December 21, 2005
Can the Democrats “Nationalize” 2006?
By Jay Cost

That DCCC Chair Rahm Emanuel refused to predict for The Hill last week that the Democrats would recapture the House is very telling. “We’re not in a game of predictions,” Emanuel said. This is, of course, quite true. But he is in a game of winning elections, which first requires recruiting good candidates. And good candidates who wish to serve on the Hill read The Hill. Why would Emanuel refuse an opportunity to fire up the elite part of his base, possibly inducing the marginal top-tier Democratic fence sitter to toss his hat into the ring, by publicly stating his confidence in victory? It is reasonable to guess that it is because both Emanuel and the elite Democrats he is trying to convince are increasingly certain that a Democratic takeover of the House is out of the question. Said Emanuel, “My job is to affect, not predict.” Fair enough. But, if he thought the Democrats could retake the House, would he not proclaim it? In that situation, is not predicting the same as affecting?

In recent days, I have noticed a shift in talk about changes in the congressional balance of power, much like Emanuel’s subtle defeatism. Democrats, at least those who are coming around to this opinion, must be incensed about the newly discovered impossibility of retaking Congress. After all, Bush’s numbers are low across the board. Congress’s numbers are worse. This president led the nation into a war in which, as of today, a majority does not want to be involved. What is more, the public is just downright concerned, even agitated, about the general state of American affairs. Why can the Democrats not capitalize on this seemingly momentous opportunity?

This is a question that I find very intriguing – for it moves beyond the soap opera of our day-to-day politics and toward the very design of our governmental and electoral institutions. It is they, so often and so easily overlooked by our pundit class, that are thwarting Democratic designs. Why? This column represents the last in a series offering a reasonable answer. The first column, broadly speaking, dealt with the extent to which the American political landscape offers a real opportunity for the Democrats to retake Congress (answer: a small extent). The second dealt with the extent to which today’s polls indicate that the public is ready to switch parties (answer: a small extent). This column will deal with the extent to which Democrats have a realistic strategic possibility for retaking Congress. To appreciate what I mean by this, imagine that the most brilliant political tactician is currently working for the Democrats. And, please, do not imagine Bill Clinton – he is very overrated, unless you think that a politician who lost his party both Houses of Congress, never won half of the electorate, never had any coattails worth mentioning, could not secure the presidency for his successor, gave his opponents virtually every policy change they demanded in his second term and managed to get himself impeached (by the same opposition, at that!) is a brilliant tactician. There is a difference between a bewitching personality and a sophisticated tactical mind.

The question I shall answer is whether such a modern day Machiavelli could win the Democrats control of Congress. Is there a strategy that, if executed by way of tactical perfection, could result in Democratic triumph? Emanuel, who is undoubtedly one of the smartest politicians in Congress, indicated to The Hill exactly how the Democrats might retake the House.

That is through “nationalization” – i.e. the process of transforming local elections into a kind of referendum on the state of the nation. Emanuel is probably correct that nationalization is the only way to take back the House and the Senate. In years past, swings of 16 seats have occurred in congressional elections that were decidedly local. However, over the years what is known as the incumbency advantage (i.e. the electoral advantage that incumbents enjoy because of higher name recognition, the congressional franking privilege, greater access to funds, ability to draw district lines, etc.) has become more advantageous, making swings of 16 seats less likely. In the last twenty years there has only been one swing of that magnitude – 1994. Democrats today often blame GOP-tilted redistricting for the increased incumbency advantage, but (a) there are many other factors that have enhanced it (most notably the rise in campaign costs, which have made it more difficult to mount an effective challenge), (b) Democrats do the same when presented with the opportunity, (c) studies have shown that bipartisan compromises on redistricting tend to heavily favor incumbents (and therefore Republicans over Democrats, as there are more incumbent Republicans), sometimes more than partisan plans, and (d) studies have not yet convincingly shown that redistricting diminishes “representativeness”. Usually, the only way around the incumbency advantage (absent a nationalized election) is to win the seats of retiring members, i.e. open seats. But, the rate of retirement has declined over the years and, accordingly, there are very few congressional retirees this year. The rise of the incumbency advantage and the decline of retirees are such that nationalization is necessary for the Democrats to recapture the House.

