Saul Anuzis to GOP Economic Populists: "This is not your average Republican twitter page!"

ElectionDissection strolled down to the offices of Americans for Tax Reform for the latest in the series of Newsmaker Breakfasts hosted by the American Spectator.  The “newsmaker” on hand was Saul Anuzis, the Michigan Republican Party chairman who earned the Paultards’ enduring animus by calling for Ron Paul’s exclusion from Republican presidential primary season debates after his symbiotically beneficial contretemps over 9/11 blowback with fmr. NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani in South Carolina.

Despite the fact that its Congressional delegation has been shrinking in recent rounds of redistricting and expects to at the next census, Michigan’s noteworthy political legacy is even more salient as potential bailouts for the Big Three dominate the headlines.  It’s clear that Anuzis’ decades of experience in the trenches of Wolverine State politics do color his vision for a revivified GOP as he vies for RNC Chair.

Anuzis highlighted his vision for harnessing new media to facilitate disseminating the GOP’s message.  (Best line: “This is not your average Republican twitter page!” Oxymoron of the week: “Republican twitter page!”)  And he repeatedly harkened back to the fabled “Reagan Democrat,” citing appealing to this once-decisive voting bloc as the key to a Republican resurgence.  Suburban Detroit’s Macomb County boomed in the 1950s and 60s with auto workers as White Flight emptied the white working class neighborhoods of Detroit’s Wayne County.  Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg identified Macomb as the spiritual home of this famously crucial electoral demographic.  (It’s interesting to note that Greenberg, post-2008, agrees that this political dinosaur is, in fact, extinct.)   

“Reagan Democrats,” of course were those Northern, often-ethnic and heavily Catholic, white working class voters who were lured away from their ancestral Democratic moorings by GOP appeals to their conservative opinions on moral issues, busing and crime and Cold War hawkishness.  But many of these voters were proud union men (and women) who couldn’t swallow even Ronald Reagan’s free trade agenda.  This was especially acute in Macomb Co., Michigan in the 1980’s as competition from Japanese imports rattled Detroit’s long-term game plan.

While social conservatism can be found in Michigan politicians of both parties – Reps. Dale Kildee, Bart Stupak and John Dingell count themselves as either pro-life, pro-gun or both – so, too, does the state’s formidable strain of economic populism infect voters on both sides of the aisle. 

Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace first identified this political animal instinctively, scoring above his national average in Macomb in his 1968 indie bid, and capturing a majority in the 1972 Democratic presidential primary statewide.  Twenty years later, Pat Buchanan barnstormed the state denouncing imports and racked up his best score this side of the Granite State in his challenge to George H.W. Bush’s renomination.  Four years later, he fared even better, denouncing NAFTA at every stop. 

Only an underwhelming performance in Detroit dragged Ross Perot’s percentage statewide back to his national average in 1992.  In over half of Michigan’s counties, his call to heed that “giant sucking sound” supposedly sending manufacturing jobs to Mexico pulled in over a quarter to 30% of the vote.

And in this year’s Republican presidential primary, Mike Huckabee scored well in Dutch-settled southwestern Michigan where his social conservatism no doubt resonated with the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church-goers.  But, his economic populism seems to have struck a cord here, too.  The area’s Dutch-American U.S. Rep. Peter Hoekstra was the only Michigander Republican to oppose NAFTA back in ’93.  Huckabee’s populist notes also played among Yoopers, too, in the Upper Peninsula’s mining and timber towns. 

But Michigan’s stunted population growth has frozen the smaller, broken rust belt cities like Saginaw, Flint, Muskegon and Bay City, where Wallace, Buchanan and Perot exploited white working class anxiety, as well as both the U.P. and the Dutch southwest where Huckabee found a base far above the Mason-Dixon Line. 

Macomb is growing, but still totals far behind Oakland’s population.  (Besides, Obama captured the county comfortably, flipping the narrow win G.W. eked out in 2004.)  Contrast Macomb to its fellow Detroit suburb, Oakland County.  Once home to Midwestern, Michigan, Gerald Ford-style regular Republicans, as this affluent and educated enclave population expands, it threatens to surpass Detroit’s Wayne County, which still continues to hemmorage residents, as the state’s largest jurisdiction.  Oakland’s Democratic trend is relentless as Obama scored the best Dem numbers since LBJ, beating FDR, even!  McCain’s percentage dipped to near Goldwater and Alf Landon lows.  Once safe GOP Rep. Joe Knollenberg also succumbed to Oakland's Democratic wave in '08, after what shouldn't have been a surprisingly close race in '06, given the county's trends were then becoming evident.  (Note, too, the strong showing by North Dakota Rep. William Lemke’s third party bid here in 1936, whose message melding social conservatism and economic populism was amplified by on air harangues from Father Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest whose Shrine of the Little Flower sits in now-trendy Royal Oak, a leading indicator of Oakland’s partisan progression.  Royal Oak gave Gore a 51-45 win over Bush in 2000.  By 2008, Obama’s margin here had grown to a lopsided 61-37.)

