

|
March 1986
The Curse of the Six-Year Itch
In the coming midterm elections a venerable political
pattern threatens
Republican control of the Senate
by Norman J. Ornstein
It is hard to get anybody but the politically besotted excited over
midterm elections. But this year's raise interest above the average: party
control of the Senate is at stake, and so might be the Republican bid to
become the new governing party. The Republican majority in the Senate,
captured in 1980 for the first time in a quarter century, and held by the
fingernails since, is at present a bare three seats. If the Democrats gain
four (ties are broken by the Republican Vice-President), they take
charge--and with it take the top leadership positions and all the
committee and subcommittee chairmanships, and control the agenda.
Granted, a change from the Republican Bob Packwood to the Democrat Lloyd
Bentsen as chairman of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee is not
exactly a sharp veer to the left; nor is a shift from Pete Domenici to
Lawton Chiles on the Budget Committee; nor, for that matter, from Barry
Goldwater to Sam Nunn on Armed Services. But imagine what would happen to
the confirmation prospects of a Reagan nominee to the Supreme Court in a
Judiciary Committee chaired by the Delaware neo-liberal Joe Biden instead
of the South Carolina conservative Strom Thurmond, or to a family-planning
funding proposal in a Labor and Human Resources Committee chaired by the
redoubtable Ted Kennedy instead of by the New Right leader Orrin Hatch, of
Utah, and you can see why control of the Senate matters. And not just to
Republican senators but to Ronald Reagan, who has had his differences with
Senate Republicans but who has at least been able to count on them to
promote his agenda and respond to his timing. For Reagan, Republican
control of the Senate may mean the difference between a placid and a
miserable final two years.
The 1986 elections will involve nearly twice as many Republican seats as
Democratic ones. With twenty-two seats up, Republicans are more vulnerable
to losses--and more of their seats are vulnerable to begin with. Sixteen
of the twenty-two Republican seats are held by freshmen, first elected in
the Reagan landslide of 1980, many by extremely narrow margins. (Indeed,
half the Republicans who won in 1980 did so with 52.1 percent of the vote
or less.) There are only twelve Democrats up. All, of course, withstood
the Reagan tidal wave; by and large, they start out in stronger
positions.
For all practical purposes each side has roughly the same number of safe
seats--seats in which a loss would be a major upset. For the Republicans
these include those of Quayle, of Indiana; Packwood, of Oregon; Grassley,
of Iowa; Rudman, of New Hampshire; Garn, of Utah; Dole, of Kansas; and
Murkowski, of Alaska. For the Democrats they include those of Bumpers, of
Arkansas; Dixon, of Illinois; Ford, of Kentucky; Glenn, of Ohio; Hollings,
of South Carolina; Inouye, of Hawaii; and Dodd, of Connecticut. This
leaves fifteen Republican and five Democratic seats with varying degrees
of vulnerability. The Democrats are concerned about two open seats
(Missouri and Louisiana) and the seats of two incumbents (Cranston, of
California, and Leahy, of Vermont), along with Gary Hart's Colorado seat.
Republican worries include the open seats in Maryland, North Carolina, and
Nevada, along with the seats of a number of freshman incumbents, such as
Abdnor, of South Dakota; Hawkins, of Florida; Nickles, of Oklahoma; Symms,
of Idaho; and Mattingly, of Georgia. Republican nervousness is compounded
by the fact that 1986 is a second-term off
year election--one susceptible to a phenomenon that Kevin Phillips has
called the "six
year itch."
For decades political analysts have been intrigued by an ironclad pattern
in American politics: the President's party loses seats in the off-year
election that follows his White House triumph--a phenomenon that has
occurred in every off-year election save one since the Civil War. Since
the Second World War, off-year losses for the President's party in the
House have averaged fifteen seats in the second year and forty-eight in
the sixth; in the Senate the average losses are zero in the second year
and seven in the sixth.
The losses have occurred whenever a party has held the White House for two
terms, even when the President has changed. (For example, the Democrats
suffered deep losses in 1966, six years into the Kennedy and Johnson
presidencies, and Republicans suffered badly in 1974, the sixth year of
their hold on the White House.) There is no need to go back much further
for a purer analogy to the present situation. The last time that a
President served through the sixth year of two terms was in 1958, with
Dwight Eisenhower. An elderly, popular, two-term Republican President who
had won a landslide re-election victory two years earlier saw his party's
hopes for majority status disappear. Battered by a farm crisis and a deep
recession, the Republicans lost forty-seven seats in the House of
Representatives and a full fifteen in the Senate (including two newly
created ones for Alaska), an outcome that set the Republicans back for
more than two decades and gave the Democrats a boost that carried them, in
Congress at least, for the same period.
This sixth-year massacre stems from a variety of mundane causes. Some of
them have to do with candidate-recruitment patterns. The party that wins
the presidency usually has had good fortune overall in that year, with
topflight, well-financed candidates for Congress attracted by the momentum
of their party. But its potential-candidate pool is thereby lowered for
the next midterm election. The out party usually experiences the reverse
pattern, getting better candidates in the later off year. Economic cycles
matter too: Presidents and Federal Reserve Boards pump up the economy in
the presidential-election year, and we pay the price, with a downturn or a
recession in the off year. With a two
term President the cycle often oscillates more in the second term, leading
to a more severe downturn in the sixth year--as happened in 1958.
