Rescrambling Political Loyalties
TYLER, GUS
THE '98 ELECTION Rescrambling Political Loyalties By Gus Tyler Anticipating a broad victory, Speaker Newt Gingrich predicted the Republicans would gain 30 to 40 seats in the House on...
...When Will Rogers was asked to what "organized party" he belonged, he replied, "I belong to no organized party...
...That left roughly 40 seats, less than one-tenth of the House, up for grabs...
...Incidentally, the only President besides Clinton to see his party's House representation increase during his sixth year was James Monroe, in 1822...
...The answer, interestingly, appears to be the same one that explains why the party occupying the Oval Office normally loses ground in midterm elections...
...Northern capitalists, farmers, and newly enfranchised ex-slaves to create the mass base of the Republican Party...
...From 1914 to 1946, the average number of seats lost by the Presidential party in a midterm election was 43...
...For that reason, Republicans oppose it...
...They are composed of different elements who agree on a candidate or set of candidates...
...The majority of them apparently felt the way Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr did when, in a 1983 interview with Diane Sawyer, he said: "Public media should not contain explicit or implied descriptions of sex acts...
...On the surface, the single previous exception to the midterm rule in the 20th century seems to have been the 1934 midterm election, following FDR's victory two years earlier...
...It is largely the zealots and the naysayers who trek to the polls in off years...
...Republicans can rely on the more affluent, the religious Right, gun enthusiasts, xénophobes, and white supremacists...
...The reason is that both Democrats and Republicans are devotees of a malicious monster called the "gerrymander...
...Of the435 House contests, fewer and fewer are being genuinely contested...
...Traditionally, the Democrats were the party beset by internal dissension...
...Once there were militant liberal Republicans: Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, George W. Norris, William E. Borah, Wayne Morse, Margaret Chase Smith, Jacob K. Javits, et al...
...The Republicans, who traditionally were dominated by big business, usually in alliance with rural elements, are currently torn between the "social" conservatism of the religious Right and the economic conservatism of the well-to-do...
...It may someday be recorded as a great fin-desiècle electoral irony that the Democrats' unexpected success was due to the antics of the Independent Counsel...
...Nebraska has a nonpartisan unicameral legislature...
...The Democrats did unusually well...
...Roosevelt was elected not because the people were for him but because they were against Herbert Hoover—on whose watch the country had drowned in the Depression...
...According to exit polls conducted by the Christian Coalition, for instance, onethird of the votes cast by those who identified themselves with the religious Right went to Democrats, up from one-quarter in 1994...
...THE '98 ELECTION Rescrambling Political Loyalties By Gus Tyler Anticipating a broad victory, Speaker Newt Gingrich predicted the Republicans would gain 30 to 40 seats in the House on November 3. In the Senate he foresaw an addition of five seats, giving his party the 60 votes required to shut down future Democratic filibusters...
...The first three were the handiwork of distinguished Presidents: Thomas Jefferson, who formed a coalition of the rural South and the Northern working class to establish the original base of the Democratic Party...
...In 1938, with Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House, the Democrats lost 71 seats...
...Yet that exception proves the rule...
...Despite the fact that the parties depend on certain socio-economic-ideological groups for support, the election has shown this is not always as firm as assumed...
...Gus Tyler, a longtime contributor to The New Leader, is currently a syndicated columnist and radio commentator...
...In 1922, with Warren G. Harding in the White House, the Republicans lost 75 seats...
...The same cozy collusion helps to define state legislative districts...
...Abraham Lincoln, who forged an alliance of abolitionists...
...They appear to have more than an even chance of electing a President and retaking Congress the next time out—provided the country does not fall into a major recession or depression before the new century begins...
...Today most of the breed has changed parties and, in so doing, has changed the "solid Democratic South" into a semisolid Republican South...
...This year the major parties paid special attention to states where lawmakers are elected to four-year terms, because they will have a voice in districting after the next census in 2000...
...Within the next two years a third element may emerge when the Bush boys (governors George W of Texas and Jeb of Florida) try to remake the elephant to look more like the donkey...