Building on a question from Economist.com blogger Dave Weigel suggesting the GOP's appeals to socially conservative voters and anti-immigrant demagoguing had aliented electorates in similar suburban counties nationwide, ElectionDissection questioned Anuzis about whether his strategy for staving off further losses in Oakland included toning down the economic populism that hasn't been a vote-winner there – especially in light of a Big Three bailout that may play well in his state, but not among the Southern-anchored grassroots of the party he wants lead - his answer focused more on this blog’s analysis of Michigan’s political geography than his thoughts on recasting the Republican message.  But Anuzis did offer some interesting off-the-cuff insight into shifting intra-state demographics – UAW retirees, for instance, migrating up north to retire and the increasingly racially diverse make-up of Oakland Co.’s electorate – which offer fodder for future posts.  

Georgia Sen Runoff: Could it have been "Peach-ier" for Vernon Jones than Jim Martin?

Most press previews of today’s Georgia Senate runoff focus on how the result is expected to hinge on Afro-Am turnout.  Black voters were believed to have boosted overall turnout by over 600K this year and sliced McCain’s margin over Obama by ten points as compared to Bush’s 2004 margin over John Kerry.  And conservative white Democrats are believed to have returned to the fold down ballot after going for the McCain-Palin ticket for president.  (No wonder that the GOP has sent in Sarah Palin to rally the base in this expected low turnout runoff.) 

Performance doesn’t seem to be too far off, geographically-speaking.

Here’s the map of county returns for president:

 And here’s the Senate county map

Note Mitchell County’s tie!):

 

 Given this playing field, it’s difficult not to speculate how this race might be panning out if Dem nominee Jim Martin, a fmr. State rep. and failed Lt. Gov. nominee, had fallen to DeKalb Co. CEO Vernon Jones in the primary.  Jones’ bid might have been fatally wounded by ethics questions, but given his moderate – and even conservative – views on some issues and his geographic base, Jones might have been an ideal candidate.  In fact, Jones has flirted with Republicans: donating to the Georgia Republican Party and confessing to voting for George W. Bush, twice, all the while hectoring Martin for being insufficiently pro-Obama.   

Jones’ controversial temperament seems to have stunted his growth into a politician in the mold pioneered by Black Caucus Blue Dog Georgia House Democrats Sanford Bishop and David Scott, who have built up a support in white rural Georgia – the heart of Lester Maddox country! – by staking out conservative positions on issues such as gun control and positioning themselves as guardians of local and ag interests – particularly peanuts, in Bishop’s case.

Jones would differ significantly in that he would be the first politician to carve such a support base out of a booming New South county like DeKalb.  DeKalb is now majority Afro-Am, but continues to be fairly affluent even as its residents’ hues have changed.  Despite being home to the notorious giant bas-relief memorial to Confederate generals in Stone Mountain, DeKalb was a rare oasis of support for Richard Nixon, as George Wallace swept the Peach State in 1968.

While Bishop or Scott might be secretly harboring questions of how they might have been better positioned in this post-Obama runoff, Jones might be wondering - if he had crafted a more careful career – how he might have been able to cobble together an energized black Georgia electorate with just enough of a sliver of suburban Atlanta McCain voters still disaffected with the Bush Administration and Saxby Chambliss’ Congressional Republican cohorts to pull off a victory that might be just beyond the reach of the Democratic nominee, Jim Martin. 

ElectionDissection.com Book Club--Revisiting 1976

A few weeks back, while visiting Milwaukee for work, I stopped into my favorite bookstore, Renaissance Books. A towering warehouse filled with miles of shelves lined with musty books, I like stopping in a few times a year because I’m always sure to find older works of political history and biography that can’t be found easily anywhere else. Sure enough, I found a few things destined to find their way into future posts. The treasure of my visit was a copy of the 1976 Almanac of American Politics. For political junkies—especially those who study the Congress—this is our bible. I’d never seen a copy this old (1974 was the first edition) so the past several days have been spent digging into the congressional bios of members long since gone and the voting data from the post-Watergate Democratic landslide. This is high level politics nerd-dom.

What I have found particularly interesting in my reading so far is how it described the upcoming 1976 presidential election. With the benefit of hindsight, we don’t often appreciate the uncertainty that exists a year or so out from an election. However, it was far from clear who would emerge from the chaos of the Watergate era to win the White House. Michael Barone and his co-authors' description of the potential candidates is fascinating.

