"U.S.
Presidential Elections in Perspective is republished with permission
of Stratfor."
U.S.
Presidential Elections in Perspective
October 30, 2012 | 0900 GMT
By
George Friedman
The U.S. presidential election will be held a week
from today, and if the polls are correct, the outcome will be extraordinarily
close. Many say that the country has never been as deeply divided. In
discussing the debates last week, I noted how this year's campaign is far from
the most bitter and vitriolic. It might therefore be useful also to consider
that while the electorate at the moment appears evenly and deeply divided,
unlike what many say, that does not reveal deep divisions in our society --
unless our society has always been deeply divided.
Since 1820,
the last year an uncontested election was held, most presidential elections
have been extremely close. Lyndon B. Johnson received the largest percentage of
votes any president has ever had in 1964, taking 61.5 percent of the vote.
Three other presidents broke the 60 percent mark: Warren G. Harding in 1920,
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 and Richard Nixon in 1972.
Nine elections saw a candidate win between 55 and 60
percent of the vote: Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant,
Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower
and Ronald Reagan. Only Eisenhower broke 55 percent twice.
Candidates who received less than 50 percent of the
vote won 18 presidential elections. These included Lincoln in his first
election, Woodrow Wilson in both elections, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy,
Nixon in his first election and Bill Clinton in both his elections.
From 1824-2008, 13 elections ended in someone
obtaining more than 55 percent but never more than 61 percent of the vote.
Eighteen elections ended with the president receiving less than 50 percent of
the vote. The remaining 16 elections ended with the winner receiving between
50-55 percent of the vote, in many cases barely above the 50 percent mark --
meaning almost half the country voted for someone else. The United States not
only always has had deeply divided elections, but in many cases, minority
presidents. Interestingly, of the four
presidents who won more than 60 percent of the vote, three are not remembered
favorably: Harding, Johnson and Nixon.
Three
observations follow. First, for almost 200 years the electoral
process has consistently produced a division in the country never greater than
60-40 and heavily tending toward a much narrower margin.
Second,
when third parties had a significant impact on the election, winners won five
times with 45 percent of the vote or less.
Third,
in 26 of the U.S. presidential elections, the winner received less than 52
percent of the vote.
Even in the most one-sided elections, nearly 40
percent of voters voted against the winner. The most popular presidents still
had 40 percent of votes cast against them. All other elections took place with
more than 40 percent opposition. The consistency here is striking. Even in the
most extreme cases of national crisis and a weak opponent, it was impossible to
rise above just over 60 percent. The built-in opposition of 40 percent,
regardless of circumstances or party, has therefore persisted for almost two
centuries. But except in the case of the 1860 election, the deep division did
not lead to a threat to the regime. On the contrary, the regime has flourished
-- again, 1860 excepted -- in spite of these persistent divisions.
The
Politically Indifferent
Why then is the United States so deeply and
persistently divided and why does this division rarely lead to unrest, let
alone regime change? Let us consider this seeming paradox in light of another
fact, namely, that a substantial portion of the electorate doesn't vote at all.
This fact frequently is noted, usually as a sign of a decline in civic virtue.
But let's consider it another way.
First, let's think of it mechanically. The United States is one of the few
countries that has not made Election Day a national holiday or held its
presidential elections on a weekend. That means that there is work and
school on Election Day in the United States. In the face of the tasks of
getting the kids off to school, getting to work, picking up the kids on the way
home -- all while fighting traffic -- and then getting dinner on the table, the
urgency of exercising the franchise pales. It should therefore be no surprise
that older people are more likely to vote.
Low voter turnout could also indicate alienation
from the system. But alienation sufficient to explain low voter turnout should
have generated more unrest over two centuries. When genuine alienation was present, as in 1860, voter turnout rose and
violence followed. Other than that, unrest hasn't followed presidential
elections. To me, that so many people don't vote does not indicate
widespread alienation as much as indifference: The outcome of the election is
simply less important to many than picking up the kids from piano lessons.
It is equally plausible that low voter turnout
indicates voter satisfaction with both candidates. Some have noted that Barack
Obama and Mitt Romney sound less different than they portray themselves as
being. Some voters might figure there is not much difference between the two
and that they can therefore live with either in office.
