Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  Indeed, some Republican strategists such as Kevin Phillips suggest that the recent Republican realignment began not with Reagan, but with Nixon in 1968, and it has already run its most dynamic twenty years. In Phillips’s view, President Reagan is the end—rather than the start—of the conservative Republican trend. “Reagan may be remembered less as the engine of late 20th Century U.S. conservatism than as its jaunty, if somewhat wayward, caboose,” Phillips wrote after the 1986 elections.15 Following the old cyclical swings of the pendulum, Phillips’s theory points to another national partisan watershed in the 1990s—away from the Republicans.

  The Democratic Lock on the House

  While the long-term Republican future is uncertain, what is well established is the unbreakable Democratic lock on the House of Representatives for thirty-four straight years.

  The Senate has become the swing element in our government, going under Republican control in 1980 and switching to the Democrats in 1986.16 The Senate shifts reflect changing voter views, rising with the Reagan tide and ebbing with that tide.

  But the House has become insulated from national partisan trends. It has become the Gibraltar of the Democratic party. For seven successive presidencies—starting with Eisenhower in 1954 and then under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan—the Democrats have had a majority in the House. That is by far the longest span of control in American politics since the Civil War.17 Even New Deal Democratic control of the House, from 1932 to 1946, does not match the current Democratic hegemony.

  In part, this reflects the fact that vast numbers of American voters no longer conceive of their government as a unit or vote a straight ticket for president, vice president, Senate, and member of Congress. People used to vote that way. In the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the custom was to vote a straight ticket. Back then, there were only five or ten congressional districts where a majority of voters selected a president from one party and a congressman from the opposite party.

  By contrast, in 1984, the year of Reagan’s crushing landslide, there were partisan splits in forty-four percent of the districts. In 192 of 435 congressional districts, voters chose one party for the White House and the opposite party for the House. Many people think of this as common in the South; but this is no longer a regional phenomenon; the Rocky Mountain West has many split districts as well. In fact, ticket splitting happens nationwide. The result, after Reagan’s smashing reelection, was that he had only 182 Republicans in the House to carry out his program—thirty-six votes shy of the needed majority.

  Walter Dean Burnham, a political scientist from MIT, pointed out that the House Republican strength after the 1984 election was the lowest proportion of party supporters ever recorded for a victorious presidential candidate in the fifty presidential elections since 1789.18 Obviously, this outcome was a blow to Reagan’s hopes for a dynamic second term; it was also a blow to a cohesive and durable governmental policy. And unless some dramatic changes are made in our election system, any Republican president will probably face a similar disadvantage.

  The causes of the Democratic lock on the House are imbedded both in political habit and in how the modern power game is played. First, inertia is a powerful force for continued Democratic control. For most of the thirty-four-year Democratic reign in the House, Democrats were the majority party, demonstrating strength at all levels. They won the presidency three times, held the Senate twenty-six years, dominated state governorships and legislatures. Second, Republicans, perceived by voters and political aspirants as the minority party, had difficulty recruiting strong candidates and financing campaigns. The Republicans’ losing record became a vicious cycle, until the 1980s’ surge.

  Some Republican officials contend the electoral system is stacked against them. They blame gerrymandering of congressional districts by state legislatures under control of Democrats and by Democratic state governors. In 1986, Republican officials charged that their party was deprived of twenty-three rightful seats in the House, by the way congressional district lines were drawn. As evidence, they asserted that the Republican share of House seats does not match the party’s share of the popular vote. In 1984, for example, Republican candidates won forty-seven percent of the popular vote for the House, but only forty-two percent of the seats.19

  In the redrawing of congressional district lines in 1981 (after the 1980 census), Republicans were probably gypped out of five seats in California, and perhaps of a couple of seats elsewhere in the country, through crafty Democratic remapping of districts. But several nonpartisan studies assert that nationwide, political gerrymandering has had minimal effect on the overall balance of power in the House. In Indiana and Pennsylvania, for example, the Republican tilt in state government in 1981 gave Republicans an advantage in drawing district lines, to balance off the Democratic tilt in California.

  What is not well understood is that our electoral system of single-winner districts automatically results in a “seat bonus” for the winning party: a larger percentage of seats than votes. Members of Congress represent districts, not numbers of people. At the extreme, imagine the Democrats having a slim fifty-one percent majority in every single district: They would win one hundred percent of the seats with fifty-one percent of the votes. At lower percentages, the winner’s bonus is smaller but it still exists. Republicans had a seat bonus when they had a House majority back in the early 1950s.

