Reality Check  

Politics vs. Ideology:
How Elections Are Won

by Stephen Cox

Presidential elections have always been about interest groups, with ideology playing only a small role. Libertarians should learn from this.

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"I have long entertained a suspicion, with regard to the decisions of philosophers upon all subjects, and found in myself a greater inclination to dispute, than assent to their conclusions." — David Hume

As Hume automatically doubted the conclusions of other philosophers, so I have a strong tendency to distrust the speculations and assumptions of political commentators and party activists, especially when they are engaged with their favorite subject, the nature of American presidential elections. Here I want to dispute a number of attitudes that they have propagated among the American people, attitudes that obtrude themselves wherever politics are discussed.

One of these attitudes is the tendency to regard presidential elections as "defining historical events," as expressions of great "ideas" and great "social movements." Even the election of 2004 was commonly described, before it happened, as an event that would "change the nature of American politics for the foreseeable future." It is now being described as a "political watershed" that has precipitated a last, desperate battle to "redefine the heart and soul" of the losing party.

A second attitude, one that is closely linked to the first, involves the idea that decisive victory in a presidential contest confers a "mandate" on the winner, ratifying his ideology and requiring that its principles immediately be put into practice. Vox populi, vox dei; or, as H.L. Mencken said, democracy is the idea that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

A third attitude runs contrary to the first two. It stems not from a misplaced sense of drama but from flat-footed pragmatism. It arises from the theory that elections are won, not by ideas, but by an assemblage of "populations," "communities," or "voting blocs" that are known in advance to be favorable to one party or another. Find enough blacks, ecologists, soccer moms, and college professors; herd them to the polls; and the Democrats will win. Lure enough angry white males into the cave, and victory will go to the Republicans. This kind of theory is classically represented by Theodore White's study of the election of 1960 and V.O. Key's studies of the degree to which people tend to adopt the party allegiances of their parents.

The third attitude often produces a fourth. People who harbor it see America as a nation characterized by highly stable "power bases"— ethnic groups, social classes, that kind of thing. They believe, therefore, that any party that succeeds in capturing one of those bases from the other party will thereby change the whole shape of American politics. Suppose the Republicans capture the Democrats' "Hispanic base," or the Democrats capture the Republicans' "values base." The winning party would then "have a lock on" subsequent presidential elections. Or so people say.

Each of these four attitudes, I believe, is grounded in an element of truth. There are such things as political "bases," communal sources of political identification: "I am a Catholic"; "I am an African-American"; "I'm gay"; "I'm a Southern rebel." There are also such things as political ideas and social movements, and these can have noticeable effects on elections, occasionally dramatic effects. And people who win elections are free to claim that they have succeeded in attaining a mandate. But the picture of the world that people with these four attitudes see is very far from the world as it is.

I recently looked at returns from the past 45 presidential elections, beginning with 1828, which is about the time when political parties as we know them began to take form and the popular vote for president began to assume its current significance. The numbers I saw prompted questions about the nature of American electoral success.

Let's start with the issue of the winner's "mandate." President Bush suggests that his decisive electoral victory in 2004 constituted a mandate for the programs he favors. Democrats are eager to dispute this claim. They suggest that his victory was (in the words of a certain political scientist) "actually one of the narrowest" in the last 100 years. But both sides are wrong. Although Bush got only 51% of the popular vote, nine of the past 25 winning candidates (including Truman, Wilson, and Clinton) got even less. Bush was nearer the center than the end of the list. Only by standards very far removed from common sense, however, could such a victor derive a "mandate" from his success in running with the pack.

American elections are not won by "ideas" that can conveniently be transformed into mandates. For one thing, the diversity of the American populace, a diversity that is ordinarily very well reflected in any snapshot of either the winning or the losing party, means that no one is able to calculate exactly what it was that appealed to this heterogeneous group of voters and thereby produced the alleged mandate. I, and 5 million other people, may have voted for presidential candidate X primarily because we liked his advocacy of free trade. My next-door neighbor, and 5 million of his friends, may have voted for candidate X primarily because they are recipients of the economic handouts he endorsed. And in a normal election, candidate X would need all of us to win, no matter how opposed our premises might be. Even if he gathered enough of us together to win 60% of the vote, he could not have a mandate to give all of us, or any one of us, exactly what we wanted.

But the big fact about American presidential elections is that they are won by small margins. In only five of the past 45 elections did the winning candidate get anything near 60% of the popular vote: Harding, 1920, 60%; Roosevelt, 1936, 61%; Johnson, 1964, 61%; Nixon, 1972, 61%; Reagan, 1984, 59%. All these victors (four of whom, by the way, had the advantage of incumbency) were pitted against extraordinarily weak opponents. All but one (Johnson) were able to contrast themselves with closely preceding administrations of the opposing party (those of Wilson, Hoover, Johnson, and Carter) that were generally perceived as disastrous.

