Irresistible force meets immovable object. That’s one way to describe the 2016 presidential campaign.
The immovable object is the close and bitter partisan division that has prevailed in general elections for the last two decades. The irresistible force is the corrosive discontent of American voters, their sense that the nation is on the wrong track and that experienced leaders are more the problem than the solution.
The immovable object may prove, in the end, to be immoveable. In which case, it becomes easy to forecast the shape of the presidential race, but hard to predict the winner. In all of this century’s presidential elections, Republicans and Democrats have won between 46 and 53 percent of the vote. In the historical sense, that’s a narrow range. No nominee has come close to winning the 57 to 61 percent landslides registered by Democrats and Republicans in 1936, 1956, 1964, 1972 and 1984.
The same phenomenon has been apparent in congressional elections, which have been a good proxy for support of the president and his party since the middle 1990s. In nine of 11 elections starting in 1994, Republicans have won between 48 and 52 percent of the popular vote for the House, and Democrats between 44 and 49 percent. Again, a historically narrow range.
The two exceptions were in 2006 and 2008, when George W. Bush’s job approval plunged to 30 percent levels, when Democrats won 53 and 54 percent and Republicans 45 and 43 percent. Democrats hoped that would turn out to be a new normal, but in 2010, 2012 and 2014, the House popular vote swung back into the 1994-2004 range.
Some pollsters report an increasing percentage of voters identifying as independents. But fewer and fewer Americans vote that way. Straight-ticket voting, increasingly rare from the 1960s-1980s, has become more common today. In 2012, only 26 of the 435 House districts voted for a presidential candidate of one party and a House member of the other, the lowest number since 1920.
Presidential voting has become more predictable as well. Only three of the 50 states (Iowa, New Mexico and New Hampshire) voted for different parties’ candidates in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Only two states (Indiana and North Carolina) voted for different parties’ candidates in 2008 and 2012. You have to go back to the 1880s to find such partisan continuity.
A bigger swing in presidential voting occurred between 2004-08. But even then, only nine of the 50 states switched parties, and six of those had been carried only narrowly, with 50-52 percent of the vote, by George W. Bush. Of the other three, Indiana switched back to solidly Republican in 2012, North Carolina moved narrowly from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney and Virginia has, perhaps implausibly, become the national bellwether, with its percentages for the candidates matching national percentages more closely than any other state.
Hence, the now-familiar division between Republican “red states” (23 of them, with 191 electoral votes), Democratic “blue states” (16 states plus D.C., with 212 electoral votes) and “purple states” (11 states, all furiously contested in 2012, with 135 electoral votes). In this century, only one red state has voted Democratic (Indiana in 2008) and no blue state has voted Republican; few have ever been close.
So it’s reasonable to conclude that if the immovable object of stark partisan division remains immovable, the contours of the 2016 presidential vote will look much like those in recent elections. Particularly the most recent, 2012, since Barack Obama is president, with job approval slightly below 50 percent, and the near-certain Democratic nominee is his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. In that event, the race will be decided by voters in the 11 purple states.
And perhaps that number could be winnowed to the five states with the lowest Obama percentages in 2012. Each of them now has a Republican governor and a majority-Republican U.S. House delegation. Each presents different electoral challenges for the two parties.
- North Carolina, 15 electoral votes, 48.4 percent Obama. Blacks were 23 percent of the 2012 electorate and voted 96 percent for the first black president. Can another Democrat match those numbers?
- Florida, 29 electoral votes, 49.9 percent Obama. The nation’s third largest state, famously diverse and excruciatingly closely divided politically. Obama carried 60 percent of Hispanics and 66 percent of Jews, who together accounted for 22 percent of the electorate. Romney had higher percentages among panhandle and north Florida whites, who accounted for a similar percentage.
- Ohio, 18 electoral votes, 50.6 percent Obama. Blue collar whites, stirred by attacks on Romney’s business practices and many with union backgrounds, cast unusually high Democratic percentages.
- Virginia, 13 electoral votes, 51.2 percent Obama. Democrats depended on high margins from blacks, 20 percent of the electorate, and from young voters and Hispanic immigrants in Northern Virginia.
- Colorado, 9 electoral votes, 51.4 percent Obama. White voters narrowly favored Romney, but Hispanics, 14 percent of the electorate, went 75 percent for Obama.
These five purple states have 84 electoral votes; Obama won 69 of them. If he had lost all these states, Romney would have won 275 electoral votes and would be president. Can Clinton run as well as her former boss? Can the Republican nominee run better than Romney? The answers to those questions in these five states will determine the electorate, if the immovable object of partisan attitudes remains unmoved.
But what if the irresistible force scrambles the political map? This has always happened, sooner or later, in American politics. It has often been sparked by the rise of a disruptive candidate, running as an independent or as the nominee of a major party. Think Ross Perot, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Abraham Lincoln. A disruptive candidate raises new issues, breaks across old party lines, brings new voters into the electorate.
Is something like that happening now? One piece of data suggests it is — the stunningly high viewership of the two Republican presidential debates: 24 million in August and 23 million in September. That’s nearly three times the previous GOP record of 8 million. Viewership of the third Republican debate, held on the night of a World Series game, fell to about 14 million, and viewership of the single Democratic debate so far was 13 million. But viewership for these still beat the previous record for primary debates, 10 million, set by Democrats in the heat of a furiously contested race in 2008.
Some, perhaps much, of this increase can be chalked up to the celebrity of Donald Trump. But not all. Much may be due to the seemingly irresistible force of public discontent. And that could have an impact on, perhaps smash, the seemingly immovable object of steady partisan attachments. Those patterns can be disrupted by the one factor pollsters have trouble projecting: turnout.
It has often been noted that Barack Obama’s victories benefited from increased turnout among non-whites and blacks. But the biggest surge of turnout in this century occurred not during the Obama years, but during the George W. Bush presidency. In 2004, presidential turnout increased by 17 million. Bush received 11.5 million more votes than he had four years before, and John Kerry received 8 million more than Al Gore.
The sharp increase in debate audiences gives Republicans some hope that their party can expand the electorate, perhaps even more than they did 12 years ago. The much smaller but still significant increase in Democratic viewership gives their party some basis for hoping they may expand the electorate as they did in 2008, when Obama received 10.5 million more votes than Kerry.
But the force of discontent, if it proves to be irresistible enough to move the seemingly immovable force of partisan polarization, seems more likely to work against the party now holding the White House than against the party better positioned to cast itself as a force for change.
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