How Obama made history: He got by with a little help from his opponents
The dust settles
“The basic maxim of democracy should always be: turn the rascals out. When people are entrusted with power and make a botch of it, their options should be dropped.” — Arthur Schlesinger on the 1980 election
Barack Obama was elected our first African-American president when economic calamity caused a political slide among almost every group toward the Democrats, and also because he inspired a landmark mobilization among the youngest voters. The Crash of 2008 gave Obama the populist edge he needed to woo white swing voters,
allowing him to conquer key previously “red” states. For the second straight election cycle, voters were in a mood to punish the Republicans — and did so vigorously. Since 2005, Democrats have gained nearly 70 seats in both Houses of Congress.
Regardless of who won, this year would have been one for the history books. Presented with a historic choice and dramatic circumstances, Americans contributed, watched the debates and conventions and then voted at record rates. The intensity of voter interest and turnout, the quality of convention speeches and the large TV audiences for the debates all combine to make 2008 a political classic.
Jonathan Rauch wrote in the National Journal that voters this year had the best choice since Eisenhower-Stevenson in the ’50s, while David Broder called this the best campaign he’s seen in five decades of reporting. I agree with both of them. John McCain was an undeniable war hero with proven appeal to independents and a track record of bipartisan accomplishments who was defeated by events beyond his control, while Obama was the most charismatic Democrat since John F. Kennedy. Both men ended the campaign with roughly 60 percent approval ratings in the Gallup Polls, which hasn’t happened since 1960.
So what happened? Occam’s Razor: It was the
economy again. Scientists often recall the theory of the English scientist William of Ockham, who theorized that in the absence of any other evidence, the simplest explanation is probably the right one. Both Michael Barone of Fox News (“McCain had the advantage several times this election and fate took it away”) and Byron York in National Review (“What sank Mc- Cain’s presidential bid was a set of the worst conditions to face any candidate in decades, in combination with an opponent who was not only a better
campaigner but also the favorite of the nation’s media establishment.”) asserted that outside events wrecked the McCain campaign. Democratic consultant James Carville also called the election for Obama in September. They are almost certainly right.
With his successful convention and selection of Sarah Palin, McCain was slightly ahead in the average of national polls in early September. After putting Obama on the defensive on energy production and ridiculing his celebrity, all the pieces were in place for a successful GOP comeback based on a hardball anti-liberal campaign. Presumably, independent groups and conservative talk radio hosts would have thrown the knockout punch in late-October by harping on Obama’s liberalism and youth (with perhaps a hint of the race card). For all the criticism of McCain-Palin, they were winning until the market crashed.
On Sept. 15, the financial system nearly collapsed under the weight of bad mortgage debts. The unemployment rate also shot up as the recession became apparent with a million jobs lost. The financial meltdown was devastating to Republicans because it hit hardest their base among the middle class, and those are also the voters with the highest turnout. Obama re-surged to a steady lead of 6 to 8 points that held up.
Older white voters, who had supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries, swung back to Obama on the economic issue. The 93 percent of voters who said that economic conditions were “not so good” or “poor” voted for Obama by 54 percent to 44 percent, providing his margin of victory. And 63 percent of voters cited the economy as the most important issue, and they voted 53 percent to 44 percent Democratic. The crash turned the usual GOP advantage in the suburbs into an even split.
In 1990, as the first Persian Gulf crisis was cranking up, Republican analyst Kevin Phillips wondered whether President George H. W. Bush would give us “the economics of Herbert Hoover and the military misjudgment of Lyndon Johnson.” That did not occur in the early 1990s as Bush led the allied forces to an easy victory over Iraq. (The recession of 1992 caused his loss to Bill Clinton and Ross Perot).
However, this is perilously close to being the judgment of the second Bush presidency. The various disappointments of the last four years — Iraq, Katrina, the scandals and most of all the fall financial crash — created a massive wave of discontent that Obama and the Democrats rode to victory on a platform of “change.” The goats of this election are the GOP officials who designed the policies that drove the Bush administration into the ditch: Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Karl Rove.