It was not "ideas" that defeated James Cox (1920), Alfred Landon (1936), George McGovern (1980), and Walter Mondale (1984). True, many people voted for Harding and against Cox because they disagreed with the Democratic Party's support for the League of Nations. Many people voted for Roosevelt and against Landon because they believed that Roosevelt's economic policies were worth a continued try. Many people voted for Nixon and against McGovern because they believed that McGovern was a socialist, and socialism is not a good idea. Many people voted for Reagan and against Mondale because they were opposed to the social-welfare liberalism that Mondale championed. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to see Harding's party, let alone Nixon's, as a party of ideas.

Roosevelt's and Reagan's parties were much more ideological, although the two candidates spent about as much time dodging their parties' ideological assumptions as they did explicitly advocating them. Johnson's victory can plausibly be viewed as a repudiation of Barry Goldwater's ideological conservatism. Yet even Johnson's election, which was won by a swing of only eleven points from the 50% taken by the Democrats four years before, hardly represented an overwhelming ideological victory. In only eight states did the popular vote on either side of this, by far the most highly polarized electoral contest of the 20th century, exceed Johnson's national share of 61.1%. His was a broad victory, but it had no deep wellsprings of support. In the next two elections, the opposing party won, the second time by a "landslide."

And Johnson's victory in 1964 was as close as you get to a "mandate" in American electoral politics. The fact that President Bush can dare to represent his achievement of a 51–48% victory as a mandate merely demonstrates what a deformed meaning the word has come to possess, under the pressure of America's highly competitive two-party system.

One may say of this system, as Mark Twain supposedly said of the weather, that everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. The reason is that there is nothing to be done. The logic is inexorable. People work for American political parties, give money to American political parties, and to a large extent vote for American political parties in order to win elections. Few people do any of these things merely to express some set of abstract views. Even voters who, because of their geographical location, are doomed to lose — Democrats in Indiana, for example, or Republicans in New York — can picture themselves as contributing to the larger, national effect, or to a party-building effort that may eventually pay off in their benighted home states.

But there can be no question about the professional managers of the major parties: they are working to win, and to win right now. Even Bill Clinton, that embittered opponent of the great right-wing conspiracy, tried to convince John Kerry to campaign aggressively in favor of the anti-gay-marriage measures that were placed by the Right on the 2004 state ballots. For Clinton, winning was what counted. The important thing was to come out a vote or two in front of the other guy, no matter how you did it. He knew that the 49% he won in 1996, or even the 43% he won in 1992, was about as good as any 51% that someone else might get. Just get that vote!

"Winning," in the context of American politics, is not like winning World War II. It's more like winning one of those 18th-century wars in which, with tremendous effort, one of the European powers captured a hundred square miles of marginal territory, only to give it back the next time a war came along. But American elections are even more complicated and "marginal." In the 18th century there was an England, a France, a Spain, an Austria, and a Prussia, each representing great and permanent blocs of power. Such blocs do not exist in America. Unlike other countries, America has never had a "Catholic" or a "Protestant" party, or even a "religious" party. It has never had a viable "labor" party. Its regional parties, such as the Southern Democratic Party in the election of 1860 or the States Rights Party in the election of 1948, have been of very short duration.

It's worth asking why this is. The reason is that Americans, heirs of two centuries of political and religious individualism and extreme social mobility, are people of multiple social identifications. Here's an example. Most gay Americans currently identify with the Democratic Party. They may not know a word of the party platform, but they feel a personal identification with a party that (they believe) "supports" them as gay people. It's all very vague, and the vagueness expresses the fact that push so rarely comes to shove in American politics. If you're an ordinary, hard-working, law-abiding American, it's not easy to tell, from its overt actions, whether a political party "supports" you or not. It doesn't give you immunity from taxes, allow you exclusive use of the municipal swimming pool, or grant you a title of nobility; neither does it arrest you for being "who you are." It doesn't dream of doing such things. Once in power, it treats almost everyone with contempt and indifference, occasionally doling out some political welfare in the shape of "affirmative action" or "faith-based initiatives" — until the next election comes around, when it starts talking again about "making the government look more like America."