For example, at the time of the book’s publication in 1975, the presumptive Democratic nominee appeared to be Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson:

…at this writing he is probably the leading candidate for the nomination. The impetus for the Jackson candidacy comes from those Democrats who are liberal on domestic policies and basically hawkish (though Jackson dislikes the word) on foreign policy. And his backers believe that Jackson has shown by his work in the Senate that he has mastered more subjects a President must understand than any other American legislator…Jackson has two majors problems as a presidential candidate: he is still not terribly well known, and he faces the implacable hostility of the portion of the Democratic Party that nominated George McGovern in 1972. At this writing, he is not known by almost half the American electorate; this will probably change in the course of the primaries, unless he runs unexpectedly poorly in the early contests. He certainly has the financial support necessary. He has already collected large sums, much of it from ardent supporters of Israel who appreciate his long record on Middle Eastern policy, much of it from businessmen who see him as a more congenial kind of politician than most liberal Democrats. The antiwar left is another matter. There are literally thousands of Democrats, including now some members of Congress, who got into politics primarily because of the opposition to the Vietnam War; why should they now support a man who was one of its major proponents?

Also given much discussion, but not much of a chance, was Alabama Governor (and 1968 and 1972 candidate) George Wallace. Reflecting on the Alabaman’s journey, including the 1972 attempt on his life, Barone writes:

No one doubts that he wants to run for President; it appears now that for all his primary runs and third party candidacies he has been seeking a way fro a one-time vocal segregationist to make it to the White House. Wallace has managed to raise literally millions in small contributions through direct mail, and he has enough hard core support—augmented, if anything by the respectability conferred by martyrdom—to run ahead of all other Democratic presidential possibilities in early 1975. But even more Democrats find Wallace totally unacceptable and would back anyone in the general election against him, even Gerald Ford; for all his talk of how he reflects the people’s real views, Wallace is clearly the weakest candidate the Democrats could nominate. And of course they won’t.

Also garnering attention, Arizona congressman Mo Udall:

Udall has not yet raised anything like the amount of money a presidential candidate is thought to need, and of course his name recognition is about zero. But he does have certain advantages: most notably, after the withdrawals of Edward Kennedy and Walter Mondale, there is a dearth of candidates acceptable to the liberal wing which dominated the Democratic convention in 1972 and may well again in 1976. Udall is at least acceptable to that group.

Where, you might ask, is Jimmy Carter, the eventual nominee and winner in 1976? Barone et al, less than a year before the beginning of the nomination contests, have very little to say about the former Georgia governor, and don’t seem to view his as a top tier candidate. Writing about his rise in Georgia political circles and election to the governorship in 1970, they state:

During his campaign, in which he shook tens of thousands of hands, Carter liked to describe himself as a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. He placed somewhat less emphasis on the fact that he had served as a top aide to Admiral Hyman Rickover in the nuclear submarine program, and that his peanut farm was not a shack-and-forty-acres affair but a well-managed, thriving business. Carter lost the Atlanta metropolitan area in both the primary and general election; but surprised some of his erstwhile supporters by coming out foresquare for integration…Now he is running for President, vowing that he will go into all the primaries; barring a major upset of George Wallace, it looks like a uphill race.

Thus, on the eve of the Democratic nominating process, it was virtually impossible to predict who would ultimately emerge victorious. It’s important, I think, to appreciate how hard it is to predict the way events, especially electoral and political, will play out. To maybe put this into a more contemporary perspective, try to go back to the recent editions of the Almanac or its competitor “Politics in America” and find anyone making a convincing argument about Barack Obama’s chances of becoming President. Momentum can develop very quickly in American politics.

As a final note, check out this snippet, written almost in passing, in the section on Arkansas in the ’76 Almanac:

Arkansas seems full of young, fairly liberal, personally attractive Democratic politicians these days—a type that simply was not around in the days before Winthrop Rockefeller (although, ironically, none is in Rockefeller’s Republican Party). There are Bumpers and Pryor, of course, and state Attorney General Jim Guy Tucker and Congressman Ray Thornton and almost successful congressional candidate Bill Clinton.

Here’s What’s the Matter with “What’s the Matter with Cairo, Ill.?”!

ElectionDissection strolled down Mass. Ave., NW to the Cato Institute today for a book forum discussing “Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do” whose authors maintain a data-rich blog.

Informed comments were offered by George Mason Univ. prof and exit poll veteran Dr. Michael McDonald – whose invaluable data ElectionDissection links to on our Election Returns & Other Data sidebar – titled “What’s the Matter with Cairo, Ill.?” McDonald contrasted how Chicago’s affluent and historically Republican Collar County suburbs have been trending Democratic in recent elections – reflected in the political journey of their Favorite Daughter, onetime Goldwater Girl Hillary Rodham Clinton – with the Republican swing in Cairo’s impoverished Alexander County, home to a historic Southern Democrat-style tradition.

Being a son of Little Egypt, nickname for Southern Illinois, the flood-prone region whose tip meets at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers at the aptly named Cairo, I have to quibble with Prof. McDonald’s choice of this town to contrast with Chicago ‘burbs. But, I’ll stress, given the strength of McDonald’s presentation, I’m only quibbling.

Cairo, sits – or withers, rather – at the tip of the Land of Lincoln, but couldn’t be further away from Abe’s Sangamon County, in both distance and culture.