The election results should finish off the influence of the neo-conservative movement that was able to hijack the administration after 9/11. It’s now doubtful that leaders of either party will listen to the opinions of Commentary, the Weekly Standard or the Wall Street Journal. The last time the Democratic Party was the beneficiary of two straight “wave” elections was the 1929-1936 era when they won four national elections in a row under Franklin Roosevelt.
Two conservative commentators who predicted a Bush bust should also get credit for calling this landmark election: Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune (“rarely has the prize been so dubious”) and CNBC’s Bill Fleckenstein (“To the losing party, I would say: It’s my belief that these next four years will see many dreams shattered and hearts broken in the aftermath of upcoming economic turmoil. If so, the silver lining may indeed belong to the losing party, which may only have to wait four years for a chance to reign supreme for a couple decades.”) Both columns were written the week of the 2004 Bush victory — but, in fairness, both men are now warning Democrats that they must deliver.
The 27 percent of voters who approved of Bush voted 89 percent to 10 percent for McCain, while the 71 percent who were anti-Bush went 67 percent to 31 percent for Obama. To overcome this burden, McCain would have had to get the votes of one-third of all voters who disapproved of Bush’s performance. That proved impossible.
Obama was lucky to run in a year when almost any Democrat would have won. Clinton almost certainly would have been able to capitalize on economic issues in 2008. In fact, any scandal-free Democrat like Joe Biden or John Kerry also would have been carried in by the wave. The country is in worse shape than it was eight years ago, and voters took out their anger on the Republicans.
The demographics of the vote also were interesting. During the 1980s, Jesse Jackson sought to build a “Rainbow Coalition” of racial minorities, women and gays. It never worked — partly because Jackson was unelectable and partly because those groups didn’t come close to a majority even in Democratic primaries.
This year, Obama was able to build a broad multiracial coalition based on economic issues that was a lot closer to Franklin Roosevelt’s model than Jackson’s. Obama improved on Kerry’s performance in virtually every demographic group. Obama won 43 percent among white voters, more than Kerry or Gore. He matched Lyndon Johnson’s record of getting nearly all the black vote. Obama posted major gains over Kerry with Hispanics (+7 to 10 points) and Asians (+5, no doubt due to his Hawaiian upbringing).
Based on economic appeals, he split the male vote, which almost never happens, while winning women by 13 points. Obama won almost half of married voters and 65 percent to 31 percent among the single set. The two candidates split middle and upper-income voters; Obama’s margin came from low-income precincts (60 percent to 38 percent Democratic). Obama even scored 3-point gains among white evangelical Christians and veterans.
Just as the pre-election surveys predicted, Democrats opened a 10-point lead in party identification. Conservatives went 4-to-1 for McCain and liberals 9-to-1 for Obama; in the crucial moderate category, Obama triumphed by 60 percent to 39 percent.
But the biggest dividing line was by age: Voters between 30 and 60 split evenly. McCain won only voters over
60. For the first time since the voting age was lowered to 18, the youth finally showed up. Not only was their turnout slightly higher than 2004, voters under 30 delivered an astonishing 66 percent to 32 percent landslide for Obama (of course, the youngest age cohort is also the most racially diverse). If he can keep these new voters reasonably happy, Obama will have the makings of a new Democratic majority.
The geography of the vote also mattered. For the first time since 1964, Democrats carried the new battlegrounds of the South and West in a two-way race. Obama carried every “blue” Kerry state and swung nine Bush states into his column including Virginia and Indiana, which hadn’t voted for a Democrat since 1964, and North Carolina, which hadn’t since 1976. Obama improved on Kerry’s showing in virtually every state, except for a few in the South.
The best news for the Democrats is that Obama won most of the fastest-growing states in the South and West: Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado and Nevada. Obama became the first Democrat to crack 40 percent in Texas since 1996. With Bush and McCain fading, Texas and Arizona could be Obama targets in 2012.
The key to a new national Democratic majority will be holding onto the suburban and new Hispanic voters that Obama won as these battleground states will have even more electoral clout after 2010.
And there was a record vote harvest. Preliminary returns indicate that the percentage of voter turnout was slightly higher than the 61 percent who came out in 2004, the highest figure since the 1960s. But an enlarged population due to immigration and a new baby boom resulted in more than 5 million extra voters compared to 2004’s record of 122 million votes cast. For obvious reasons, black turnout equaled white turnout (more than 60 percent) for the first time ever. Hispanics were a record 9 percent of the national electorate. The turnout was so big that Obama won more votes (more than 66 million) than any other candidate in history, while McCain (nearly 60 million) may have received more votes than any loser.