Still, I know gay men who care nothing about politics as such, but would probably kill themselves rather than cast a Republican vote. Yet millions of gay voters also identify themselves as property-owners, Texans, home-town boys, friends of the military, tax foes, Christians, and other people emotionally or logically identified with the Republican Party. Who can tell how such people will vote? Who, therefore, can tell how gays "as a group" will vote? Nobody. And you can say the same thing about people in virtually every social group in the country, because virtually everyone in America is self-identified with a multitude of groups, causes, jobs, beliefs, interests, prejudices, and experiences.

The task of the American political party is to exploit as many of these personal identifications as possible. This is not a science, and it cannot be. Representatives of any group or position with which some people identify are free to say, as they are saying of the recent Republican victory, "We caused it! If it hadn't been for our 3% of the vote, the candidate would have lost." But that goes for every 3% and even 2% and 1% of Bush's vote. All of those percentages were necessary to elect him.

Further, it is by no means clear that the, say, 60% of the gay population that voted for Kerry in 2004 will vote for a Democratic candidate in 2008, whatever he does or does not do (or is perceived as doing or not doing) in relation to gay people. Group identifications vary unpredictably, and so does the strength of group identification in the lives of individual people. A black ex-military voter may have felt strongly impelled to vote for Bush in 2004, but he may feel only weakly impelled to vote for the Republican candidate in 2008, when (God willing) the war will be over.

Voting behavior is like other forms of human action, as explained by such economic theorists as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises; it proceeds from individual, variable, nonquantifiable preferences. Someone who writes "Vote for Bush!" at the top of his Things-to-Do list in November 2004 may write "Vote for Hillary!" at the top of that list in November 2008; or his list for the first week in November may start with "Buy new shoes," "Remember conference call," or "Register kids, preschool," with no entry at all pertaining to electoral politics.

What happens in American elections is that the party that lost the last one looks for a way to win the next one, knowing (if it's smart) that it cannot rely implicitly on any stable bloc of voters. Even the legendary strength of African-Americans' identification with the Democratic Party can easily recede sufficiently to keep most potential voters in that "bloc" away from the polls. The best that each political party can do is to go through its list of possible voters, trying to interest as many as possible, beginning with those most strongly identified with itself (at the moment) and proceeding as far down the list as its funds and energy permit. If the gay vote is sixth on the list, a party that has any possibility of getting it will try to do so, altering its own character and "ideas" when alteration is necessary to optimize its capacity for winning.

One result is that the two major parties stay fairly close to equal in strength. Another result is that voter identification groups drift restlessly from one party to another, and the two major parties drift eerily across the political, social, and literal landscape, seeking whom they may devour. The solid Democratic South is now the solid Republican South. The Republicans, formerly the big-government party, are now the small-government party (except when they're not). Blacks used to be "predictably" Republican; now they are "predictably" Democratic. College professors used to vote Republican; now they vote en masse for the Democrats. Democratic soccer moms become Republican security moms; populist evangelical Christians (Democratic) become community-standards evangelical Christians (Republican); big business stands with the Republicans, leaps suddenly toward the Democrats, then shivers into a thousand fragments, each pursuing its own interest in government benefits or obeying its managers' ethnic, gender, or ideological inclinations, or the phases of the moon.

American elections are won not by stable power blocs but by shifts in party identifications among people who used to be in those blocs, until they escaped. Some of the shifts, which go on all the time, in every conceivable direction, coincide with major intellectual or social movements, the kind of movements that change large patterns of intellectual and social history. But electoral politics has its own more intricate, local, and self-adjusting patterns, the patterns of the marginal gains and losses that happen as parties hunt the all-important plurality of votes.

The most historic and ideological election in American history was undoubtedly the election of 1860, when the Republican party came to power as the political expression of the antislavery movement. Abraham Lincoln won just 40% of the vote that year. In 1864, he managed to increase his party's share to 55%, but by then eleven opposition states were not even voting; they were out of the union. His raw popular vote — the vote of a wartime president! — had increased by only 19% over the 1860 total. At that rate, if the Southern states had not seceded and other things had remained equal, he would have received only about 48% of the popular vote in 1864. Presumably, the nominee of the Democratic Party would have beaten him. It was no historic mandate, conferred by the voters on Abraham Lincoln, that inspired the Southern states to leave the union after the election of 1860; it was a refusal to recognize the self-correcting nature of American electoral politics.

In 1868 and 1872 the Republicans responded to their perilously small electoral margin by nominating Ulysses S. Grant, a war hero. Grant won both elections, but he received only 53% and 56% of the vote, respectively. (And in both instances, his margin was inflated by unnaturally Republican conditions in a partly disenfranchised South.) During the remaining three decades of the century, an era that witnessed many historic ideological and social movements, to which both parties attempted to adjust, the Republican Party usually won; but the winning party's head was never far above the water. The winners' vote-shares were 48%, 48%, 49%, 48%, 46%, 51%, and 52%.