But nationalization is easy, right? The Republicans themselves showed the Democrats how to do that. All the latter need do is develop their own version of the Contract with America – a set of policy prescriptions designed to take advantage of the public’s anti-Washington, anti-Republican, anti-Bush mood. Well, not quite. An analysis of post-election public opinion polls from 1994 shows that one should not be hasty in giving the Contract much credit. Specifically, the data creates some puzzles that make it difficult to pin down exactly how it was effective. Typically, it is candidates in open races who use to great effect issue positions like those embodied in the Contract. Thus, we would expect in 1994 that Republican candidates in open seat races, not challengers of incumbents, would have been the greatest beneficiaries of the Contract. But, in fact, it was exactly the opposite. The data indicates that it was challengers who benefited most from the Contract. What is more, a week before election day, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that a whopping 71% had never heard of the Contract with America. The poll further found that only 7% claimed that it would make them more likely to vote Republican (and 5% said it would make them less likely to vote Republican). So, clearly, the Contract with America was not sufficient to bring about the GOP victory that year.

It is better to say that the Contract was part of an overall push by the Republicans that year to change the public’s frame of reference. It is best to say that the Contract was a symbolic representation of the key ingredient that year – Republican unity. In other words, the Contract did not induce the public to vote differently than it did in 1992. Rather, it reflects the Republican approach to the election: unify the party in opposition to what the public identified as the gridlock and misdirection of Clinton’s Democratic Party. The Contract represented Republican unity.

Unity, however, is not sufficient for electoral victory – not in 1994 and not in 2006. If all 450 or so Democratic candidates met on the steps of the Capitol to announce that they are unified, we would not expect that alone to sweep the GOP out of power. In politics, unity is not intrinsically valuable. It is, rather, a means to an end. In 1994 GOP unity enabled the party to shift the focus of the electorate ever so slightly. In other words, studies have shown that the Republicans did not nationalize 1994 by making the election a referendum on which party the public wanted to control of Congress, and certainly not on whether the public liked or disliked the Contract. What the Republicans did, rather, was connect individual Democrat members of Congress to Clinton. A unified GOP made this a message that was consistent across elections and heard by many more voters than who would have heard it had a few local candidates said the same. Think of it this way. It is one thing if WPXI’s David Johnson, by repeating Rick Santorum’s campaign message, suggests to his nightly news viewers that Harris Wofford has voted against Pittsburgh’s values. It is another thing if Tom Brokaw, in the next half hour, by repeating Newt Gingrich’s campaign message, suggests the same about Democrats generally. In 1994, the message was, “Your congressman voted against your values!” and unity was the megaphone for this message.

Thus, the second part of the GOP’s success that year was attaching members of Congress to Clinton. They did this by using the roll call votes of individual Democratic members of Congress to connect them to particularly unpopular elements of the Clinton agenda. Most notably, the GOP managed to connect Southern, Midwestern and Western Democrats to Clinton’s 1993 budget bill and the assault weapons ban. This is why the GOP was relatively unsuccessful in the North – Northern voters largely supported the major parts of Clinton’s legislative successes. Thus, Northern Democrats made it through the 1994 midterms mostly unscathed. But Democrats in more conservative regions, at least Democrats in those regions who voted against their districts for the sake of their party, were much more likely to lose.

This is how 1994 was a national election. Precisely speaking, local politics was not so much nationalized in 1994 as national politics was localized. If, therefore, the Democrats hope to nationalize 2006 in the same way that 1994 was a national election, they must first unify and they must second attach individual members of Congress to President Bush. Can they do this?

Let’s examine the possibility of Democratic unity first. It seems very likely that the Democrats can indeed unify on a series of domestic policy proposals that would be, by and large, palatable to the American electorate (though whether such measures would be compelling is another matter entirely, one that we will not address here). Bush has had, after all, lots of trouble connecting with the American public on domestic issues. But the real sticking point for Democratic unity is obviously Iraq. Democratic unity would have to include a coherent and relatively specific position on Iraq upon which most-to-all Democrats agree. Indeed, unity on domestic issues would probably seem hollow and meaningless without unity on Iraq.

