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A Bush Mandate?
It’s in the Eye of the Beholder
By Rhodes Cook
Editor, The Rhodes Cook Letter
As originally published in the "The Rhodes Cook Letter".To his critics, virtually everything about Bush was controversial – from the furor over his initial election to the president’s embrace of an ideologically conservative agenda driven by an assertive leadership style. And the campaign of 2004 was waged against the backdrop of an uncertain economy, with both parties evenly matched – unified and well-financed for their rendezvous with the electorate.
Taken together, it created a volatile political cocktail, which for the first time in decades produced an election in which nearly everyone agreed that it made a difference who won.
In the end, there was little doubt that the election of 2004 was a victory for Bush and his Republican Party. But how great a victory is in the eye of the beholder.
Viewed from one angle, Republicans scored a decisive triumph that gives President Bush the mandate he so quickly claimed after the Nov. 2 balloting. Yet from another perspective, it is a different story. The president’s victory over Democrat John Kerry appears tepid at best.
Case for a Mandate
Looking at the results from the GOP vantage point, the election of 2004 was a remarkable success. Republicans fashioned a clear message that combined support for traditional family values and the president’s decisive leadership both home and abroad, while sharply questioning the suitability of Kerry to lead in troubled times. And the GOP buttressed its effort with a focused advertising campaign and a quietly effective voter targeting operation that in the end the Democrats could not match.
The result: Republicans strengthened their grip on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and maintained a clear majority of the nation’s governorships, in a history-making election that produced the nation’s highest voter turnout ever.
For the first time since 1988, a presidential candidate of either party captured a majority of the popular vote; Bush took 51%.
For the first time since 1924, the GOP both reelected a president and won control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
For the first time ever, a presidential candidate won more than 60 million votes, as Bush easily surpassed the previous record of nearly 54.5 million set by Ronald Reagan in 1984.
And the incumbent prevailed in the face of a record high turnout of 122 million voters, almost 17 million more than turned out four years earlier. On the eve of the election, there was a widespread belief that a huge turnout would benefit the challenger. But rather than fueling a vote for change, it was Bush who benefited most from the additional ballots.
While Kerry won 59 million votes, fully 8 million more than Democratic nominee Al Gore received in 2000, Bush hiked his own total by 11.5 million votes from four years earlier – the largest jump in a president’s tally since Richard Nixon increased his total by more than 15 million votes from 1968 to 1972.
In every state, Bush received more votes this time than in 2000, as did Kerry in every state except Alabama when his vote is compared to Gore’s in 2000. Yet in the vast majority of states, 38, to be precise, there were more additional ballots last fall for Bush than Kerry.
The power of the moral values issue no doubt played a hand in the Bush upsurge. In the 11 states where a ban on gay marriage was also on the November ballot – which were primarily smaller states in the Republican heartland – Bush gained more than two and a quarter million votes from 2000.
But the trauma of 9/11 was also a driving force, very evident in the three states within a close radius of ground zero – New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. In those three states alone, Bush gained more than one million votes from four years earlier. The increase was not enough for the president to come close to carrying any of the three. But the huge gain in his vote total spoke to the power of terrorism, and the president’s handling of it, in the 2004 election.
The increase in Bush’s vote from four years earlier was not a regional phenomenon. It was broad based, as his share of the vote went up from 2000 in all but three states – North Carolina, South Dakota and Vermont. In a majority of states – 29 - Bush captured at least 50% of the vote.
And nationwide exit polls showed the president running better than 2000 among Hispanics, Jews, Catholics, women and suburbanites – all groups that some observers had figured would be pillars of an emerging Democratic majority. It may be too soon to talk of a Republican realignment. But there is little doubt that the election of 2004 provided new evidence that the pendulum of American politics continues to swing steadily in the Republicans’ direction since “the perfect tie” of 2000.
On the Other Hand …
Yet this was an election where the outcome could be argued round or argued flat. In short, there is also a compelling a set of data that points to a more hopeful scenario for the Democrats.
Bush’s margin of victory in the popular vote – 3 million – was the smallest for any reelected president since Harry Truman scored his fabled come from behind victory in 1948. And then, less than half as many votes were cast as this time.
Bush’s margin of victory in the electoral vote – 35 – was the smallest for any reelected president since Woodrow Wilson won by 23 in 1916. And other than Wilson’s, there has been no other successful presidential reelection in the Electoral College as narrow as Bush’s since the founding of the Republic.
To boot, Bush’s margin of victory percentage-wise in the popular vote – 2.4 points – was the smallest for a reelected president in the nation’s history, bar none.
The scope of Bush’s victory this year looks impressive when compared to his father’s 1992 reelection defeat or “W’s” own win on a split decision in 2000, when he won the electoral vote by five, but lost the popular vote by more than a half million.
But it looks a lot less gaudy when compared to recent incumbents such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who parlayed their popularity (and their opponents’ weakness) into reelection landslides that exceeded 15 million votes, or for that matter, Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton, who won a second term in 1996 by a margin of more than 8 million votes.
Neither Bush nor Kerry came close to running a 50-state campaign in 2004, operating instead off the closely divided electoral map from 2000 with its sharply defined red and blue shadings. Both candidates conceded huge chunks of the country to the other, to the extent that it could be argued that Bush’s triumph in 2004 was less a rousing nationwide vote of approval than a more limited triumph based largely in one region, the South.
The president swept the 13 states of the South (the 11 of the old Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma) by nearly 6 million votes, but was beaten by Kerry in the rest of the country by almost 3 million. In electoral votes, it was 168-to-0 for Bush inside the South, 251-to-118 for Kerry outside the South. If Democrats have problems in rural America, Republicans have concerns almost as troublesome in the large metropolitan areas of the Northeast, Midwest and the West.