Let's take another example of the difference between "history" and electoral processes. The administration of Franklin Roosevelt (1933–1945) was clearly a triumph for the ideology of big government and the welfare state. Yet Roosevelt came to power on a small-government platform, displacing Herbert Hoover, who endorsed roughly the same ideas and practices as Roosevelt but had been discredited by his failure to "solve" the Great Depression. Roosevelt's victory by 57% to 40% of the vote was not a mandate for the distinctive set of policies that his administration eventually came up with; it was a vote against Herbert Hoover. In 1936, Roosevelt's share of the vote climbed to 61%, an enormous accomplishment in an American election. Although he was running against feeble opposition, it is certain that many of the votes he received were from converts to the big-government ideology. By 1940, however, Roosevelt's vote was down to 55%; in 1944, in the midst of a global war, and against an opponent who was barely campaigning, he achieved only 53%. His highest percentages of votes came from the deep South, where some people might have expected his modern liberalism to be one of his less popular characteristics.

A worse fate befell the party of Lyndon Johnson after his great "ideological" victory of 1964. In 1968, the Democratic Party's left-liberal stalwart, Johnson's hand-picked successor and apologist Hubert Humphrey, gained only 43% of the vote against country-club Republican Richard Nixon (43%) and segregationist George Wallace (14%). In 1972, a revival of left-liberalism under George McGovern lost the election for the Democrats by the terrific margin of 61% to 38% (which was, however, just 5% lower than Humphrey's vote). In 1976, Jimmy Carter, who was perceived as an anti-ideologue if not as a "conservative," crept into a 50–48% victory against a Republican Party discredited by the Watergate scandal. In 1980, 16 years after the defeat of Goldwater, the great champion of conservatism, a conservative administration came to power with Reagan's 51–41% victory over Carter. In other words, the Democrats sank by nine points that year, and the Republicans rose by three.

Such small margins, achieved by such large movements! And ideological movements were far from the only factors involved. There were also matters of personality, of preceding failure or success in office, and of geography, with Carter exerting, initially, a special appeal to the South. In view of these relatively small but shifting margins, it is understandable that President Clinton's supporters should have regarded his progress from 43% of the vote in 1992 to 49% in 1996 as a triumph, whether of ideology or of personal charm (they didn't care, so long as he remained in office).

In truth, however, only ten elections out of the past 45 have been won by margins of 48% or less. Clinton's 1996 victory put him on the southern shore of the mainstream of electoral success, the broad current that has carried 19 presidential candidates to victory with shares of 49% to 53%, the current that swirls fretfully around issues and ideologies, then courses happily downward toward the votes that are most easily obtained (and no truly ideological vote is ever easily obtained).

Again, this does not mean that ideas are wholly without influence, even electoral influence, in American life. They have a chance of gaining influence, but their chances often improve when they don't have to carry an entire political party with them. This is what supporters of minor parties usually do not understand. Almost every minor party is an ideological party, and that explains why such parties either remain minor or cease to exist. Even the Republican Party, the only example of an ideological party that succeeded in becoming a major one, was supported by much more than antislavery sentiment. It offered protective tariffs, internal improvements, western land, municipal reform, and a variety of other ostensible benefits, especially to people of the North. It also retained much of the old northern Whig power structure; i.e., politicians who were experienced in taking votes from Democrats. But the social welfare movement, the feminist movement, the African-American movement — none of these movements had to constitute itself as a political party in order to get its way. Had it done so, it would have had to take on many more issues than the ones that primarily interested it, and it would have alienated more people than it did in its quest for single-issue legislation.

In 1916, the Prohibition Party achieved 1.19% of the popular vote. A little over two years later, a prohibition amendment was added to the Constitution. Obviously, A was not the cause of B. It is frequently suggested that minor parties lose with issues that major parties later use to win. But the mere fact that the Democratic Party has adopted many of the proposals once offered by the Socialist Party does not indicate that the Socialist Party itself had any considerable influence on the process. It was people within the Democratic Party who saw the appeal of socialist ideas, and used them, despite the simultaneous, somewhat embarrassing advocacy of those ideas by the Socialists.

The same might be said about most of the issues that reputedly mobilize "the" Democratic Party and "the" Republican Party of today. Issues mobilize some people. But if all that a studio executive in Hollywood and an auto-parts worker in Cleveland have in common is their friendship for "the environment," then the Democratic Party is in serious trouble. The two people in question will have as much in common, on that score, with many Republicans, and with very many people who see no occasion to vote at all. And that is precisely the problem with the current Democratic Party: it's hard to keep a party together when many of its participants share just one reason for supporting it, and the reasons themselves vary so wildly that many Democratic voters might just as easily be in different parties.

