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Studies in American Political Institutions and Public Policy
General Editor: James W. Ceaser, University of Virginia
Presenting works on contemporary American politics that address the
question of how institutions and policies can best function to sustain a
healthy liberal democratic government in the United States.
Congress’s Permanent Minority? Republicans in the U.S. House
by William F. Connelly, Jr., and John J. Pitney, Jr.
Hostile Takeover: The House Republican Party, 1980-1995
by Douglas L. Koopman
Divided Government: Change, Uncertainty, and the Constitutional Order
edited by Peter F. Galderisi, with Roberta Q. Herzberg and
Peter McNamara
Losing to Win: The 1996 Elections and American Politics
by James W. Ceaser and Andrew E. Busch
LOSING TO WIN
The 1996 Elections and
American Politics
JAMES W. CEASER
and
ANDREW E. BUSCH
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham e New York e Boulder e Oxford
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Published in the United States of America
by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. .
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Copyright © 1997 by Rowman &L ittlefield Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored ina retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Losing to win : the 1996 elections and American politics / edited by
James W. Ceaser and Andrew E. Busch.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8476-8405-9 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8476-8406-7
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Presidents—United States—Election—1996. 2. Elections—
United States. 3. Presidents—United States—Nomination.
4. Republican Party (U.S.) 5. United States—Congress—Elections,
1996. 6. United States—Politics and government—1989-_ I. Ceaser,
James W. II. Busch, Andrew E.
JK5261996a
324.973'0929—dc21 97-1579
CIP
ISBN 0-8476-8405-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8476-8406-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Printed in the United States of America
is The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
To Mindy and Blaire
Contents
Acknowledgments 1x
1 Greater Dooms Win Greater Destinies
2 The Two Clinton Presidencies ZT
3. The Republican Nomination ee
4 In the Doledrums: The Interregnum from March to
September 89
The Congressional Elections 119
ao
6 The Presidential Election and the New Era of Coalitional
Partnership 149
Appendix: Presidential Vote by State, 1996 175
Index 77
About the Authors 187
vil
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the following persons for their assis-
tance in preparing and editing this manuscript: Josh Dunn, Mike Cairo,
Andrew Hall, Blaire French, Richard Skinner, and Robert Stacey. Julie
Kirsch, managing editor at Rowman &L ittlefield, guided the manu-
script through production with remarkable speed and efficiency. Fi-
nally, our appreciation goes to the Rowland Egger Fund of the
Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of
Virginia for financial assistance in preparing the manuscript.
Chapter 1
Greater Dooms Win
Greater Destinies
The American electorate of the nineties stands out for its willingness
to experiment with alternative political lifestyles. Call it a penchant for
majority shopping, or perhaps merely a succession of cases of buyers’
regret, but American voters have tried three of the four possible parti-
san combinations for arranging power in Washington: a Republican
President with a Democratic Congress, a Democratic President with a
Democratic Congress, and a Democratic President with a Republican
Congress.' To the Republicans’ dismay, the one option that has been
neglected is a Republican President with a Republican Congress. In
only two periods in the last century has there been a comparable series
of shifts, between 1888-1896 and between 1946-1954, when the elector-
ate batted for the whole circuit and went through the cycle of all four
combinations.
The current decade—let us start in 1988—began with a Republican
President (George Bush) elected with a Democratic Congress. This con-
figuration appeared with such frequency during the previous twenty
years that many political scientists considered it the statistical “norm”
for modern American politics. Under the daunting title of the theory
of “split-level realignment,” Republicans were said to hold a lease on
the presidential suite on the top level, while Democrats were the per-
manent tenants of Congress, certainly of the House. As Byron Shafer
succinctly put it, ‘The Republicans, being the party of cultural tradi-
tionalism and foreign nationalism, control the presidency. The Demo-
crats, being the party of economic liberalism and service delivery,
control the House.’’””
