NYT's Douthat is Wrong: Realigning Elections Exist and One is Coming

Via Memeorandum I read an article by Ross Douthat, writing for the New York Times, called Waiting For A Landslide, in which he discusses V. O. Key's essay “A Theory of Critical Elections.” In his article Douthat claims that:

...One reason American policy-making has become “less stable, less effective, and less predictable” — in the words of the downgrade that Standard & Poor’s handed to the United States on Friday night — is the enduring influence of V. O. Key’s theory, and the seductive dream of realignment that it conjured up.

This dream has hovered over national leaders from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. But it has loomed larger in the last decade, as our politics have grown more polarized and our country has suffered through a series of dislocations and disasters. Events like 9/11 and the Great Recession have persuaded partisans on both sides that a dramatic realignment is imminent; the breadth of the ideological divide has convinced them that it’s necessary...

...The dream of realignment has become the enemy of such compromises....

...In reality, the next election may be no more transformative than 2008 turned out to be.

Douthat sadly makes two mistakes in his article- one, he rejects the theory that Key put forth, and two, he thinks that Obama's election in 2008 was any sort of a transformative election.

Let's all take a moment to go down memory lane and read what I wrote in 2009 regarding realigning elections in my post Why 2008 Was Not a Historic or Realigning Election:

The theory of realigning elections (sometimes called key elections, critical elections, or historic elections)is that sometimes there is a dramatic change in the political system that you can observe in one election or a couple elections in a row. Usually it coincides with the coming to power of a new coalition of voters or the movement of a large or important bloc of voters to a new coalition, these realigning elections occur when voters decidedly break in a new direction on a particularly important issues, when a new party leader emerges who takes the party in a new direction, when the regional and demographic bases of power of the two parties switches, or when there is a new rules of the political system (ie, expansion of suffrage). Because political parties in America tend to be rather stable coalitions, a sudden realignment by a voting group tends to have a longer-lasting and dramatic effect. These realigning elections seem to occur once a generation (every 30-40 years). V. O. Key, Jr. is the professor who pioneered the study of these elections.

Most experts agree that the following where clearly realigning elections- 1800 (Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson wins over Federalist John Adams), 1828 (Democrat Andrew Jackson wins over Democratic-Republican John Q. Adams), 1860 (Republican Abraham Lincoln wins over others), 1896 (Republican William McKinley wins over Democrat William Jennings Bryan), 1932 (Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt wins over Republican Herbert Hoover), 1968 (Republican Richard Nixon beats Democrat Hubert Humphrey), and 1980 (Republican Ronald Reagan beats Democrat Jimmy Carter). In each election, patterns in politics were broken and new patterns were put in place that lasted many years and large blocs of voters moved from one party to another. Based on the 30-40 years estimate, the next 'realigning election' is due 2012-2020.

Many though, because Barack Obama is black, want to say to say that the 2008 election (Democrat Barack Obama beats Republican John McCain) was a historic election, an unprecedented election, or a realigning election. Does it fit the model though?

There is support for the argument that it was a realigning election. There was an important issue that a candidate could have advanced a different view on (the War in Iraq), there were some realignments of geographical areas (surprisingly strong Democratic gains in the Northeast), and there was a change in the number of voters who declared themselves to belong to a particular party (dramatic rise in the number of voters who declared themselves to be Democrats). If Obama had run as a liberal- running on a liberal platform and advocating liberal issues and highlighting his sharp policy differences from the past- then 2008 would have been a realigning election.

But let's go back to last year. Watch the campaign commercials that Obama ran. Obama did not run as a liberal. He did not run on a platform that advocated stimulus packages, massive spending, large amounts of debt, pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, nationalized healthcare, raising taxes, cap-and-tax, or government-take-overs of companies. Obama ran as a moderate. He ran as a new and different candidate, one who would not be liberal or conservative, but would reach across the aisle and be a post-partisan President. He talked about tax cuts and strong defense and ending corruption.

Obama ran as a moderate- on a moderate platform- and McCain was a moderate, and the gains in Congress for Democrats were mostly from moderate Blue Dogs, and the polls show the election map as being essentially the same as 1996-2004, so 2008 was not a historic, realigning, critical, key, or unprecedented election.

Obama's victory in 2008 is closer in its character to 1976 (Carter over Ford) or 1964 (LBJ over Goldwater) in that it represented simply dissatisfaction with the proposed candidate. The later unpopularity of Carter and LBJ did set the stage for the historic realigning elections that followed.

2012 will probably be the historic election that we are all looking for. Obama will be running as a liberal and will be seeking a mandate and approval for his policies- which this time around will be clearly liberal and far left. Voting blocs will have to move to vote for him, the map will have to change, and our nation will indeed embrace change with an Obama victory in 2012, setting the stage for likely Democrat control of government for 30-40 years and a shift in our nation farther to the left. If Obama loses, he will lose to a conservative candidate (the GOP is not going with another moderate- Romney, Pawleny, Palin, Huckabee, etc are all conservatives) running on a conservative platform, and it will mark a return to power for conservative Republicans and a move back to the right for our nation.

The recent data from 2009 supports my argument. Read Charles Krauthammer's article The Myth of '08, Demolished to see that the evidence is that 2012 will be re-aligning- areas that once consistently voted Democrat (like New Jersey) will switch and even moderate Republican candidates will be defeated by conservatives. The elections in 2010, in which Republicans will likely make big gains, will further vindicate my theory that 2008 was nothing more than just another ho-hum election and not the unprecedented, historic, realigning election that many on the left want it to be.

Let me continue to suggest that 2012 will probably be the historic election that we are all looking for- a conservative Perry or running-as-a-conservative Romney will win the election, Republicans will hold the House and take back the Senate, and the party that wins will continue to increasingly reflect the realigning ideals of the Tea Party. Historic indeed.

UPDATE: Today via RealClearPolitics I read an article by Salena Zito, who is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial page columnist, that also gets at this idea that 2012 is going to be a real 'change election':

Another wave is coming, Washington – and “the ‘ins’ may be thrown out, and the ‘outs’ may be thrown in,” according to Michael Genovese, Loyola University political-science professor.

Genovese thinks the economic and political turbulence of the past 12 years are “eerily similar” to the Panic of 1893 and the unsettling election cycles of 1884 to 1896. Both eras feature fantastic wealth created for a privileged few, fiercely competitive and highly partisan elections, an ineffectual and seemingly corrupt government, and an angry, disillusioned electorate. And both have had populist movements – the Progressives of the late 1800s, the Tea Party of today – born of economic dislocation that has pressured the status quo, Genovese said.

While people call the 2008 presidential contest a “change election,” it was merely a small part of the unsettling of the country, rooted in economic uncertainty that has crippled the middle class. If Barack Obama’s election truly was the “change” the nation sought, then solid-Democrat New Jersey would not have rebuked his policies less than a year later by electing Republican Chris Christie as governor. Nor would Virginia have given Republican Bob McDonnell a landslide victory that same year. And Republican Scott Brown had no political rationale to run for Teddy Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, let alone to win it – but he did.

Despite all of the warnings, the White House was blindsided when Republicans took back the U.S. House in historical numbers in 2010. Last week, New York voters in a Democrat-stronghold district reminded President Obama that nothing is safe, not even in Brooklyn: Republican Bob Turner comfortably won the House seat that text-happy Democrat Anthony Weiner was forced to give up.

Economics drives politics, Loyola’s Genovese says, adding: “If the past is a prelude, another angry election is on the way."