Now suppose, as is actually the case, that one or both major parties were disliked and distrusted by a majority of voters, or that neither major party were courageous enough to address certain issues of wide popular concern. This still does not imply that a minor party would be able to intervene successfully in electoral politics. A minor party invariably has a well-disciplined set of ideological positions, but it lacks the wide array of personal identifications that are necessary to unite a large proportion of American voters over a substantial period of time.

It is noteworthy that the Democratic Party's electoral votes in 1952 and 1956 came exclusively from Southern states, despite the fact that its presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, was the quintessential northern liberal. Even voters' traditional loyalty to a party label can keep a party going for a decent period of time. (Or it can delude the party by masking other sources of political identification. In several north Florida counties, as many as 75% of voters consider themselves Democrats, but those counties went overwhelmingly for Bush this year.) Minor parties, however, have few or no such nonrational means of retaining their voters. The best that a minor party can do is to keep itself in business as a continual advertisement for its ideology. The worst it can do (and the best and the worst are in this case inseparable) is to advertise its continual failure to win public office.

It is quite possible that many of the Libertarian Party's leading ideas are shared by a substantial majority of Americans. But that isn't enough for a political party. There is not even the hint or seed of a "mandate" here. Most Americans do not derive their electoral identity from that particular set of ideas, nor do they share most of the other identity markers that tend to unite political-party libertarians. Most Americans are not rationalists, deists, or atheists, chronic dissenters, or owners of small businesses; most are not even college-educated, as virtually all (upper case) Libertarians are.

Even if the national economy collapsed tomorrow as the obvious result of government interference with the marketplace, the Libertarian Party would never come to power on that issue, or any other. Americans would simply turn to one of the two major parties, to an entity whose vast, unruly identities. It would be well if there were libertarians within that lucky party, people who could draw it in a direction more favorable to their own ideology. At any time, from the point of view of sheer practicality, libertarians would do better to climb onto a major party, taking their position on the back of an animal with many feet to bear it to victory, than they would to set out toward the next election with only their own legs to carry them.

It grieves me to say this. I am a registered Libertarian. I think that, by and large, the Libertarian Party has done a good job advertising ideas of individual freedom. The Libertarian Party in my home county has done a magnificent job at that. And there is nothing wrong with using a party for purposes of intellectual advertisement. The question is whether, from a political point of view, another medium would be more effective.

As I have indicated, and as everybody knows, even the major parties have serious problems. It might even be possible for a major party to die, if it ceased to offer large segments of the electorate the multiple identity connections that allow them to adhere to one political entity. Already the Democratic Party, by exchanging the South for its largest donor base, the Hollywood film industry, has forfeited what used to be a major point of political identification for an enormous segment of traditional voters: we're from the South; we've always been Democrats.

But anyone with a brain — and a major political party is bound to have some people with brains — can figure out a way to maximize Hollywood donations without losing even more votes in Georgia. I believe that the Democratic Party, in some form, will be with us for a long, long time, whatever turns its official ideology takes from moment to moment. The same can be said of the Republican Party. They're not going away. If you want to accomplish something in electoral politics, you have to work with one of them.

Is this picture of American politics too cynical, too dispiriting? Consider the alternative. We might live in the kind of country that is washed by recurrent waves of political ideology and "idealism," a country (like France in the late 18th and 19th centuries) in which lopsided plebiscites or parliamentary elections continually change the basic form of government, sweeping past all local attachments, professional loyalties, inherited ideas, and practical considerations — all the "little" things from which the little margins of American elections are made. No, I'd rather live with the politics of small adjustments than with the politics of revolutionary upheavals; even though my advice is not solicited by either major party.

Despite all that, I admit that I would like to see libertarianism become an electoral movement. I would like to see the Libertarian Party sweep the country, elect a president, and organize both houses of Congress. That's not going to happen. American electoral politics just don't do things like that. But being elected yourself isn't the only way to affect the political system. The fact that both major parties attempt to appeal to an enormous variety of people gives libertarians a clear invitation to do so too, to increase the sentiment for liberty within the major parties by connecting that sentiment with the interests or personal identifications of the major parties' constituents. The libertarian idea really does offer something for rich and poor, black and white, male and female, gay and straight, Christian and atheist, doesn't it? Perhaps in 2008 we will hear that "opposition to big government," "the decriminalization platform," "free school empowerment," and "the minimal taxation movement" have produced the next presidential "mandate" for one of the two major parties.

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