...Democrats can generally count on working people (voters from union families made up 22 per cent of the total vote this year, even though they constitute less than half that per cent of the population), environmentalists, educators, women, blacks, Hispanics, and senior citizens...
...This does not mean our dominant parties are now homogenous...
...After World War II the average fell to 28, indicating the midterm phenomenon has been losing some of its sting...
...While the character of the '98 election was shaped by such immediate events as the Monica Lewinsky matter and the impeachment investigation, it also revealed that a less obvious long-term process is under way: The country's various economic, ethnic, religious, sexual, and other interest groups are realigning their party attachments...
...Then crazy but convenient lines are drawn to guarantee the "ins" stay in...
...When a state legislature is about to perform its important function of drawing Congressional district lines, they hold a dialogue of sorts: "If you vote to give us a safe district, we will vote to give you a safe district...
...I am a Democrat...
...With a little luck, he hinted, the GOP might even win twothirds of the Senate seats and thus be able to impeach the President...
...And it was the Speaker—not, as he almost certainly expected, the President— who decided to leave office before anyone got the chance to fire him...
...Overall, the '98 results suggest that the momentum is with the Democrats...
...This time around, the naysayers came out to protest against the Republican strategy of "sex über alles...
...Some 300 were in races whose outcome was a foregone conclusion...
...Instead, the Democrats scored a historic victory by gaining five seats in the House while holding fast in the Senate...
...Our society should be purged of the perverts who provide the media with pornographic material while pretending it has some redeeming social value under the public's 'right to know.'" In the eyes of many voters, Starr was one of those "perverts' who had brought filth into their homes because he believed the public had the "right to know...
...Gingrich, being a bit of a history buff, had reason for his ebullience: Since 1914, when the number of Representatives was set at 435, an average of 35 House seats has been lost by the Presidential party in midterm elections, and in some cases the losses were much greater...
...Once there were powerful conservative (generally Southern) Democrats who repeatedly frustrated FDR's liberal initiatives...
...In turn, of course, this is bound to alter the number of Congressional seats each state would be apportioned and how many electoral votes each would have in a Presidential election...
...They call it "compassionate conservatism," an American form of the noblesse oblige once embodied in Disraeli's "Tory Socialism...
...and Franklin Roosevelt, who fused conservative Southern Democrats, blacks, farmers, union members, and liberal intellectuals into the pillars of a reborn Democratic Party...
...The new realignment, still in the making, tends toward a greater ideological consistency, roughly along liberal and conservative lines—with some exceptions...
...The development marks the fourth time since the founding of the republic that a rescrambling of political loyalties is taking place...
...This year, for example, 95 candidates —58 Republicans and 37 Democrats— faced no opposition at all...
...They gained about 45 seats, although since 1942 the Presidential party has lost an average of 382 state seats in midterm elections...
...Turnout is relatively small, especially on the part of those who are pleased about how the President they chose is taking care of things...
...At present, millions of people without an easily identifiable residence are missed...
...There was another factor at work, though, that made it unlikely the Democrats would suffer the losses Gingrich predicted...
...No wonder...
...Now the Democrats, varied as they are, tend to agree on basic liberal social and economic tenets...
...The bureau wishes to use a "sampling" system that would yield a more accurate count...
...Today the like of them is virtually nonexistent...
...FDR was the choice of the naysayers...
...He came in on a tidal wave of deep anger that was still palpable two years later...
...Democrats back the idea because in practically every respect they would be its beneficiaries...
...in 10 states they divided control of the two...
...More important for the Democrats, however, is a pending decision in the courts on whether it is constitutional for the Bureau of the Census to change its standard method of counting heads...
...So Gingrich's educated guess was that the Democrats, smeared by President Bill Clinton's moral turpitude, would surely be very big losers...
...Going into the '98 campaign, the local legislatures were almost equally balanced: In 20 states the Democrats, and in 19 states the Republicans controlled the upper and lower houses...
Vol. 81 • November 1998 • No. 12