  That inevitable result of our election system is exacerbated by the fact that, on average, the Republicans turn out more votes per winner than Democrats do. Congressional districts must all have roughly the same population. But Democrats win more urban districts—where turnout is relatively low among poor, minority voters; whereas Republicans win more suburban districts—where turnout is much higher among well educated, well-heeled voters. So on average, Republicans get more votes per House seat, regardless of who draws the lines.20

  Above all, the Democratic lock on the House reflects the enormous advantages of incumbency. For what is striking about recent election returns is the public’s tendency to reelect members of Congress. Throughout the postwar period, an average of ninety-one percent of the House incumbents who sought reelection were reelected. (In the more volatile Senate, it was only seventy-five percent.) Reelection of incumbents reached an all-time high in 1986 when 394 House members sought reelection; only nine lost. The other 97.7 percent were reelected—and mostly by overwhelming numbers; eighty-five percent of them had no serious contest. The overall trend of lopsided incumbent victories has been increasing.21

  Most House incumbents are so well entrenched that they scare off serious opposition long before the campaign begins. Marcia Hale, former political director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, reckoned that at least 190 Democrats and 120 Republicans had safe seats going into the 1986 election. Indeed, Linda DiVall, a pollster who used to work for the National Republican Congressional Committee, estimated that in 225 districts, no Republican has won since Watergate—a pattern that guarantees Democratic control of the House.

  The key lies in the enormous resources available to incumbents and their ability to localize elections, insulating themselves from national trends. The Democrats made big gains in 1974, many in suburban, normally pro-Republican districts, and then protected them shrewdly. Their cushion rests heavily on the skills of new-breed Democrats at the techniques of the constant campaign: constituent case work by their staff, campaigning at home practically every weekend, mass newsletters and sophisticated computerized direct mailings financed by taxpayers, and high visibility through radio and TV satellite feeds. In money terms, political strategists reckon the “incumbency advantage” to be worth the equivalent of half a million dollars in campaign contributions to each incumbent.

  Name recognition is the first requirement for any political candidate. Most incumbents have it, and most House challengers are virtually invisible unless they get heavy TV exposure. The old-breed technique of knocking on doors is too s
low and inefficient to fill that need of becoming known. The challenger desperately needs media time, and unless he is extremely adept at generating news coverage, that means lots of expensive television ads. Such media advertising has driven up the costs of congressional campaigns astronomically: from $99 million in 1976 to $450 million a decade later.

  In the crucial game of fund-raising, most challengers are licked before the race begins. Political money has been a prime protector of incumbent House Democrats—Republicans, too, but mainly Democrats since they are a solid majority of the incumbents. A study by Common Cause, the public-affairs lobby, showed that in the 1986 election, House incumbents on average raised more than three times as much money as their challengers, and that in the critical two-week homestretch of the campaign their cash on hand was twenty times that of their challengers.22 That meant the incumbents were sitting pretty to finance their final media blitzes and lock up their seats for two more years.

  The greatest incumbent advantage in the money game is among Washington-based PACs, whose contributions to congressional races tripled from 1976 to 1986.23 The continuous floating fund-raising game in Washington and the symbiotic relationships between members of Congress on one side and lobbyists and PAC managers on the other side all play to the advantage of incumbents. “PAC Money is and will remain the easiest money for most incumbents to raise,” Michael Malbin of American Enterprise Institute asserts. “Tens of thousands of dollars typically change hands in any of the hundreds of Washington fund raisers held every year.… The members [of Congress], clearly on top of the situation, use the events to raise $250 or so in quasi-tribute fees from people who might not otherwise support them.”24 Unless an incumbent has deeply angered some group of PACs, or unless a member retires and both parties have an equal scramble over an open seat, the incumbency bias of PACs leaves all but a handful of challengers out in the cold. This is more true in the House than in the Senate. In 1986, for instance, House incumbents received six times as much PAC money as did their challengers.

  In short, the cards are stacked in favor of continuing Democratic control of the House—unless changes are made in the current system of campaign financing or challengers are given some new means of access to television exposure. Democratic control of the House obviously spells divided government for every Republican president. Moreover, the existence of a permanent majority and a permanent minority in the House has a corrosive effect on the two-party system and on the process of governing. Permanent minority status is not only demoralizing to House Republicans but drives them toward the negative tactics of obstructionism, because a permanent minority scores political points with the voters by loud criticism and by playing the spoiler role, rather than by developing responsible, constructive proposals, which it cannot pass. And on the other side, being a permanent majority can make Democrats fat, satisfied, and so cocky that they do not feel pressure to work together.

  “Large, stable majorities tend to become divided and self-centered,” observed political scientist Thomas Mann. “They take for granted the rewards of majority status and lose sight of the importance of the party’s collective performance.”25 Both tendencies reinforce the ills of divided government.

  Ticket Splitters: New-Collar Voters

  With Reagan’s great personal appeal, the built-in advantages of incumbency would have been seriously tested if voters were still casting party-line ballots. But ticket splitting obviously helped protect House Democrats. Most political observers attribute ticket splitting to the increased independence of voters, rather than to any conscious decision by voters to keep government divided.

