Election 2024: 'Landslide' Edition

 

 

One of the things that you’ve heard so many political commentators and historians say about our polarized and fractured society is that the only thing that might be the solution is for one party to lose in a humiliating landslide that forces them to reevaluate how they conduct business. They say that since we haven’t had a landslide since Reagan carried 49 of 50 states back in 1984 our political system has become irrevocably fractured on party lines. (They’re not historically accurate on their dates, but I’ll get to that below.)

As a student of American history, I can understand why they might think that way. Up until the 21^st century, the overwhelming electoral victory was the norm in the American democracy rather than the exception. During the 20^th century, after we solidified the number of electoral votes at first 531, then 538, there were fourteen presidential elections since 1912 where the winner received at least 400 hundred electoral votes. In six of these elections the winning candidate received somewhere in the margin of 60 percent of the popular vote. In three of these elections, the winning candidate received more than 520 electoral votes. In the 21^st century, the highwater mark for any Presidential candidate was Barack Obama received 365 electoral votes to John McCain’s 172 and won by a margin of ten million votes.

However looking back I have come to believe that both historians and commentators alike have far too often been mistaking the term ‘landslide’ for ‘mandate’. The two are similar but not the same. A mandate has always struck me as more significant than a landslide because it is an argument for a specific political agenda rather than simply change. And looking back over our electoral history in the 20^th century, there’s a huge argument that we’ve had far fewer mandates in our history than landslide victories.

How do I define a mandate as opposed to a landslide? Coattails. A huge electoral win is significant for a President but it is meaningless unless he receives a similar backing from the voters for a Congress of his party. That doesn’t just mean a shift in control of Congress but rather a wave. And there have been far fewer of those in our electoral history then you’d think.

So in this article I’m going to take a look at some of the more historic Presidential elections in our history, how both parties have far too frequently mistaken landslides for mandates, and most of all how both sides frequently took the wrong lessons. I’m going to be using some maps for guidance going forward.

Let’s start at the beginning with the 1912 election. I’ve written that because of the split in the Republican Party between Taft and T.R., Woodrow Wilson won the election. His win was a huge electoral victory: he took forty states and 435 electoral votes to T.R.’s 88 and Taft’s 8. But it was only because of the split in the Republican Party that Wilson won; Taft and T.R. combined won more than seven million votes to Wilson’s six million.

Still, it’s hard to argue this wasn’t a mandate for the Progressive Agenda. The voters endorsed the progressive cause, considering more people voted for Wilson and T.R.’s Bull Moose Party then the kind of conservatism Taft endorsed.  The Democrats gained 61 seats in the House and the Progressives gained 10 seats. (The Senate is harder to measure because direct election in most states was not allowed yet.)

By 1920 with the end of World War I and fatigue with Wilson, America had its first real electoral landslide from the most unlikely candidate. Warren G. Harding, the dark horse Republican, swept James Cox the Democrat in what was the biggest electoral win of any Republican to date:

What the electoral map doesn’t show is how much worse this was for the Democrats. Harding had received 60 percent of the popular vote to Cox’s 34 percent. Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate received six percent of the vote. In all the years since 1920, no losing candidate for either party has ever finished with this small a percentage of the popular vote since. It was reflected in the Congressional races as well; the Republicans gained 63 seats in the House and ten in the Senate. They would hold these healthy majorities in both houses until the end of the decade.

The 1928 election for President was actually more significant. I’ll be dealing with that in a later article, so for now I’ll just stick to the basics. The election involved Herbert Hoover against Al Smith, the Democratic governor of New York. The Republicans still had a healthy margin during Coolidge’s time in office but the GOP had been in power for eight years. However because of the general prosperity (as well as other factors), the election was a landslide for Hoover:

Hoover had won with nearly 59 percent of the vote and a margin of eleven million votes over Smith. He had also become the first Republican since Reconstruction had ended to carry the state of Texas, a Democratic stronghold. The Republicans gained 32 seats in the House and another seven to widen their lead in the Senate to 56 seats to the Democrats 39.

I’m going to skip over FDR’s landslides save for one critical detail. After 1936 when FDR won 46 of 48 states and more than 60 percent of the popular vote, the Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress that were so huge that for the next sixty years, the GOP would control both houses of Congress only twice.

