Blogosaurus

"All we need to do is do a better job of getting our message out."

We've heard some variation of that from many Democratic party figures lately-- from Howard Dean, from Nancy Pelosi, from the [i]Nation[/i] crowd. The people would elect Democratic presidents if only 1) Karl Rove didn't deceive them and 2) we didn't keep nominating stiffs. There is some logic to this, after all-- the fact is, the last two stiffs did substantially better than 80s stiffs like Mondale and Dukakis. Around 1992, the Democrats looked a lot more like a permanent minority party than they do now. Nominate someone with a real pulse, and they could eke out that extra point or two that makes a president. (Well, assuming you eke it out in the right states.)

Sounds good-- heck, John Judis and Ruy Texeira wrote a whole book about how demographic trends alone would soon carry the party to majority status. But it's self-delusion-- as becomes clear if you step back from one election and look at several at the same time.

Every election is a confluence of unique factors, which makes it easy enough to say "Well, it should have been a Democratic year but the war/Swift Boats/Kerry's lack of charisma/[insert reason here]..." Excuses were as common as balloons the day after the vote. Look at a bunch of elections, though, and the virtues and failings of individual candidates balance out-- for every Reagan a Clinton, for every Mondale a Dole. What's left is the broad historical trend-- which is, not surprisingly, Republican.

The modern presidential political era begins in 1968-- the year Vietnam began to fracture the Democrats, the year Nixon's Southern Strategy began to remake the Republicans. There have been ten elections since that year. If we add the vote totals for each party in those ten elections, here's what percentage of total votes cast for the two parties (excluding third parties) each party claims:

Republicans: 52.2% (456.2 million votes)

Democrats: 47.8% (418.5 million votes)

Take that as a baseline for the electorate over the last 36 years-- 52-48, Republican to Democrat. Though even that, perhaps, is overgenerous to the Democrats-- if we look past party affiliation, and consider the races in terms of ideology, giving each side credit for significant third party candidates (defined as polling more than 1% in the race), the split looks more like this:

Right (Republicans + George Wallace, John Schmitz, Ed Clark, Ross Perot): 53.7% (495.9 million)

Left (Democrats + John Anderson, Ralph Nader [2000 only]): 46.3% (427.1 million)1

So that's the real ideological break in the electorate-- 54 to 46, right to left.2 Now let's do another bit of figuring.

Notes

1. Who the hell were John Schmitz and Ed Clark? Schmitz ran on what was basically George Wallace's ticket in 1972 after Wallace's shooting and got 1.4%, while Clark is the only Libertarian candidate to (barely) break 1%, in 1980.

2. If you wanted to make things even more dire for the Democrats, you could start to weight your figures to make each election equivalent. The population's bigger today, so more people vote-- John Kerry, losing, got about 10 million more actual votes than Richard Nixon did in a landslide in 1972. If you accounted for that, by making a 51% win in the 60s or 70s equal to a 51% win today (a perfectly reasonable judgement call for a statistician), it would give even more weight to two blowouts-- Nixon over McGovern and Reagan over Mondale-- which would make the Democratic position even that much more dismal. But why twist the knife with statistical games?