It is very clear that, as of right now, the Democrats are not unified on Iraq – neither in terms of specifics nor even in terms of the broad-brush strokes. Some Democrats want the US out of Iraq immediately, some want a structured but purposeful drawdown, some want the status quo, and some want us to amp up our involvement. This covers the complete spectrum of opinions on Iraq, which means that the Democrats are about as variable as they possibly can be. What is more, it surely is something when the House Minority Leader and the former vice presidential nominee are on opposite sides of the issue. Is it possible for the Democrats to overcome these policy differences for the sake of unity?

The answer seems to be no. The Democrats face a classic “collective action dilemma”. This is the type of situation that occurs whenever people pursue a collective goal (i.e. a goal that everybody can enjoy regardless of whether they actually contributed to its achievement). The Democrats’ collective goal is control of Congress. If they achieve it, all Democratic members of Congress will be able to enjoy it, regardless of whether they helped achieve it. If unity on the Iraq issue is part of the way to achieve that goal, Democratic members of Congress will have to find some significant common ground. But the divergence of opinion among members of Congress reflects the divergence of opinion among different constituencies. It is no coincidence that Ted Kennedy and Ben Nelson have different views on Iraq – the former being more liberal than the latter: Massachusetts is more liberal than Nebraska. Thus, if the Democrats are to find some common ground, some set of Democrats must shift their positions on Iraq such that they are less representative of their constituencies. In other words, they must pay some kind of cost – in this case an increased chance of defeat.

However, as we said above, they are pursuing a collective end: if the goal is achieved, all congressional Democrats will be able to enjoy it regardless of whether they were loyal. In situations like this – which are called “prisoners’ dilemmas” – the choice we expect all rational individuals (i.e. those who are interested in getting the best possible outcome for themselves) to make is to not help achieve the goal, i.e. “defect”. All players in a prisoners’ dilemma are best off if they defect and others participate, and worst off if they participate and others defect. Thus, the best strategy is to always defect. Because the Democrats face a prisoners’ dilemma wherein they can each choose to pay for the collective good and wherein payment for does not affect future enjoyment of the good, we can expect the Democrats who are asked to pay a cost to refuse. Such Democrats will be better off by being disloyal, regardless of what their fellow Democrats do.

There are, of course, ways around the problem of collective action. One such way is a central authority that rewards people for participating and punishes them for refusing to participate. But there is no such authority in American political parties, which are very decentralized compared to their European counterparts. If the Democratic Party decides to coalesce around a leftist agenda on Iraq, and Ben Nelson refuses to participate, there is nobody in a position to punish him for his disloyalty. From Ben Nelson’s perspective, he is better off being disloyal than being loyal – what good is it to him if the Democrats recapture the Senate, but he loses his seat? The same logic holds for left-of-center Democratic members of Congress (Maria Cantwell and Debbie Stabenow come to mind) if the party decides to move rightward. It also holds for challengers of Republicans. It does the individual no personal good to sacrifice him- or herself for the sake of the common good of the party.

There is an intractability to the problem of collective action. Once you face it, you cannot solve it. The only real alternative is to avoid it by somehow changing the incentives of the individuals involved, but the Democratic leadership lacks the ability to do that. Thus, it should come as no surprise that recent reports about Democratic tactics suggest that, at best, the party is going to take an open-ended, and therefore ambiguous, approach to what constitutes “Democratic opinion” on Iraq. As The Washington Post reported last week, the unified Democratic position, when it emerges, will be extremely broad – so broad that it can, according to Jim VandeHei and Shalaigh Murray, “provide the party enough maneuvering room to allow Democrats to adjust their position as conditions in Iraq change”. This shall give both conservative and liberal Democrats sufficient cover. The problem with this, obviously, is that it is nowhere near close to the kind of specificity that the Democrats need to nationalize the election. And, on Friday, Nancy Pelosi said that the final Democratic position will be the null set – that the party will take no unified stand whatsoever about what to do next in Iraq. In other words, the leaders are not even going to ask their rank-and-file to pay personal costs for the sake of party unity. This is exactly the sort of result we expect in a prisoners’ dilemma. Substantive unification is not in the cards, and so the party’s leadership – because it cannot coerce members into a unified position – is essentially throwing its hands up.

