinton carried the state in 1992 and 1996, and, in the latter election, Republicans lost a short-lived majority in the state assembly. In the 1998 midterm, Democrats took the governorship and most other statewide offices. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s victory in a 2003 gubernatorial recall election temporarily revived GOP hopes, but he did little good for Republicans down the ballot. By the time he departed in 2010, the state’s flagging economy and his legislative alliances with Democrats had made him a pariah within the party. That year’s election brought Jerry Brown back to
the governorship and left Republicans without a single statewide office. Meanwhile, California had become such a reliable state in presidential elections that Republicans dropped any serious effort to contest it. In his losing 1992 race, President George H. W. Bush got 41.4 percent of California’s two-party vote. In his winning 2016 race, Trump got only 33.9 percent.

  Party registration figures tell a similar story. In 1992, 39.6 percent of the state’s voters registered as Republicans.75 In 2016, that figure was down to 26.8 percent.76

  The Hispanic vote is the most common explanation for the state party’s problems. In 1994, Governor Wilson and many other leading Republicans supported Proposition 187, a ballot measure to deny many public services to undocumented immigrants. Hispanic voters strongly disapproved of this position, but it would be an exaggeration to say that the issue suddenly tipped a large voting bloc against the GOP, since the state’s Hispanic voters already favored the Democrats.77 Far more important was that the Hispanic population simply became much bigger and that non-Hispanic whites diminished as a proportion of the state’s population. In 1990, 57 percent of Californians identified as non-Hispanic “white alone.”78 By 2015, this group had shrunk to 38 percent, compared with 39 percent identifying as Hispanic.79 Though non-Hispanic whites had become a minority overall, they still made up the largest group in the electorate because many Hispanics were not yet citizens or under age eighteen, and because turnout was relatively lower among Hispanics eligible to vote.80 Still, the Hispanic share of the California electorate grew from about 8 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2016.81

  The “Asian alone” population was also growing, from 4 to 12 percent of the electorate. Like Hispanics, they have leaned Democratic. The Vietnamese American population used to be an exception, because of the GOP’s anticommunism. But as that issue fades into memory and other issues came to the fore, younger Vietnamese Americans have abandoned the GOP. Republican state legislator Janet Nguyen explained that many of them arrived the United States in poverty and relied on the social services that the GOP disparages: “Going back to the 90s, if you came to me and said those on welfare milk the system, that’s offensive to me. That’s what you might see a lot for the younger generation, knowing their family came here extremely poor.”82

  There were other reasons for the California GOP’s decline. From the 1950s through the 1980s, hawkishness was good politics, and the party could count on the support of white-collar engineers and blue-collar factory workers in the state’s vast aerospace industry.83 The end of the Cold War wiped out this voter base, as the state lost two-thirds of its aerospace jobs between 1990 and 2011.84 The state’s economy shifted toward more Democratic-friendly sectors such as health services and high technology. Santa Clara County, encompassing such technology hubs as San Jose and Cupertino, was once politically competitive. Reagan carried the county in 1984, and Bush ran just four points behind Dukakis in 1988. It also sent Republicans to the U.S. House, including Ed Zschau and Tom Campbell. By 2016, those outcomes were a distant memory. The county gave 73 percent of its vote to Hillary Clinton, and in the race for the 17th congressional district, no Republican even made the general election ballot.

  In June 2010, state voters approved the “top-two” primary. Under this system, all candidates for partisan office appear on the same primary ballot. The top two finishers, regardless of party, move on to the general election. Schwarzenegger pushed the proposal on the assumption that it would serve as a moderating force. If candidates could win a primary by appealing to independents and members of the other party, the thinking went, they would have a strong incentive to move to the center. Some Republicans hoped that it would foster the nomination of GOP candidates with wider voter appeal. Evidence for the moderating effect is mixed at best.85 As for helping the GOP, top two failed. The party simply abandoned swatches of the state, where there were no Republican candidates on the November ballot.86

  The 2016 election was the first time since the direct election of senators in 1914 that no Republican candidate for Senate made the general election ballot in California. A few competed in the primary, but none got more than 8 percent. The top two finishers were Attorney General Kamala Harris, a liberal from San Francisco, and Representative Loretta Sanchez, a moderate liberal from Orange County. Harris had party support and statewide name identification from her two successful races for state office. Sanchez had less money and visibility, but she might have been a real contender if she had rallied Republicans by clearly running to Harris’s right. She did not do so, and more than a third of Republican voters said that they were skipping the Senate race altogether.87 By the fall, Harris’s victory was a virtual certainty, and the public tuned out. The sole moment of interest came at the end of the candidates’ only televised debate, when Sanchez finished her closing statement with a dance move known as “dabbing.”