Divided government ended in 1992, when the Democrats main-
1
iz Chapter One
tained their control of Congress while ousting the Republicans from
the presidency, albeit with only 43 percent of the national vote. Al-
though this election violated the recent statistical norm of a split-level
result, many interpreted it as a return to the deeper historical equilib-
rium condition of unified party government. According to James Sund-
quist, divided government was accidental and dysfunctional, leading
to policy incoherence, nondecisions, standoffs, checkmate, and dead-
lock.3 The election of 1992 broke this stalemate. Although it was per-
haps not a great realigning election, many argued that it tapped a real
domestic majority that had been obscured for some time. According
to Wilson Carey McWilliams the 1992 election signaled the public’s
“demand for an active government engaged to relieve America’s dis-
contents and reclaim the future.’’* Left unsaid, although widely under-
stood, was that unified government for the immediate future would
have to take place under the Democratic Party, because Republican
control of the House was at best a project for the next decade. All that
Republicans could reasonably hope for was a return of divided govern-
ment with a Republican presidential victory in 1996, along perhaps
with a Senate majority in 1994 or 1996.
No sane individual in 1992, unless it was Newt Gingrich, foresaw
the Republican congressional sweep in 1994. The unexpectedness of
this victory, together with the breadth and depth of GOP gains in the
governors’ mansions and state legislatures, made 1994 no ordinary
midterm takeover of Congress. Many analysts called 1994 a full-scale
realigning election. For Walter Dean Burnham it was ‘one of those rare
elections from which bearing will have to be taken for a long time to
come.”’° The historical analogue of 1994, in this view, was the congres-
sional midterm elections of exactly a century before, when Republicans
seized control of the Congress from the Democrats and went on to win
the presidency in 1896. Republicans then held both branches of the
government uninterrupted for the next 14 years. In this scenario Bill
Clinton's fate was to play the part of the portly Grover Cleveland, who
was left to preside helplessly and haplessly over the decline of his par-
ty’s fortunes.
So favorable a view for the Republicans was bound to inspire a
counter-interpretation to buoy the Democrats’ flagging spirits. A quick
search through the history books yielded another potential analogy:
1946. Some observers, whose numbers increased starting in late 1995,
argued that 1994, like 1946, represented no more than a brief burst of
public protest by “angry white males” that would be erased in the next
presidential elections. As in 1948, Republicans in 1996 would awaken
Greater Dooms Win Greater Destinies 3
the day after the election to face unified party government under the
Democrats. In this scenario Bill Clinton was asked to play the role of
the sprightly Harry Truman, fighting valiantly to lead his party back
to power.
In the end the clash of interpretations for 1996 proved disappointing
to both sides. The President turned out to be neither Bill Cleveland nor
Harry S Clinton, but quintessentially himself. He won his own reelec-
tion handily, but he left congressional Democrats largely on their own,
and they were unable to recapture either house. The improbable result
of divided control between a Democratic President and a Republican
Congress was not only confirmed in the election of 1996, but it began to
produce new theorizing of continued Republican control of Congress
together with a Democratic “lock” on the presidency. The “normal’’
split-level of 1988 had been reversed. Democrats vacated their premises
on the ground level and moved upstairs, while Republicans moved
downstairs and took over the Democrats’ digs. From the perspective
of 1988, it seemed that we had entered an era of permanent deviance.
But in 1996 this all somehow seemed so natural.
If a pattern underlies these extraordinary swings of the pendulum, it
was foreseen long ago by the famous pre-Socratic pollster and philoso-
pher Heraclitus: ‘“Greater dooms win greater destinies.” In modern
parlance this is the theme of losing to win. A precondition—and more
likely a cause—of the Republicans’ congressional victory in 1994 and
the Democrats’ presidential victory in 1996 was the decisive defeat that
each party suffered in the previous election. The idea that a party must
lose to win was advanced, somewhat facetiously, by Thomas Mann
in 1991, when George Bush’s reelection seemed certain. Asked by the
magazine Roll Call to project a scenario under which Republicans could
ever capture the House, Mann responded that it could occur only if
Republicans would lose the White House. Otherwise House Republi-
cans might continue wandering in the wilderness for as long as thirty
ears.®
Mann’s modest proposal for the GOP to sacrifice the presidency was
based on the insight that big party victories in American politics are
only possible when a single party is clearly in control and when things
go poorly on its watch. National party accountability is then possible,
and a campaign can be run on a “throw the bums out” theme. (The
last, almost successful, campaign conducted on this basis was in 1980,
when the Republicans took the presidency and the Senate and made
impressive gains in the House.) The logic for this kind of development