Another explanation is that some voters feel
indifferent to the president and politics in general. They don't abstain
because they are alienated from the system but because they understand the system
as being designed such that outcomes don't matter. The Founding Fathers'
constitutional system leaves the president remarkably weak. In light of this,
while politically attentive people might care who is elected, the politically
indifferent might have a much shrewder evaluation of the nature of the
presidency.
The
Role of Ideologues
The United States always has had ideologues who have
viewed political parties as vehicles for expressing ideologies and reshaping
the country. While the ideologies have changed since Federalists faced off
against Democratic-Republicans, an ideological divide always has separated the
two main parties. At the same time, the ranks of the true ideologues -- those
who would prefer to lose elections to winning with a platform that ran counter
to their principles -- were relatively sparse. The majority of any party was
never as ideologically committed as the ideologues. A Whig might have thought
of himself as a member of the Whig Party when he thought of himself in
political terms at all, but most of the time he did not think of himself as
political. Politics were marginal to his identity, and while he might tend to
vote Whig, as one moved to less committed elements of the party, Whigs could
easily switch sides.
The
four elections in which presidents received 60 percent or more were all
ideological and occurred at times of crisis: Johnson in 1964 defeated Barry
Goldwater, a highly ideological candidate, in the aftermath of the Kennedy
assassination; Roosevelt defeated Alf Landon, an anti-Roosevelt ideologue,
during the depths of the Depression; Nixon defeated George McGovern, an
anti-war ideologue, during the era of the Vietnam War and the anti-war
challenge; and Warren G. Harding won in the wake of World War I and the latter
debacles of the Wilson administration and its ideology.
Crisis tends to create the most extreme expressions
of hostility to a challenging ideology and creates the broadest coalition
possible, 60 percent. Meanwhile, 40
percent remain in opposition to the majority under any circumstances. To
put it somewhat differently -- and now we get to the most significant point --
about 40 percent of the voting public cannot be persuaded to shift from their
party under any circumstances, while about 20 percent are either persuadable or
represent an unrooted voter who shifts from election to election.
The 60-40 break occurs rarely, when the ideological
bent rallies the core and the national crisis allows one party to attract a
larger block than normal to halt the less popular ideology. But this is the
extreme of American politics; the normal election is much narrower.
This is because the ideologues in the parties fail
to draw in the center. The weaker party members remain in their party's orbit
and the 20 percent undecided distribute themselves fairly randomly, depending
on their degree of indifference, so that the final vote depends on no more than
a few percentage points shifting one way or another.
This is not a sign of massive divisions. Whereas the
60-40 elections are the moments of deepest political tension in which one side
draws the center to it almost unanimously, in other elections -- particularly
the large number in which the winner receives less that 55 percent of the vote
(meaning that a 5 percent shift would change the outcome) -- the election is an
election of relative indifference.
This is certainly not how ideologues view the
election. For them, it is a struggle between light and darkness. Nor is it how
the media and commentators view it. For them, it is always an election full of
meaning. In reality, most elections are little remembered and decide little.
Seemingly apocalyptic struggles that produce narrow margins do not represent a
deeply divided country. The electoral division doesn't translate into passion
for most of the voters, but into relative indifference with the recognition
that here is another election "full
of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
The fact that nearly 50 percent of the public
chooses not to vote is our tipoff about the public's view of elections. That
segment of the public simply doesn't care much about the outcome. The
politically committed regard these people as unenlightened fools. In reality,
perhaps these people know that the election really isn't nearly as important as
the ideologues, media and professional politicians think it is, so they stay
home.
Others vote, of course, but hardly with the
intensity of the ideologues. Things the ideologues find outrageously trivial
can sway the less committed. Such voters think of politics in a very different
way than the ideologues do. They think of it as something that doesn't define
their lives or the republic. They think of politicians as fairly
indistinguishable, and they are aware that the ideological passions will melt
in the face of presidential responsibility. And while they care a bit more than
those who stay home, they usually do not care all that much more.
The United States has elected presidents with the
narrowest of margins and presidents who had far less than a majority. In many
countries, this might reveal deep divisions leading to social unrest. It doesn't
mean this in the United States because while the division can be measured, it
isn't very deep and by most, it will hardly be remembered.
The polls say the election will be very close. If
that is true, someone will be selected late at night after Ohio makes up its
mind. The passionate on the losing side will charge fraud and election
stealing. The rest of the country will get up the next day and go back to work
just as they did four years ago, and the republic will go on.
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