Culturally, Cairo (pronounced “kay-row”) holds more in common with Memphis, the Deep South river town, or even Yazoo City in the Mississippi Delta, where McDonald mentioned he attended high school, than greater Southern Illinois, which has more of the feel of an Upper South “Border” region.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, The Cairo Gazette was openly secessionist. Cairo itself is largely Afro-Am in population, and impoverished. The town was the scene of repeated violence, a flashpoint in the struggle for civil rights, from which it has never recovered. Alexander County’s white population were so agitated, they gave segregationist Alabamian George Wallace 21% of their votes in 1968, the loudest electoral thundering of white backlash in the Land of Lincoln.

Cairo’s “peculiar” Old South character renders it an anomaly even for Southern-inflected Southern Illinois, home of sweet tea-sipping white Baptists. I just couldn’t resist quibbling with McDonald - and only out of regional and familial pride - whose comments will certainly inform my reading of the book.

Bob Barr Blusters: Pres Nomination Campaigns don't "affect change"??!!

ElectionDissection ventured over to the National Press Club for a couple of press conferences today.   The first featured Ron Paul with his by-now-signature unfocused, “aw shucks” style with which he urged his acolytes – and the American electorate at large – to reject McCain and Obama and consider any of four third party candidates.  Green nominee and former Dem. Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney, independent perennial Ralph Nader and far-right Constitution Party standard bearer “Pastor Chuck” Baldwin were all on hand to bask in Dr. Paul’s glow.  Libertarian Party nominee, former GOP Georgia U.S. Rep. Bob Barr pointedly declined the invite.

Half an hour later, Barr responded with a press conference of his own.  Barr and his top aide, former Ross Perot campaign honcho Russ Verney, explained Barr’s absence that morning, with Barr insisting that his bid offers “bold, focused, specific leadership,” not Ron Paul’s “amorphous kind that says ‘any of the above’ or ‘none of the above.’”  Barr asserted that the goal of his campaign is to amass as many votes as possible, hoping to affect policy change in his direction; a worthy and very reasonable goal for a third party candidate determined to run an actual political campaign, seeking actual votes, not just to hit the college lecture circuit and bloviate ad nausea. 

Barr’s and Verney’s “we’re the grownups here” mein bordered on farce.  Barr got so wrapped up in the “we’re not goofing around here” meme that, invoking Verney’s old boss Perot repeatedly, he asserted the patently preposterous claim that primary campaign vote totals, and failed nomination campaigns, are irrelevant; rather, building significant general election vote totals is the only way for alternative presidential candidates to affect policy change.  This is indubitably true for segregationist George Wallace’s 1968 American Independent bid that first identified “Reagan Democrats” among Northern Urban Ethnics and rural Southern Democrats and liberal Republican John Anderson’s 1980 indie bid that gave us sneak peaks at segments of the coalition that vaulted Obama to the Democratic nomination this year.  But for the highest vote getting third party bid in modern electoral history – Ross Perot’s snaring of nearly one in five votes in 1992 – the jury is still out as for its long term impact.

Barr’s claim was made to counter claims that Paul’s 1.2 million primary season votes did more than Barr’s effort will to further a libertarian agenda.  There is a question to be considered that Paul’s 2008 primary totals – as scattered as his message – may tell us less about a long-term libertarian vote trend than does Ed Clark’s 1980 Libertarian Party high water mark. 

Nevertheless, the litany countering Barr’s ludicrous contention is a long and venerable one.  

Let’s start with Wallace: the 670,000 votes and 3.75 million votes he garnered, respectively, in his upstart 1964 and 1972 Democratic nomination bids were dwarfed by the 9.9 million votes he attracted in his 1968 indie bid, but reinforced to Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips that millions of those voters – especially in states like Wisconsin in ’64 or in Maryland and Michigan in ’72 – who might never have voted for him in a general, or before his assassination attempt, were up for grabs.  Peeling these proto-Reagan Democrats away built the Conservative Coalition that governed under Reagan during his first term. 

Eugene McCarthy’s quixotic bid for the 1968 Democratic bid may have been as unfocused as Paul’s this year, but his 2.9 million votes forced the incumbent president, LBJ, to withdraw from consideration for re-nomination and marked the first electoral inklings of popular discontent over the Vietnam War that culminated in Nixon – the staunch anti-communist – pulling US forces out of Indochina a few years later. 

The Rev. Jesse Jackson’s nearly 10 million votes between his 1984 and 1988 bids put his slice of urban America’s agenda on the table, arguably prompting passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 in a still conservative-oriented Congress and signed by a Republican president.    

