Bush, The Democrats, and ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ America
By Rhodes Cook
Editor, The Rhodes Cook Letter

As originally published in the October 2003 issue of "The Rhodes Cook Letter".

ELECTION ANALYSIS ARCHIVES

The Fight to be First Unusual Turnout Dynamic Keys Big Democratic Comeback Voter Turnout and Congressional Change Halfway to November 2006 Primary Season Opens in Texas 2005: An Eventful Year Competition and Congruency A Bush Mandate? The Election of 2004: A First Take More Voters Steering Away from Party Labels Primary Analysis Charts Bush, The Democrats and 'Red and Blue' America Winning "the Invisible Primary" The South, the GOP and the White House 2000 1996

Congressional/Gubernatorial 2002: Leaning Republican Fit to be Tied: The Battle to Control Congress in 2002 Do the Math, and the Result Is: Not Much of a Contest Parties Could Do Better in 'Civics 101' A Good Start for Incumbents Charts: Summary of Election Results What's Up in 2002 Gubernatorial and Senate Nominations at a Glance House Casualties 2000: A Few Incumbents Under Fire

Election Wrap-Up 2000: Part Retro, Part New Age

While George W. Bush’s bid for a second term, he is approaching his reelection campaign as arguably the most successful party-building president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Certainly, that is the case when measured in terms of Republican officeholders. FDR and Bush are the only presidents since the Depression whose parties gained House and Senate seats in their first midterm election. Both the Democrats under Roosevelt in 1934, and the Republicans under Bush in 2002, performed the rare political feat of solidifying their majorities on both sides of Capitol Hill in midterm voting.

The GOP also emerged from last year’s election with more state legislative seats than the Democrats for the first time in a half century. And while the number of Republican governors has declined from 29 after the 2000 election to 27 now, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent victory in the California recall election gives the GOP control of the governorships in the four most populous states (California, Texas, New York and Florida).

All of this compares quite favorably to Bush’s recent predecessors. Three years into Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Democrats had already lost their majorities on both sides of Capitol Hill. So had the Republicans at a similar point of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency. As Jimmy Carter approached reelection, Democratic House and Senate majorities were on the decline, while John F. Kennedy moved toward the fateful November of 1963 with an increased Democratic majority in the Senate but a slightly smaller Democratic House majority than when he first took office.

And the last three Republican presidents before Bush – Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush – all approached reelection saddled with Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives. Nixon and the elder Bush had to deal with a Democratic-controlled Senate as well.

2002: ‘Red’ America Trumps ‘Blue’ America

Republicans succeeded in the 2002 election by doing better on their part of the national electoral map than Democrats did on theirs. It is a map that has taken on a life of its own since the closely fought 2000 election, and reflects the concept of a nation evenly divided between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ America. For whatever reason, red is the color often associated with Republicans on election maps, with blue the color used to depict the Democrats.

Thirty states comprise Red America, the states carried by Bush in the last presidential election. They are mainly in the South, the Plains, and the Mountain West. Twenty states make up Blue America. They are the states carried by Democrat Al Gore and are mainly in the Northeast, the Pacific West, the industrial Midwest and the more agrarian Upper Midwest.

Altogether, Republican candidates won a healthy 78% of the Senate elections in Red America last fall, 74% of the gubernatorial elections, and 63% of the House elections.

Meanwhile, Democrats won just 64% of the Senate elections in Blue America, 58% of the House elections, and 53% of the gubernatorial races.

To be sure, Democrats scored some notable ‘against the grain’ victories in gubernatorial and Senate races last fall, holding hotly contested Senate seats in Louisiana and South Dakota, while picking up a Senate seat in Arkansas and governorships in such seemingly hostile territory as Arizona, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wyoming. Democrats even picked up the governorship in Tennessee, which had denied its electoral votes two years earlier to native son Al Gore – 11 electoral votes that would have given Gore the presidency.

But Republicans made deeper inroads into Blue America last year than Democrats did into Red America. Case in point, the House races. While the GOP won 91 of the 217 House seats in the Gore states last year, Democrats won only 80 of 218 seats in the Bush states. The resulting 58-seat advantage that the GOP posted in Red America easily offset the 34-seat edge that Democrats had in Blue America.

Republicans also picked up a critical Senate seat in Minnesota, and won six governorships in states from Massachusetts to Hawaii that Gore had carried two years earlier by at least 15 percentage points. For good measure, the GOP picked up the Vermont governorship vacated by Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.

Party Building Can Beget Polarization

Bush's White House has played an integral role in the Republicans' success, both in recruiting candidates and helping to raise tens of millions of dollars to fund their campaigns. Bush has exhibited a degree of intraparty involvement that goes far beyond the level of most of his recent predecessors in the Oval Office. And so far, it has paid off.

But the flip side of efficient, hard-charging party building can be polarization, something the American electorate is displaying these days in spades.

A Gallup Poll taken earlier this month indicated that fully three-quarters of all registered voters have already made up their mind whether they will vote for or against Bush next November. And they are evenly split – 38% saying they would definitely vote for the president, and 38% saying they would definitely vote against him. That leaves only one-quarter of the electorate up for grabs for an election still more than a year away.

This is where Bush and FDR may part company. Like the current Bush administration, Roosevelt’s New Deal had its visceral opponents. But by the start of FDR’s first reelection campaign in 1936, Roosevelt was immensely popular and the Democrats dominated all levels of American politics. Meanwhile, the Republicans then were a traumatized and defeated force with the discredited former president, Herbert Hoover, still their most visible public face. FDR went on to score a landslide reelection victory in 1936 that helped expand the Democrats’ already huge majorities on Capitol Hill to historic levels – a whopping 75 seats in the Senate, 333 seats in the House.