Pelosi’s spin on the disunity, that it was a sign of strength, was a particularly amusing attempt to save face (likely with potential Democratic donors). Disunity is a sign of strength – that is just like how it is much easier to break 100 sticks all at once than it is to break them individually, right? She must be referring to that weak kind of strength that we hear so much about. This is not going to help the Democrats do what they want to do. It seems that the their will boil down to, “We Democrats oppose President Bush, but we offer you, the public, no specific alternative upon which we agree”. This position, which is the kind of result to expect in a collective action dilemma, is essentially what every opposition party does every election year. Every opposition party can minimally agree on being in opposition – such a position, however, is not sufficient for the Democrats to acquire the reins of government next year.

Unification thus seems impossible; can the Democrats at least attach Republicans to unpopular measures? Is there such a set of roll call votes that the Democrats can use? There does not seem to be such a set – at least a set that does not result in the same kind of collective action dilemma for the Democrats. Attempting to tie the GOP to, for instance, the Iraq vote in 2002 or the Schiavo vote earlier in the year (the two most promising candidates, it seems) will implicate many Democrats, who invariably will shirk from participating in such a strategy. What will induce them to stick their necks on the line, risking their seats and their careers, so that the Democrats can retake Congress?

If any party will have roll-call ammunition next year, it will probably be the Republicans. House Republicans have put the Democrats on record as opposing a bastardized version of the Murtha proposal, thus opening the way to more charges of “flip-flopping” when campaign rhetoric gets too close to what the GOP characterizes as the intent of the proposal on which the House voted. What is more, as Dan Balz reported last week in The Washington Post, the Republicans are planning to again put the Democrats on the record, this time in terms of “artificial” timetables about Iraq.

The Democrats have no such opportunities because they do not control Congress, and importantly, because the Bush White House is far too perceptive to have opened itself to this kind of attack. Clinton, in his first two years of office, consistently advocated proposals that much of his congressional party’s electoral constituency found unpalatable. What is more, Clinton induced members of Congress from those conservative constituencies to put themselves on the record as supporting his proposals. He made his members of Congress vote to the left of their constituents, opening them up to attacks from the right. Bush has tenaciously avoided this kind of blunder. Rarely (if ever – no significant bill comes to my mind) has he forced congressional Republicans to vote to the right of their constituencies. He has forced them to vote to the left, for sure, but this does not make them vulnerable to general election attacks. Clinton, by pushing for measures that alienated upper middle class suburban voters and Southern, Mid- and Western voters in his first two years, put many Democratic members of Congress in harm’s way. That is why so many Democrats went the way of Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (a name you read nowadays only in columns like this or on Trivial Pursuit cards).

Unfortunately for the Democrats, it is unlikely that a broader strategy of guilt by association will be effective. Without roll call votes, it is just too hard to associate a member of Congress with what people today do not like about Washington. For instance, consider Democrat’s plan to label the GOP the party of congressional corruption. This is all well and good as a way to set a general tenor for next year’s elections or to satisfy the donating base’s appetite for rhetorical red meat. And, if there were to be many open seats next year, it might be sufficient to tilt the House toward the Democrats. However, there are fewer than usual open seats. This means that the culture of corruption theme, to be effective, must be attached to individual incumbent Republicans. And, unless the Democrats will be satisfied unseating Ney and Delay, or unless we discover literally dozens of (net) Republicans who have been scandalous, such a strategy will not result in Democratic control of Congress. At the end of the day, individual members of Congress are very effective at running away from public antagonism to their party or Congress as a whole. It is unlikely, for instance, that Christopher Shays is going to lose his seat because Ronnie Earle has indicted Tom Delay.

Thus, a recapture of the House or Senate is out of the Democrats’ grasp,. It is not a matter of the Democrats discovering the right tactics to use. It is a matter of strategic possibility, or rather strategic impossibility. Christopher Columbus failed to discover a water route to the Indies not because he was a bad sailor but because America stood in his way. So it is for the Democrats in 2006. There is just no way for them to recapture Congress in this environment. The nature of congressional elections and the internal divisions within the Democratic Party preclude the possibility of a Democratic recapture of either chamber of Congress.

Jay Cost, creator of The Horse Race Blog, is a graduate student of political science at the University of Chicago. He can be reached at jay_cost@hotmail.com.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-12_21_05_JC.html