Democrats Won by Flukes

Democrats won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.

Barely. 

When they had every advantage.

 
The year 1992 began a long string of Democratic national popular vote victories that serve to comfort and re-assure Democrats. They think they have the winning ideas, people, and demographic trends to make the current success even better in the future. Democrats observe that young people trend Democratic, and they will be around for decades.  Republican seniors are dying off. More people are getting college educated and they trend Democratic. There are more people of color in the country and more of them are voting. It's fair weather ahead for Democrats.

The reality is that Democrats have been lucky.

The Great Depression election. FDR established the New Deal coalition amid the misery of 20% unemployment, bank failures, and a minimal public safety net. Neither the Fed, the Hoover Administration, nor politicians in either party knew what to do to end the Depression. Hoover was the incumbent and things were miserable, so of course he took the blame. Hungry, out-of-work people seek change. FDR was there and he represented change.

The Watergate election. Jimmy Carter won the popular vote in 1976 with 50.08% of the vote. I was a young adult during that election and I remember the zeitgeist. Republicans were on the ropes. Richard Nixon had recently resigned from the presidency with the majority support--insistence--of GOP senators. America had watched a year of hearings and revelations about Nixon, and the TV channels represented non-partisan high-minded citizenship. Revelation after revelation shocked Americans. Back in those days Republican voters could be bothered by misbehavior by a president of their own party. They were embarrassed by what was revealed, because significantly, so was Nixon. He knew he had mis-behaved, which is why he covered up his obstruction of justice. He felt ashamed, and that shame communicated to the public. Besides, he swore in the Oval Office, and it was on tape. We all learned the phrase "expletive deleted," the term for deleted words in printed transcripts of the conversations. Nixon offended people, Republicans included. Icing on the cake of corruption was the revelation that the first Nixon Vice President resigned rather than being prosecuted for taking monetary bribes, right in the VP's office. Gerald Ford faced a tough primary against Reagan. Ford's own words about the era call it a "long national nightmare." It wasn't over because Ford then pardoned Nixon. It all looked bad.

Plus, inflation was out of control and unemployment was high, twin miseries that were not supposed to happen simultaneously, but did. They created a name for it: "Stagflation."

So I ask the question: How much worse can it be for the GOP than it was as the time of the 1976 election?

Jimmy Carter won, but just barely. 

The Ross Perot confusion. The 1992 election that put Bill Clinton into office was a strange three-person race, with the entry and strong presence of an eccentric billionaire. Ross Perot taught us that Americans were intrigued by a plain-talking self-confident billionaire. His bluntness came across as honesty. His billions implied competence. He got 19% of the vote. 

It is unclear whether Perot helped Bush or Clinton. What is clear is that his presence scrambled political alignments and that it was a tough time to be president. George H.W. Bush carried the burden of political longevity turning into frailty. He had succeeded Reagan, having what was essentially Reagan's third term, and this would be a fourth term. Voters were restless. Plus there was a recession. "It's the economy, stupid" was on the wall of the War Room. The meme was that the Reagan-Bush era was tired. Bush looked at his watch during a debate, as if to ask when all this would be over. The answer was soon. Amid all this Bill Clinton won, with a plurality, not a majority. He got 43% of the vote; 57% wanted somebody else.

The Great Financial Crisis election. The Republican nominee had an impossible job in 2008. The Bush Administration presided over a collapse of the financial system. The economy in November, 2008, was shutting down. The banking crisis spread to the insurance industry and then to industrial companies and then to Main Street. General Motors and Chrysler needed to be bailed out. General Electric came within one day of declaring they didn't have cash to operate. Money funds were unsafe. Banks were unsafe. Leave aside whether it was bad timing to have named Sarah Palin as VP nominee at a time when Republican competence was on the table, the election coincided with the worst moments of the Great Financial Crisis, an event so memorable that it got its own initials: GFC. How much worse could it have been for Republicans?

Amid a debacle, Obama won.

Trump and COVID. The 2020 election was another crisis under the GOP watch. The November, 2020 election that coincided with the worst and most frightening weeks of COVID, amid a parabolic rise of COVID deaths into thousands a day. Trump was president  and he had represented the no-big-deal, don't over-react position as regards COVID. That policy looked most misguided at the time of the election. Deaths were skyrocketing and there was not yet a vaccine. Plus, unemployment was high, businesses were shut down. Plus, Trump was singularly divisive, with persistent under-water approval numbers. Even with the benefit of hindsight, one could not have picked worse timing for the election. With misery this profound, was the election a Republican wipe-out?  No. Down-ballot Republicans did just fine and a change in fewer than 50,000 votes spread between a few battleground states would have given this election to Trump. How much worse could it have been for Trump than a daily body count?

Fluke. Democrats need to change their attitude toward their recent electoral success, and recognize that Democratic policy and message are not a tremendous success. The party is a threadbare coalition that wins by Republican error combined with miserable timing for them. If there hadn't been, in John Dean's words, "a cancer on the presidency;" if Republicans, as Obama put it, had not "driven the economy into a ditch;" if Covid deaths hadn't ramped up just then, then everything might have been different.

Democrats are winning elections because Republicans preside over disasters, and even then Democrats just barely eke out victory.  Democrats aren't winning. Republicans are forfeiting.