First-time voters were 11 percent of the total and Obama carried them by 68 percent to 31 percent. The much-vaunted Obama Organization came through: Twice as many voters reported being contacted only by the Obama camp compared to McCain’s, and they went 80 percent Democratic.
Is this the end of the Nixon-Reagan- Bush era? Perhaps we should have seen this realignment coming as it was historically due. Party coalitions have generally changed every 28 to 36 years (in 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932 and 1968). The last great upheaval came in the late 1960s when moderate-to-conservative Democratic blue-collar workers defected, first to George Wallace and then to the GOP. Republicans won seven of 10 presidential elections from 1968 to 2004 and controlled the Senate for nearly half of this time.
The Nixon-Reagan-Bush Coalition was built on traditional Republicans in suburbia and the Farm Belt plus gains among white workers in the South and West. In the last generation, federal policy shifted from pro-labor to probusiness and from social programs directed at the urban poor to tax cuts for suburbanites.
Figuring 36 years after 1968 would have meant that the next realignment was due in 2004 at the latest, but it was delayed four years by the fluke election of Jimmy Carter after Watergate. The Republicans dodged a major bullet in 2004 with Bush’s one-state re-election victory, but the problems of the last four years wiped out their position.
Now the Obama Democrats will have the opportunity to build a new coalition based on the economic insecurities of the 21st century — and the country’s new demographics caused by a generation of immigration from the Third World.
Republicans attempted to rerun a ’60s-style anti-liberal attack campaign against Obama by linking him to various radicals like William Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but voters were in no mood to hear this old message after $3 trillion of household wealth disappeared in the crash. Who cares about some ’60s radicals who will have zero influence in an Obama administration when you’ve lost 40 percent of your retirement savings in a year or your house is being repossessed?
Unless the Obama administration is an obvious failure, Republicans will need a new generation of candidates with a new set of ideas.
There was also, of course, the race factor.
Perhaps we should have seen this one coming, too. Over the past 50 years, numerous black athletes (Willie Mays, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Jim Brown, Magic Johnson) and entertainers (Sidney Poitier, Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington, James Brown, Al Green, the various “Motown” singers, Samuel Jackson, etc.) have risen to superstardom based on manly charisma and natural leadership qualities. It was inevitable that these talents would eventually present themselves in politics.
Obama managed to combine the charisma of a black movie star with the knowledge of a former editor of the Harvard Law Review. Like his hero John F. Kennedy, Obama’s ethnic background promised change, but his Ivy League education and cool television demeanor reassured moderate voters that he was no Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.
The big story was that the much-anticipated racial backlash failed to appear. There was no great difference in partisanship between the 10 percent of voters who said that race was an issue and the 90 percent who said it wasn’t. The few voters who would not go for a black candidate were buried by a tide of economic concerns.
The bad news on the racial front was that roughly 10 percent of Kerry voters wouldn’t support a black candidate, thus costing Obama about 5 percent of the national popular vote. The good news was that Obama was able to easily fashion his majority out of the 90 percent of voters who said race didn’t matter. This will probably not be a state or national issue again: qualified minority candidates will be judged on their merits. As Bill Schneider pointed out on CNN: Obama won on the issues and race was simply not one of them.
Of course, now comes the hard part. David Gergen, who worked for four presidents of both parties, has stated that the new president will face the greatest economic challenges since the Depression.
The bad news is that “all” Obama has to do is jump-start the economy, raise the stock market, create jobs, save the auto industry, promote “green” energy alternatives, clean up the credit mess, successfully end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, deal with the rest of the Middle East, begin to reverse global warming, correct the housing bust, provide universal health care, avoid a middle-class tax increase and eventually reduce the deficit.
The good news is that Obama seems to have a lot of natural talent and is a fast learner. He also won’t have much opposition from a collapsed Republican Party, and the voters will likely give him a longer than normal honeymoon. President-elect Obama was wise to stress the need for patience in his post-election comments. He is going to need a lot of time to get a grip on these massive problems.
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