  THE FUTURE

  As they licked their wounds in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Democrats consoled themselves that California was a preview of the nation’s political future. With the growth of the Hispanic and Asian populations, they reasoned, the electorate will inexorably turn more liberal and Democratic. Within a few election cycles, they hoped, some red states will start turning purple, then blue. Texas, for instance, already has a large Hispanic population and a growing Asian American presence in certain urban areas. “I think members in the Democratic party do not see us winning the majority until the mid-2020s, when places like Texas turn blue, and it will,” said Representative Alcee Hastings.88

  Maybe, maybe not. For one thing, population projections involve uncertainty. In 2014, the Census Bureau cut its Hispanic population projection for 2050 by 30 million.89 Reduction in birth rates could slow down the trend, as could slower immigration rates stemming from either economic growth in Latin America or restrictive immigration policies in the United States. In addition, it is risky to assume that the current voting patterns of ethnic groups will persist into the indefinite future. It is possible that Hispanics may become more Republican as they become more affluent. Of course, Republicans cannot bank on such a shift any more than Democrats can take continued Hispanic support for granted: Jewish voters, for instance, have stuck with the Democrats through decades of economic and social ascent.

  “It depends” is the only honest answer to questions about future partisan balance in Congress and the statehouses. “Unknown unknowns” such as wars and economic crashes can disrupt social and political life in ways that are impossible to anticipate. Even natural disasters can play a part. Hurricane Katrina hurt Democrats in Louisiana by forcing thousands of African Americans to leave the state, with many never coming back. During the transition from Obama to Trump, the policies of the new administration were a “known unknown.” Trump’s statements and promises have never been a reliable guide to his behavior, so no one could be confident about what was in store for the next four years. Decisions that trigger intense political opposition and mobilization by Hispanics and Asian Americans could accelerate the “Californization” of states such as Texas. Conversely, economic prosperity and the return of jobs to the Rust Belt could nudge some Midwestern industrial states in the opposite direction.

  In the shorter run, it seemed more likely than not that the Republicans would hold onto their gains in Congress. In 2018, the map and the calendar will not help Senate Democrats. Because of the party’s good showing in 2012, they must defend twenty-five seats, compared with just eight for the Republicans. Six of the eight are in very strong GOP states, with only Arizona and Nevada looming as potential turnovers. Of the twenty-five Democratic seats, ten are in states that Trump won. In the House, Democrats need to gain twenty-four GOP seats to take the majority, which is about the same number of House Republicans who will represent Clinton districts. But only 15 of 241 Republicans won by a margin of less than 10 percent, and Democrats must defend about a dozen Trump districts.90

  But before writing off Democratic chances, remember the history with which this chapter star
ted. At the start of 1993, it was the Republicans who looked doomed and the Democrats who seemed indomitable. Two years later, House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt opened the 104th Congress by saying, “With resignation but with resolve I hereby end 40 years of Democratic rule of this House.”91

  NOTES

  1. John T. Pothier, “The Partisan Bias in Senate Elections,” American Politics Quarterly 12 (January 1984): 89–100.

  2. Gary C. Jacobson, The Electoral Origins of Divided Government (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), 112–20.

  3. Ibid., 3.

  4. Alan Ehrenhalt, The United States of Ambition (New York: Times Books, 1991), 126.

  5. William F. Connelly Jr. and John J. Pitney Jr., Congress’ Permanent Minority? Republicans in the US House (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 156.

  6. James W. Ceaser and Andrew E. Busch, Losing to Win: The 1996 Elections and American Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).

  7. Adam Clymer, “G.O.P. Seems to Gear Ads to Dole Loss,” New York Times, October 28, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/28/us/gop-seems-to-gear-ads-to-dole-loss.html.

  8. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy, Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 5.

  9. Toby Eckert, “Former Comrades Angered by ‘Bribe Menu,’ ” San Diego Union-Tribune, February 22, 2006, http://legacy.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/cunningham/20060222-9999-1n22duke.html.

  10. Andy Barr, “Dems Talk of ‘Permanent Progressive Majority,’ ” Politico, November 7, 2008, http://www.politico.com/story/2008/11/dems-talk-of-permanent-progressive-majority-015407.

  11. Leslie Marshall, “Why Democrats Will Win the House in 2014,” US News and World Report, October 13, 2013, http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/leslie-marshall/2013/03/13/why-democrats-will-win-the-house-in-2014.