  But some voters are quite deliberate about ticket splitting. In 1984, I heard Democratic candidates in heavily pro-Reagan districts from Texas to Pennsylvania openly appeal to voters to keep government divided, to elect Democrats to the House to “keep a check on Reagan.” In two touch-and-go districts outside Philadelphia, for example, Democrats Bob Edgar and Peter Kostmayer adopted this tactic as a matter of survival, for they took President Reagan’s reelection as a foregone conclusion. They also saw evidence in opinion polls that people liked Reagan as a national leader but did not agree with all his policies and did not want to give him free rein. Edgar and Kostmayer argued that ticket splitting gave voters the best of both worlds: Reagan as chief of state with a partially Democratic Congress to restrain him. With that pitch, Edgar, Kostmayer, and slews of other Democrats stayed in office in 1984.

  Pollster Lou Harris told me that his surveys found this motivation for ticket splitting as far back as the mid-1970s. Harris felt that voters had grown so wary of both parties that they were hedging their bets. “People don’t want any one party to be dominant,” Harris told me. “We’ve asked people, ‘Would you rather have divided government or one party in control?’ And they will say, sixty to thirty-five percent, they prefer divided government. They just don’t want one party of scoundrels in there. It’s born of the cynicism toward politicians. We first got that under Ford in ’75–’76. The more Congress stands up to the president, the more they like it. People believe in checks and balances.”26

  Other polltakers will not go that far. They attribute divided government to the rise of independent voters who go by the code: “I vote for the candidate, not the party.” That embodies the erosion of party allegiance at the grass roots. In 1952 at Eisenhower’s reelection, a regular biennial nationwide survey found that only twenty-five percent of the electorate were independents, the rest identifying with one of the two big parties. In 1986, independents had risen to thirty-five percent.27 Except for the Republican surges around Reagan’s two elections, independents have outnumbered Republicans for a decade or more.

  The rising mass of independent voters reflects social and economic changes in American life. For growing millions of suburbanites, well educated and well off, are issue oriented and proudly independent. Yuppies especially—young upwardly mobile professionals—do not take political cues from parties. Indeed, as life-styles and values change, even workers of the new high-tech service economy have moved away from the big-city politics of their blue-collar parents. Some sociologists have coined a term for them: new collars. They are neither industrial blue-collar workers nor white-collar workers, but the service technicians of the computer age. By some reckonings, they are fifteen percent of the adult population, roughly twenty-five million strong.

  “You can have a picture in your mind of a guy in his early thirties—running shoes, work pants, a Miami Dolphins T-shirt, a handlebar mustache, and a baseball cap,” explained Ralph Whitehead, Jr., a University of Massachusetts political scientist. “Young enough to be influenced by baby boom culture and so roughly 45 years old or younger. A family income in the range of $20,000 to $40,000. And a job in that expanding range that stands between traditional blue collar work and a career in upper-middle management or the professions.… Blue collars base their identity on their work, if they’ve got it. New collars tend to base it on their leisure.”28

  Most new collars refuse to be pigeonholed as Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Along with yuppies, they are among the biggest political switch hitters, who produce crazy-quilt results in elections—at the state as well as at the national level. In 1986, for example, Florida and Alabama elected Democratic senators and Republican governors. As MIT political scientist Walter Dean Burnham noted, Governor Mario Cuomo of New York easily won reelection, but his Democrats failed to gain even one seat in the Republican-controlled state senate. In Illinois, Republican James Thompson won an unprecedented fourth term as governor while the Democrats held control of the state senate.29

  This free-floating independence of voters has encouraged the individualism of new breed politicians. Since the party brand name lacks its old punch, some candidates run away from their party when it suits them. They sell themselves, not their party. In many marginal districts, I have found plenty of candidates in both parties playing down party labels in order to woo voters across party lines. On b
illboards, bumper stickers, and lapel buttons, they often drop their party identity entirely, implying nonpartisanship. In his excellent book, The Rise of Political Consultants, Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, quoted the play on words of a campaign ad for Republican Senator John Heinz: “If you think Pennsylvania needs an independent senator, elect John Heinz.”30

  Moreover, the new cadre of campaign consultants have accelerated the antiparty trend. The expertise for hire of strategists, pollsters, media advisers, and direct-mail and phone-bank specialists has made politicians less dependent on the party apparatus than they were in the old days. Most consultants usually work for candidates from only one party, but many of these political mercenaries have little commitment to party building or to building policy coalitions. A few firms work both sides of the street. In 1986, for example, the brassy, highly touted consulting firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly ran into bad publicity when the press learned that Democrat John Kelly and Republican members of the firm were helping raise money for the opponents in the Louisiana Senate race, Democrat John Breaux and Republican Henson Moore. But the main impact of consultants, moving in on the turf of party bosses and other party officials to run campaigns, is to help political newcomers bypass both the party apparatus and the party hierarchy, by helping them build their own individual organizations.

  “We have enabled people to come into a party or call themselves independent Democrats or Republicans and run for office without having to pay the dues of being a party member in a feudal way,” Republican media consultant Bob Goodman boasted to Larry Sabato. “Meaning kiss the ass of certain people and maybe down the line they’ll give you a shot at public office.”31