The nature of the turnout is also important. A presidential contest brings
to the polls a lot of occasional voters, attracted by the excitement of
the race for the White House. By and large they vote for the winner and
help members of his party. But in an off year the occasional voters don't
turn out, leaving the polls to the partisans and other regular voters; the
disgruntled, out-party types are more likely to vote and register their
protest than the complacent or disillusioned members of the President's
party.
Also, if the President's party does well in the presidential year, it has
more seats to protect, and potentially to lose, the next time around. And
many of these seats are held by newcomers who won, or veterans who scraped
by, largely as a result of the presidential surge. Senators, of course,
have six-year terms, with one third of the hundred in the chamber up every
two years. The group on the chopping block in the sixth year is the one
that got elected when the two-term President first swept in--and that
usually means a whole lot of the President's colleagues, and few members
of the opposition.
Still, these general considerations are balanced for the Republicans by
factors peculiar to 1986. For one, the Republicans as a party are stronger
today than they were in 1958. The Gallup Poll back then showed the
Democratic Party capturing the allegiance of 47 percent of the electorate,
and only 31 percent supporting the Republican Party. The comparable
numbers in 1985 were 37 percent Democratic and 34 percent Republican. For
another thing, the incumbents in both the House and the Senate are
unusually well equipped with resources and sophistication to separate
themselves out from national trends and blame directed at the White House.
Republicans in the House have relatively few open seats (ones in which no
incumbent is running for re-election and which therefore offer the best
opportunities for party turnover) to defend. Only thirty-five or so of the
435 House seats so far have opened or appear likely to, and not many look
vulnerable to a party shift. It is a rare election in recent years in
which 90 percent or more of the House incumbents have not won re-election
(the figure was over 95 percent in 1984). Having entrenched incumbents
reduces the potential losses that the Republicans fear.
Republicans are nevertheless haunted by the memory of 1958. Things looked
pretty good for them too, less than a year before that election--then the
recession hit. Expectably, congressional Republicans see the economy as
the overriding issue. For Senate Republicans the economy means the
deficit. They have shown a veritable obsession with it, first pushing a
bold and dramatic deficit-reduction plan last summer, only to have it
rejected by the President, and then taking up the Gramm-Rudman proposal to
lock in severe budget cuts and create the incentive for a tax increase. To
Senate Republicans the deficit is the key to the economy. As one Senate
Republican put it recently, "If the financial community and the Fed
believe that we can't do the job, they'll begin to take steps to protect
themselves and the economy against inflation. That means interest rates
going up and the money supply tightening. And it'll happen at the worst
possible time."
More than the Senate may be at stake in this midterm election. Both
parties are jockeying for long-term majority status. In order to achieve
this, a political party must capture the allegiance of numbers of voters
who will support the party down the ticket, not just at the presidential
level. However, notwithstanding the Republicans' ballyhooed Operation Open
Door to convert registered Democrats to Republicans, very few people will
spurn lifelong partisan affiliations and switch squarely to the other
side. Realignment rests on replacement: getting new voters, primarily
young ones, who haven't yet formed firm political allegiances, to join
your cause. They will eventually restructure the electorate as they
replace older voters attached to the other party.
All the research done on the dramatic Democratic realignment of the 1930s
shows that the key was young voters, coming of age as the Depression hit,
influenced deeply by the contrast between Hoover and Roosevelt. Back then
most lifelong Republicans stayed Republican--and, from the thirties
through the Second World War, continued to despise Roosevelt. Meanwhile
those young voters became lifelong Democrats. Voters born in the teens and
twenties--who were teenagers and young adults as the Depression hit, and
who are in their sixties and seventies now--are still strongly Democratic
in their identification (as are those born a bit later who came of age
around the Second World War). The oldest segment of today's population,
those who came of age during the golden years for the Republicans (the
Roaring Twenties), remain staunchly Republican today.
Young voters, then, are the prize. And young voters in the past couple of
elections, according to Gallup, are strikingly more Republican than their
predecessors. The pattern is especially pronounced among those under
thirty who have come of age during the Reagan era and who saw a vivid
contrast between Reagan and Carter. Public Opinion magazine has compared
eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds in 1985 with their counterparts in 1952;
in nearly every region of the country today's young people are much more
Republican. These young voters supported Reagan handsomely in 1980, and
again in 1984. But they are not yet firmly entrenched in the Republican
Party. Young people are considerably less anchored to parties than their
parents. It takes a while--several elections--to convert patterns into
enduring habits. Many Republicans believe that if they can hold the young
voters in 1986, they will have built a substantial and long-lasting base.
In contrast, if they lose them in 1986, a great opportunity--especially
given the size of the generation--will have been lost.
The Republican Party's position now is reinforced by its image as a
winner, as the party on the move; visit any college campus these days, and
contrast the positive, upbeat recruiting posters of the college
Republicans with the defensive ads (if there are any ads at all) of the
college Democrats. A good Republican year in 1986--defined, say, as
holding on to the Senate--will reinforce that image; a bad year could bury
it.
Copyright © 1986, Norman J. Ornstein. All rights
reserved.
"The Curse of the Six-Year Itch";
The Atlantic Monthly, March, 1986, issue.
Volume 257, Number 3 (pages 22-28).
|