Walter Mondale famously ridiculed Gary Hart’s “new ideas” bid for the 1984 Democratic nomination with the then-popular fast food chain ad refrain, “Where’s the beef?”  But the third of the Democratic primary vote and 1200 delegates that Hart’s platform attracted - a melding of cosmopolitan social liberalism with an appreciation of foreign trade and a recognition that market forces can’t be dismissed - took most observers by surprise and challenged the union orthodoxy that Mondale accepted.  Hart’s “New Democrat” agenda presaged the moderate Democratic Leadership Council from which Bill Clinton launched his successful bid for the 1992 Democratic nomination and upon whose agenda he generally governed during his tenure.  Nearly a quarter century later, Hillary Clinton reverted to Mondale’s playbook, but came up short against Barack Obama who racked up huge majorities among the very voters Hart first identified. 

Two more examples stand out because of the candidates’ associations with associates of Barr’s campaign in 2008:

Barr advisor and conservative direct mail guru Richard Viguerie keynoted the Libertarian convention this year.  Viguerie supported Ronald Reagan’s nearly victorious challenge to President Gerald Ford’s re-nomination in 1976, and tried to lure Reagan to a splinter conservative third party when Ford finally secured the GOP nod.  Of course, Reagan built upon the momentum of that strong ’76 bid to win the White House four years later, launching his “Reagan Revolution.”

“A Call to Economic Arms” was the theme of Paul Tsongas’ 1992 campaign that attracted unexpected support among Democratic primary voters.  Ross Perot – Verney was his spokesman – built upon Tsongas’ momentum in the fall, memorably campaigning with a series of charts to illustrate the federal fiscal dangers both these “deficit hawks” feared.  Bill Clinton’s first term stabs at getting the federal budget under control can be attributed to both Tsongas’ nomination and Perot’s general election campaigns.  

Watauga Watershed?

Watauga County, deep in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge might be a chink in Hillary’s fabled “Hillbilly Firewall,” and a win here by Obama will indicate the Tar Heel State’s shift from reliably Republican to highly competitive.

Boone, the county’s seat, is a college town home to Appalachian State University. Obama has won or performed well in college counties even in Appalachia, winning Virginia Tech’s Montgomery County and winning 20 to 30% more in Ohio State’s Athens County than surrounding counties.

Watauga is a historically Mountain Republican county, a rare spot in the Old Confederacy where Republicans were competitive. Democrats have only carried Watauga four times since 1924, including only two out of FDR’s four wins. Another election that Watauga forsook the GOP was 1964, when historically Democratic counties voted for Republican Barry Goldwater and his opposition to civil rights acts. Like other Southern Appalachian counties, Watauga has an almost non-existent Afro-Am population, and racial appeals have found little resonance among voters here. Watauga was one of the worst counties for George Wallace in 1968 and Strom Thurmond in 1948. And Watauga voted for Harvey Gantt, the black former Charlotte mayor in his 1990 and 1996 challenges to former Republican Senator Jesse Helms, notorious for his racially divisive rhetoric. That’s good news for Obama.

Boone is booming, and turnout hit a record high of 24,000 in 2004, up from just around 15,000 in 1998. And, like a lot of booming, economically growing North Carolina – Asheville, the Research Triangle – Watauga is trending Democratic. U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx lost the county her 2006 race, not regarded as competitive and in 2004, Kerry picked up four points over Gore in 2000, chalking up 47%.

If Obama can win these growing, Dem-trending areas, his campaign has solid evidence to counter Hillary Clinton’s contention that she would be stronger nominee, more likely carry the newly competitive swing states like Colorado and North Carolina.

Do Contentious Nominations Put Parties in Trouble or Do Parties in Trouble Have Contentious Nominations???

As the debate continues about the state of the Obama/Clinton contest and how it will affect the Democratic nominee’s chances in November, I thought it might be helpful to take a bit of a historical look at this issue. With all sorts of pundits, journalists, and Democratic activists in a tizzy over this question, taking a step back is clearly in order.

As I mentioned in my post on realignment, Walter Dean Burnham identified a process, rapidly unfolding by the 1960’s, of party “decomposition.” What he meant by this was that the party, as organization, was able to exert less and less control over the process by which party nominees were chosen. With the advent of the primary system the nomination process, while “democratized,” was also more subject to unpredictable and uncontrollable twists and turns. Candidates themselves became increasingly in control of the process and decisions about when to enter and when to exit the race were largely theirs to make. We see the manifestation of this today in the Democratic race.

This got me thinking about those nomination fights, for both parties, that have been the most contentious in the years since Burnham identified this process. Did these contentious nomination processes doom the nominee in the fall? Might there be other explanations for that party’s failure to capture the presidency?

While all nomination fights have some degree of conflict—indeed that’s what a nomination process is premised on—some have been more contentious and drawn out than others. I’ve identified four that seem to be the most cited as damaging to their party:

1968 Democrats. Here we have the classic example of a party in chaos and disarray. After President Johnson is embarrassed in the New Hampshire primary by Senator Eugene McCarthy, LBJ decides not to seek re-election. We see McCarthy continue, soon joined by Bobby Kennedy and the incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey. After the assassination of RFK, the party limps to the disastrous Chicago convention and awards the nomination to Humphrey.