These days, the Republican advantage at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is much more tenuous. Their coalition is not so imposing that they have votes to spare in the presidential race or seats to spare in Congress.

The Republicans do begin the 2004 campaign with some significant advantages. Bush is unopposed for renomination – always a good sign for an incumbent president. He is on his way to raising a record $170 million or so for the primary season, dollars that can fund a massive advertising blitz during the spring and summer months next year that the Democrats will be hard pressed to match. In addition, the decennial post-Census recalculation of the electoral vote gives the states of Red America seven more electoral votes in 2004 than they had in 2000, and Blue America seven electoral votes less.

At the Senate level, Republicans are seemingly sitting pretty, even with a scant 51 seats in their possession. Democrats are the ones who have to play defense in 2004. Of the 34 senators up next year, 19 are Democrats and 10 of their seats are in Red America, including those being vacated by John Edwards of North Carolina, Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, and Zell Miller of Georgia. Meanwhile, of the 15 GOP seats up next year, just three are in Blue America, and only that of Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois is open.

House Republicans look nearly as well positioned, especially if a new GOP-drawn map of the Texas congressional districts holds up in court. Republicans are hopeful that the controversial map might swing up to a half dozen seats their way next year, padding a GOP majority in the House that currently numbers 229 seats.

Expect the Unexpected

Still, if there is one rule of politics the last decade, it is to expect the unexpected.

Who would have expected the Democrats to win the White House in 1992, in an election where a wealthy independent candidate emerged from nowhere to take nearly 20% of the vote… or that the Democrats would lose control of both houses of Congress in 1994 … or that the president would be impeached in 1998, and a new president elected in 2000 without a popular vote majority … or that the president’s party would gain seats in both the House and Senate in 2002, defying history for the second midterm election in a row?

There is no mistaking that this is a politically volatile time, with the number of independent voters on the rise and the strength of independent-minded suburbs growing. And that could give the Democrats in 2004 a fighting chance, particularly in the presidential race.

In 2000, Gore was able to sweep many of the battleground states of the industrial Frost Belt by combining big majorities in large urban centers such as Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago, with strong showings in the vote-rich suburban counties that adjoin them. That enabled Gore to carry Pennsylvania by winning just 18 of its 67 counties, to take Michigan by winning only 24 of its 83 counties, and to bag Illinois by carrying just 24 of its 102 counties.

Democratic gubernatorial candidates last fall were able to replicate Gore’s victorious formula in those same three states, running well enough in the large cities and suburbs to offset Republican strength in smaller cities and rural areas.

Former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell carried just 18 counties in winning the governorship of Pennsylvania. State Attorney General Jennifer Granholm carried just 27 counties in capturing the Michigan governorship. And Rod Blagojevich, a House member from Chicago, won just 35 counties in winning the Illinois governorship. All three Democrats won open gubernatorial chairs that Republicans had held previously.

The basic difficulty for Democrats in 2004 is that they do not have much room for error. If they write off all, or virtually all, of the South next year, they will need to hold virtually all of the states that went for Gore last time as well as carry one or more of the states that got away.

Florida, New Hampshire and Missouri were the closest of Gore’s near misses. All of them went for Bush by margins of 3 percentage points or less (Florida, of course, by much, much less). But all three states were the scenes of notable Republican victories in 2002. The president’s brother, Jeb, was reelected governor of Florida by more than 650,000 votes. Republicans won open gubernatorial and Senate races in New Hampshire, with the state’s most prominent Democrat, Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, losing the latter. And in Missouri, Democratic Sen. Jean Carnahan was unseated.

Meanwhile, there were some ominous signs for Democrats last fall in Blue America. In Maryland, which Gore had wonby 16 percentage points, the GOP elected their first governor since Spiro Agnew in 1966. Republican Rep. Robert Ehrlich swept all but the three most liberal jurisdictions in the state – suburban Montgomery and Prince George’s counties near Washington, D.C., and the city of Baltimore – in defeating Democratic Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

In Minnesota, which Gore carried by just 2 percentage points, Republicans last fall took both the governorship and the Senate seat of the late Paul Wellstone in an emotionally charged election that produced a turnout that approached a presidential-year level. The 2.25 million Minnesota voters who turned out last November represented more than 90% the number that voted in 2000 – an unusually high midterm election turnout.

And this fall in California, a state that Gore won by 12 percentage points, voters approved the recall of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis by a margin of nearly 1 million votes while turning the office over to Republican Schwarzenegger by a margin approaching 1.5 million. For the Austrian-born movie star, it is a landslide political debut that rivals Ronald Reagan’s in 1966. But the ultimate meaning of the recall vote is not immediately apparent. Schwarzenegger’s victory could provide an opening for Bush to compete successfully next year for California’s 55 electoral votes, a result that almost certainly would reduce Democratic chances of winning the presidential election to slim or none.

Yet the recall vote could also be the first sign of a new wave of anti-incumbent sentiment that could roil the political waters for Bush and the Republicans in 2004. A strong anti-incumbent wave a decade ago helped to sweep his father from the White House in 1992 and Democrats from Congress in 1994.

We are a year away from knowing whether the ramifications of the California recall favor the Democrats, the Republicans, or ultimately neither. How it plays out will go a long way in determining whether Red or Blue America emerges triumphant in 2004.