Clearly, the Democrats are not the woebegone force they were at the presidential level in the 1970s and 1980s. In those two decades they not only lost four of five presidential elections, but in three of them fell below 50 electoral votes and barely reached 100 in another.
By contrast, the Democrats have won at least 250 electoral votes of the 270 needed to take the White House in each of the last four elections. In the process, they have won with regularity big electoral vote prizes such as California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Michigan. And in many of these megastates, the vote has not even been close.
In every presidential election since 1992, the Democrats have carried California by at least 1.2 million votes, New York by at least 1 million, and Illinois by at least 500,000 votes. A part of the vast Republican presidential terrain in the heyday of Nixon and Reagan, these vote-rich states have become cornerstones of the Democratic presidential coalition.
Victory for ‘Team Republican’
There are many who believe that the reelection of a controversial president in highly polarized times was a feat in itself. Yet throughout the campaign, Bush enjoyed some significant advantages.
He benefited from money and the map. The map in terms of a post-2000 shuffling of electoral votes that transformed his tenuous total of 271 in 2000 into a more comfortable starting point of 278. Money in the form of a virtually bottomless campaign chest that did not require the spending of a single dollar to dispatch an intra-party rival; there was none.
Unopposed for renomination (always a favorable sign for a president’s reelection), Bush was free to launch a relentless advertising attack on Kerry from March on that effectively pilloried the Democratic challenger as a liberal legislator from Massachusetts and a “flip-flopper,” particularly in his approach to the war in Iraq.
The incumbent also enjoyed the bully pulpit of the White House with surrogates galore, and was able to portray himself as a wartime president tenaciously fighting a new kind of terrorist enemy. “9/11 changed everything,” was the campaign’s answer to practically any criticism.
Yet by shedding the mantle of the “compassionate conservative” that he wore in 2000 for that of the highly partisan warrior president, Bush virtually ensured that the votes of many Democrats and independents would be tough to come by and a narrow reelection victory was likely the best he could hope for.
As a consequence, the Republican showing in the election of 2004 was truly impressive only when one moves beyond the presidential race to consider the totality of the GOP victory. In short, it was a notable victory for “Team Republican” as a whole.
Republicans in 2004 continued to strengthen their majorities on Capitol Hill. Since the election of 2000, GOP numbers in the Senate have swelled to 55 seats from 50, and in the House to 232 seats from 221. The Republican Senate total after this election ties the party’s highest post-election number since the eve of the New Deal; the number of Republican House members is the highest post-election total for the party since 1946.
In the process, Republicans have gone from razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress to a more clear-cut advantage, which could enable Bush to pursue a more activist second term agenda than many presidents in his position have been able to contemplate.
The 2004 election produced an unusual congruency in the nationwide voting for president and the House of Representatives – with the size of the GOP majorities almost identical. This congruency was literally a generation in the making. Through much of the latter half of the 20th century, Republicans dominated the balloting for president, Democrats for Congress. In 2000, the popular vote for president leaned slightly Democratic, the aggregate House vote leaned slightly Republican – each by roughly a half million votes.
But in 2004, Republicans enjoyed a similar advantage in both the presidential and congressional balloting. Bush defeated Kerry in the presidential vote by 2.4 percentage points – 50.7%-to-48.3% - and took 53% of the electoral vote. Republicans outpolled the Democrats in the nationwide House vote by 2.7 points, 50.1%-to-47.4% - and took 53% of all House seats.
Yet this election was arguably as much about incumbency as anything else. Only one Senate incumbent was defeated in the November balloting, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. He was ousted by the margin of just one percentage point.
Only seven incumbents lost in the House of Representatives, with most of the carnage concentrated in the president’s home state of Texas. There, a controversial GOP-orchestrated remap in 2003 led to the defeat of four veteran Democratic House members last fall.
Two of the passel of governors up this year lost their bids for another term, but only one, Republican Craig Benson of New Hampshire, had been elected to the post. The other, Democrat Joe Kernan of Indiana, ascended to the governorship in 2003 upon the death of his predecessor, Frank O’Bannon.
And in the presidential race, Bush effectively underscored the value of incumbency in 2004 as he made an updated version of “don’t change horses in the middle of the stream” a major theme that played particularly well in a campaign where fear of terrorism was a driving concern.
Republicans can act cocky at their peril. The GOP came out of the election with a 22-to-4 edge in Southern Senate seats, and 91-to-51 advantage in Southern House seats. Yet without the South, Kerry would be in the White House and Democrats in control of both chambers of Congress.
In California, New York and Illinois - each a keystone of the electoral map in their region – Republicans currently have problems not only at the presidential level, but the congressional level as well. Democrats hold 25 more House seats than the Republicans in these three states, plus all six Senate seats.
In last year’s Senate races, the GOP barely managed a blip on the radar screen in any of the three states. Democrats Barbara Boxer in California, Barack Obama in Illinois, and Charles Schumer in New York all won by more than two million votes – in each case, rolling up a record margin of victory for a contested Senate race in their state.
After all the effort, all the money spent – neither the presidential nor the congressional map really changed that much in 2004. Republican Senate gains were concentrated in the GOP’s strongest region, the South, where they picked up five open Democratic seats. Republican House gains were mainly in Texas, where the party picked up four seats. And in the presidential election, only three states switched from one party to another: New Hampshire to Kerry, Iowa and New Mexico to Bush. All were states decided by less than 10,000 votes in 2000 and all were close again this time.
Undeniably, the election of 2004 was a Republican victory. But by historical standards, it was a tenuous one, in which the lines between the Democratic and Republican parts of the country so evident in 2000 continued to be etched deeply.
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Rhodes Cook
rhodescook@aol.com© Rhodes Cook 2005.