1976 Republicans. President Ford, never elected Vice President or President due to the resignations of both Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon, is seeking election in his own right. In the process he is challenged from the right by former California Governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan wins some primaries but drops out at the party convention in Kansas City.

1980 Democrats. President Jimmy Carter, in the midst of the Iranian hostage crisis, is challenged by Senator Edward Kennedy. Carter, despite capturing the White House for the Democrats in the wake of Watergate, is unpopular nationwide and within the Democratic Congress. Sensing the last chance at restoring Camelot, Kennedy jumps in the race and manages to win some contests but doesn’t come close to winning the nomination. Nonetheless, he doesn’t formally drop out until the convention in New York.

1992 Republicans. This case was probably the least contentious but still produced some surprises. Coming out of the Gulf War, George Bush’s popularity skyrockets, forcing many prominent Democrats to opt out of challenging him. As the economy begins to sour, commentator and former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan mounts a populist challenge to Bush for the Republican nomination. While the outcome of the nomination was never really in doubt, Buchanan’s challenge did signal difficulties ahead, both at the disastrous convention in New Orleans, and afterwards.

So what can we say about these cases? The first thing that we would note is that in all four cases the nominee eventually lost the general election in November. The 1968 and 1976 general elections were extremely close, 1980 and 1992 less so. Thus, a fractious nominating process would seem to bring bad tidings on a party.

But wait. Might we have the arrow of causality backwards? Rather than a party being weakened by a tough nomination fight, might that fight be the consequence of an already weakened party? Here, there seems to be compelling evidence.

One thing we would note about these contentious fights is that in all four cases it was the party in power that went through the wrenching nomination. As presidents’ terms progress, we tend to see a decline in their popularity, the fracturing of their original electoral coalition, and their tendency to be captured by events. With Humphrey in ’68, his inability to disassociate himself with LBJ’s Vietnam policy was an albatross he couldn’t shake. Ford in ’76 found himself bearing the brunt of voters’ Watergate rage, surely compounded by his pardon of Nixon. Carter in 1980, as mentioned, had the Iran hostage crisis, plus the general “malaise” of inflation to grapple with. Finally, Bush in ’92 had declining economic fortunes on his watch. Thus, while we normally think of incumbents as having tremendous advantages, a faltering presidency can be deadly, whether the incumbent is on the ticket in November or not.

A second thing to note about these election years is that in three of them—’68, ’80, and ’92 you had a credible third party candidate enter the race and perform well in November. George Wallace captured 13% of the vote, and five states, in 1968. Republican House member, turned independent candidate, John Anderson received 7% of the vote in 1980. Ross Perot in 1992 got 19%. Furthermore, in looking at the origins of these candidacies and the source of their support, we can see them essentially as spin-offs or breakaways from one of the major parties. Wallace had been elected as a Democrat, had sought the Democratic nomination before and would seek it again in the future. Anderson, as mentioned, was a Republican House member and seemed to tap into the liberal wing of the Republican electorate scared off by Reagan’s conservatism. Some of these voters may have flocked to Carter (although they wouldn't have been enough to save Carter's presidency). Finally, while never a Republican office holder, an examination of the Perot vote suggests he took more from the normal Republican electorate than from the Democratic side.

So, rather than dooming a party to failure, might a contentious nomination fight be a symptom of a much larger problem?

Looking at this year, then, what can we say? The first thing I would say is that it’s not at all clear that the Obama/Clinton contest has reached to level of rancor that these other races did. We’ll have to see how the next few months play out. Second, one thing working in the Democratic nominee’s favor, whoever it is, is that they are the party out of power right now. It is John McCain who will be occupying the role of Hubert Humphrey, to use the Vietnam/Iraq parallel as an example. Neither Obama nor Clinton has to defend the current administration. There will inevitably be a rallying behind the Democratic nominee—it’s easier, perhaps, to storm the castle than defend it. Finally, we don’t have a credible third party candidate this year to siphon off votes from the left. That will work to the Democratic nominee’s advantage. If we look at the fundamentals—Bush’s approval rating, perception of the economy, opinion of the war in Iraq, Democrats’ performance in the ’06 midterms, etc.—things seem to look good for the Dems.

So for those worrying about whether Clinton voters will support Obama or whether Obama voters will support Clinton, you need to settle down.

"I was Born on this Mountain" Who's the "Hillbilly Firewall" Keeping at Bay?