In 1952 the Republicans had chosen Dwight Eisenhower as their standard-bearer. After twenty years of Democratic rule many issues including the stalemate in Korea, the rise of Communism domestically and abroad as well Democratic corruption had led many Americans to argue for a change. Eisenhower carried the Republicans to victory in 1952 with 442 electoral votes to Adlai Stevenson’s 89. He had carried 39 states to Stevenson’s 9. But despite having the electoral margins of an FDR win, there had not been the same kind of coattails FDR had. Indeed in the Congressional races, the two parties basically split fifty-fifty with the GOP only gaining a majority by eight seats in the House and 2 in the Senate. The Democrats regained the majority in both Houses two years later.

Now let me show you Eisenhower’s reelection map:

 

 

It was the biggest win in electoral history for a Republican to that point with Eisenhower carrying over 57 percent of the popular vote to Stevenson’s 42. He had made the most significant inroads into the South for any Republican in a century, carrying seven Southern states and more than 35 percent of the African-American vote.

But the Republican Party lost seats in the House and made no gains in the Senate. For all Eisenhower’s great electoral popularity, it had made no inroads into the Democratic Congressional majority.

The next major landslide came in 1964 when LBJ swamped Goldwater. While much of it had to do not only with the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination and while the Republicans did make gains in the South, the Democrats still added 37 seats to their House Majority, giving them a two-thirds majority in the House and a grand total of 68 seats in the Senate, the most since FDR. Johnson also won the election with over 61 percent of the popular vote, which broke all the records at the time. Four years later after the Vietnam War had destroyed Johnson’s administration, Hubert Humphrey could only carry 42.5 percent of the popular vote. Nixon and Wallace’s combined total showed one of the most drastic reversals of LBJ’s mandate even though the Democrats still controlled Congress. Indeed, the Democratic Party ran ahead of the Republicans in both Congressional and Senatorial Races.

In 1972, of course, Nixon won the biggest electoral landslide to date in history, carrying 49 of 50 states, 520 electoral votes and more than 60 percent of the popular vote over George McGovern. But as was a major complaint of both House Republicans and the RNC, Nixon was not interested in campaigning for his fellow Republicans. The Republicans gained twelve seats in the House but ran four million votes behind the Democrats nationwide and the Democrats gained 2 seats in the Senate. Nixon might have been the one in 1972 but not his fellow Republicans.

This brings us to Ronald Reagan and the biggest lie that Republicans have been telling themselves for more than forty years. Despite the fact that Reagan managed to landslide his two Democratic opponents in the electoral college a combined total of 1018 to 62, despite the fact he carried 49 of 50 states in 1984 and won more electoral votes than any candidate in history, that popularity never translated to sweeping huge numbers of Republicans into office. Indeed, despite their gaining 35 seats in the House, the Republicans ran three points behind the Democrats in the 1980 election and didn’t come close to taking a majority. There is a chance they only gained the Senate because of Carter’s early concession. The same was true in 1984, only more so: the Republicans ran five points behind the Democrats in Congress and the Democrats gained two seats in the Senate. There were Democrats who voted for Reagan, but only for Reagan.

And by the way that wasn’t the last electoral landslide. Let me remind everyone what happened four years later:

 

George H.W. Bush won 40 of 50 states. Like Reagan, he also had no coattails: Senate Democrats ran six points ahead of Republicans in the Senate and eight points ahead in the House. Indeed Bush bore the dubious distinction of becoming the first President since JFK to have his party lose seats in the House. So I guess in a sense he was closer to Jack Kennedy then he thought.

 

Looking at the history of comparing mandates with landslides, I’ve taken away a few lessons – lessons I think both my Republican and Democrat friends have failed to comprehend. I’ll deal with Republicans first, as I’ve been accused of going too easy on them in the past:

1.   The Republican Party hasn’t been able to win on its message for a very long time. I actually knew this going in. After FDR won a massive landslide in 1932, the Republicans spent much of the next thirty years arguing what was called ‘Me Too’ in regard to the New Deal. Much as they hated it, it was too popular to ignore so they argued they’d just run it better than the Democrats would. It basically didn’t work for twenty years, except for Eisenhower. Goldwater chose to run against everything Republicans had stood for thirty years and when he got landslide, the Republicans took a different tact for sixteen years until Reagan came along. They did well in Presidential elections in the second half of the 20^th century, but that never translated to margins in Congress. That brings me the next point:

2.   The GOP has always believed more in personality than issues. The argument I’ve heard over and over from Democrats in the last decade is that ever since the rise of Trump the Republicans have become a cult of personality. The truth is, they’ve always preferred personality more than principles. Why shouldn’t they? It’s the only thing that gets them the Presidency and those huge electoral landslides you historians love to talk about. But none of the personalities – Eisenhower’s amicability, Nixon’s geo-political visions, Reagan’s charm – ever did anything to help them down-ballot. This might explain why Republicans are willing to follow Trump even though they have never been able to win a Congressional election since then. For seventy years they’ve believed in the idea of the man on the horse who will lead to them to the Congressional promised land and time and again it never happens. We might accuse them of abandoning the principles but they must know – deep in their psyche – that most Americans do not agree with them so they keep hoping the personality will do the job. This brings me to a related point.

3.   Republicans can only gain control of Congress when they are on the outside. For the last twenty years pundits have mourned the case of perpetual attack that have made up Congressional warfare so that we are always campaigning. I think this is a lesson the Republicans have learned. The only times they have ever been able to make gains is when they are on the outside and attack the insiders. The only times the GOP was ever able to win majorities in the house came in 1946 when they campaigned on the slogan: “Had Enough?” It’s been true of both their major Congressional victories since then: the 1994 Republican Revolution and the 2010 Tea Party sweep. I think Gingrich realized this early and knew it was the only chance the GOP ever had to exist outside of being a permanent minority party – which was what they had been pretty much since 1930. As a tactic for civility in politics, it was eternally damaging. As a tactic for electoral victory, you can’t pretend it hasn’t been a winning concept for Republicans ever since.

 

But it’s worth noting Democrats have also taken the wrong lessons from so many of the landslides in the last quarter of the 20^th century.

1.   The Democrats chose to see their loss of the Presidency in 1968 as a rejection of the Democratic order. This was an understandable takeaway in the aftermath of Nixon’s winning but it left out the fact that had it not been for their own infighting and their paralysis of how to deal with the Vietnam War they still very well could have held the White House. The Democrats spent the next thirty years deciding that their candidates had to be outsiders and campaign towards the conservative ideals of the new GOP. They ignored the fact that while they didn’t control the Presidency they still held both houses of Congress.

2.   The Democrats spent the next twenty years increasingly looking for their own man on a horseback rather than sticking to their core. I have made it clear over and over that the idea of the Kennedy legacy has been the biggest obstacle to the Democratic Party ever since JFK’s assassination. They increasingly chose to mistake his rhetoric as his accomplishments and as a result spent much of the next twenty years chasing his brothers. As a result it led to intense internecine warfare in the party and caused gaps for the Republicans to win on. The Democrats spent the next twenty years looking McGovern, Carter and Mondale’s landslide defeats as signs that America had irrevocably turned toward conservatism rather than see it as a triumph of personality (and in some cases their candidate’s ineptitude) which it clearly was. Democrats were voting for Nixon and Reagan in large numbers, but they were voting for Democrats everywhere else on the ballot.

3.   The Democrats have chosen to see their electoral defeats as a sign they must embrace the Republican approach. In this case it means that they find themselves increasingly looking at the extremes of their own parties, first the far right when it still had one, then the far left even though it has been as unaccommodating to compromise as the GOP’s right branch. The fact that Democrats have been able to win elections when they cast their tent the biggest and that their landslides have involved great concepts rather than personality – the New Deal, the Great Society -  should have been a sign that they can win when they try to win over the masses rather than cater to their fringes. If we’ve learned one lesson the hard way the last decade, it’s that the extremists will never be happy.

 

As for how we can resolve the conflicts that now seem deeply woven into our electoral society, I have no easy answers. But I don’t believe a landslide is that because they can be as fragmental as anything else. Four years after Johnson’s victory, he had decided he could not seek reelection. Less than two years after Nixon’s he had to resign. Giant wins have been as ephemeral as the small ones.

The only hope we have going forward is that both sides try to learn that an electoral win is not going to solve the long term problems with our society and that any electoral defeat will not destroy their hopes forever. And we must also realize certain lessons that neither party has learned over the past century when it comes to our politics: it is the policy of the candidate that is more important to the message then the candidate who tries to sell it.