Thursday marked the release of a chock-full-of-data Pew Research poll, and the attention that a stat tucked away on page 16 has garnered brought this week’s media chatter – the idle speculation over how much a continued Democratic presidential nomination battle might hinder the eventual nominee in November – to a deafening pitch. (To counter this conventional “wisdom,” let’s invoke WaPo’s incomparable Dan Balz)

The poll’s findings indicate that, thanks to the bad blood between the Obama and Clinton camps, around a quarter of each candidate’s supporters will refuse to support the other candidate, potentially defecting to presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. Of course, both sides are jumping all over this tidbit to argue that their opponent is the one who will dampen Dem turnout or drive their base to the GOP. Some commentators are putting a cultural slant on this notion. The Washington Examiner’s political editor, Chris Stirewalt relishes the irony that this Democratic primary season’s unlikely key demographic, Appalachia’s Scots-Irish “Hillbilly Firewall,” may well sustain HRC – that product of Wellesley and affluent Midwestern suburbs reborn as the coal miner’s champion - through the rest of the primary season. Not only in West Virginia is Hillary Clinton expected to fare well, but in the Appalachian regions of other remaining primary states: Eastern Kentucky, Western North Carolina, “Pennsyltucky” and southeastern Indiana. Stirewalt hints that if Obama wins, the cultural biases of his coalition of affluent Northern liberal and Afro-Am voters may drive Appalachia into the arms of the GOP, following the decades-old lead of the Deep South.

HRC’s has performed well in Appalachia(& like regions): from southern Ohio to Missouri’s Ozarks to East Tennessee. A glance at a few similar maps, however, indicates that the “Hillbilly Firewall” is skeptical of outsiders of all stripes – as Stirewalt suggests, Bill Clinton’s Arkansas roots may be the source of HRC’s appeal here – though it’s not necessarily due to animus towards Afro-America.

Note the uncanny overlap of these maps:

HRC racked up her biggest percentage in Appalachian Southwestern Virginia.

But this part of Virginia is home to smallest percentages of black residents.

And while George Wallace’s 1968 campaign expanded his base from the “Black Belts” of the Deep South to the Upper South and the Urban Ethnic North, for the honkies in the hills and hollers of Southwestern Virginia, his segregationist rhetoric had very limited appeal:

As for John McCain sweeping up this region, well, even though by the time Old Dominion’s primary rolled around, he was widely regarded the eventual nominee, SW Virginia counties rejected him, going for another former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee by 2 to 1 ratios and more.

Return to Philly, Via Politico

Reading this story in today's Politico, I was reminded of a series of posts I did a year ago about the Wallace vote in major American, especially northern, cities. Although the story provides only anecdotal evidence of reaction to Senator Obama's speech yesterday, one must note that northeastern Philadelphia gave strong support to Wallace in 1968.

Geraldine Ferraro, Queens, and the Politics of Backlash

With the furor over the recent comments from Geraldine Ferraro, I thought we’d take a trip back in time to look at her time in the House of Representatives (1979-1985). During her time in the House, Ferraro represented what was then New York’s 9th congressional district. Basically, the district was the western most part of Queens, directly across the East River from Manhattan. In thinking about her comments, I wondered if they were not just a commentary on the 2008 election, but deeply rooted in the political culture from which she emerged in the 60’s and 70’s. I’ve written quite a bit about this period of upheaval and the politics it spawned. In his mayoral race of 1965, William F. Buckley found Queens to be quite receptive to his candidacy, receiving 17% of the vote. As New York City sank into decline, and reaction to the failures of the Great Society mounted, the inhabitants of this area saw their political allegiances start to transform. Not far away in Brooklyn, conflict exploded in the wake of Mayor Lindsay’s school reforms in such neighborhoods as Ocean Hill-Brownsville. If we look at the presidential race of 1968, we see that George Wallace performed quite well in what became Ferraro’s district. While Wallace received 4.7% of the vote citywide and 5.8% in Queens, in the assembly districts making up the 9th district he received greater support. Assembly districts 30-34 gave Wallace 9.8%, 5.3%, 7.1%, 8.4% and 9.2% respectively.

Looking at the voting behavior of this constituency during the 1970’s and 80’s, one sees the emergence of a true “Reagan Democrat” district. In 1972 it gave a large margin of victory to Richard Nixon, voted for Ford in 1976, and went big for Reagan in 1980 and 1984, even with Ferraro on the ticket as Walter Mondale’s VP. Throughout this time, though, it sent Democrats to the House, but of a more culturally conservative stock. Prior to Ferraro, the 9th was represented by James Delaney and afterwards by Tom Manton. Since redistricting, it is now represented by Congressman Joseph Crowley. While Ferraro was more culturally liberal than her predecessor and successors, she did have to strike a balance between her positions on such issues as abortion with those of her ethnic, largely Catholic, constituents.

The demographics of the 9th district when Ferraro served were roughly 75% white, 15% Hispanic, 5% Asian, and only 3% African American. At the time, the Almanac of American Politics described the 9th thusly:

“It can be said with some certainty that the durable Archie Bunker lives in the 9th congressional district of New York. The aerial shot taken by TV cameramen of Archie’s neighborhood shows the kind of aging, though still neatly maintained, one and two family houses that line the streets of Jackson Heights, Astoria, Long Island City, Ridgewood, and Glendale, Queens. Moreover, Archie’s views, as modified over the years, are a fairly accurate, if stylized, portrayal of attitudes that are often, though not always, shared in this district…Most of the people here, Bunker notwithstanding, think of themselves as coming from some sort of immigrant stock. And if they were not eager to share their neighborhoods with low-income blacks in the 1960s and 1970s, they are willing, at least grudgingly, to share them with people who are doing today what their grandparents did 80 years ago.”

So, while many are speculating on whether Ferraro’s comments are part of a coordinated effort by the Clinton campaign to make Barack Obama the “black candidate” in the eyes of white, working class voters, I thought part of the explanation for her rhetoric might lie in her past as well.

Buckley and New York, 1965

Continuing our remembrance of William F. Buckley, I wanted to write more on his 1965 mayor's race. As this masterful portrait of the race in the New York Times Magazine recalls, Buckley entered the race almost on a whim. Running on the recently established line of the Conservative Party, Buckley didn't so much "campaign" in the traditional sense as use the race as an opportunity to give voice to the maturing conservative ideology that he had spent years developing. He knew he had no chance of winning and joked about the realities of the race. In retrospect, one sees that the race was rather an opening shot in the ascendancy of modern conservatism. In order for this new order to rise, the old order had to be vanquished.

This old order was, of course, a technocratic and bureaucratic liberalism that had become universally accepted by the political, academic, and journalistic classes. Social problems could be solved, society could be perfected, and government was the instrument. For Buckley, it was John Lindsay, the Republican congressman and mayoral candidate who embodied all that was wrong with this regime and who drew most of his fire. As Walter Lippmann commented at the time, Buckley was "determined to wreck the party in order to rule the wreckage."

While I haven't been able to find precinct level returns yet, the borough by borough numbers are available. Lindsay, of course, won followed closely by Democrat Abe Beam. Buckley received 13% city wide. Breaking down the numbers further, Buckley's totals were:

Queen's--17.3%
King's--12.7%
Richmond--25.2%
New York (Manhattan)--7.2%
Bronx--13.9%

So who were Buckley's voters and why are they important? In his portrait of the race, Sam Tanenhaus argues: "Though he failed to capture any single district, he finished second in parts of Queens and fared especially well among Irish and German Catholics. Once again, ethnic group interests and values--'who hates who,'--in the shorthand used by Kevin Phillips, author of 'The Emerging Republican Majority'--held true. The difference was that those aggrieved white ethnic voters now appeared to be Republicans..." In his biography of Lindsay, Vincent Cannato comes to a similar conclusion: "The twelve strong Buckley districts were in the white Catholic outer boroughs." Thus, Buckley expanded on the project begun earlier, as so ably described by Phillips, of giving voters a reason to use fear as the basis for their vote. Even though Buckley claimed to not want to divide the electorate into groups and pander to each in order to build a coalition, the result of his campaign was that just such a strategy would be viable in the future.

The importance of the race, I believe, was not so much felt in New York--although there were certainly repurcussions as Lindsay found it virtually impossible to govern a disintegrating city. What is of greater import is what this race said about the future of American politics. These Buckley voters were in fact all across the country. They lived in big cities that were in decay. They felt they were being left behind and that other groups were being given privileges--affirmative action, busing, etc. While they had at one time been the backbone of the New Deal Coalition, they would soon begin casting votes for George Wallace and comprise part of Nixon's "Silent Majority." Finally, they would provide the margin for Reagan's ascendancy. In metropolitan areas like Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago, they were on a path toward realignment. There can be no doubt that this process was, in many ways, an ugly one. Race was used as a cleavage and latent fears and prejudices were exploited. Crime, welfare dependancy, and illegitmacy were used as metaphors for liberalism's failure. In retrospect, the tactics and language these candidates (including Buckley) often used were deplorable. However, if we want to be honest about our political history, we must reckon with them. As someone interested in why people vote the way that they do, I have to acknowledge that these reasons are not always admirable. But they must be studied.

In earlier posts on this blog, I have shown a number of examples of this, focusing on George Wallace. I wondered how a small state governor from the deep south, despite never winning the presidency, could change American politics so much. The answer, I believe, is that he gave voice to the rage and alienation of millions of Americans. At certain times in history, individuals are a perfect reflection of their times. They are the vessel in which others' aspirations, and sometimes fears, are placed. Here we have a Yale educated, patrician, son of an oil magnate drawing large numbers of votes from blue collar, lunch bucket carrying voters in Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Tempermentally and intellectually, Buckley was the polar opposite of Wallace. Reflecting on his death this week, I have to conclude that Buckley, like Wallace, was a crucial actor in this play. His influence on our politics over the past half century is incalculable.

Update: Here is a column by Buckley that I just found, written just prior to the 1968 election, on the subject of Wallace. The crux: votes for Wallace are votes that would otherwise go to Nixon. Thus, Buckley seems to agree that these were voters on the path to becoming Republicans, away from the Democrats. Here is a longer column from the same year, laying out his objections to Wallace at greater length.