Why Nov. 5 was a Watershed Election
November 20, 2002

The dust has settled and it is clear that Republicans did, in fact, win what may prove to be a watershed election on Nov. 5. Indeed, if the president and his party can follow up with a similar performance in two years, it could change the face of American politics for decades to come.

The Democrats, however, are in denial. They actually seem to believe they lost on Nov. 5, either because a few races that might have gone either way went the wrong way, the Republicans outdid them on the fundraising front, not enough of their voters turned out, or because their candidates ran too close to the center to motivate their liberal base vote.

Immediately after the votes were counted, some analysts concluded that the problem the Democrats faced did, in fact, stem from a failure to motivate their core vote, but that turns out not to have been the case. Their turnout operations do seem to have worked. Minority voters and other core Democrats voted in about the same numbers that they have in previous off-year elections. The problem was simply that more Republicans voted or that there may actually be more Republicans out there today than there were in previous years.

Still, the party is turning to its core, which means its left wing, for leadership. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) is, after all, a San Francisco Democrat who might be able to modulate her message, but isn’t likely to change it in any discernible way. She holds the job that Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) surrendered for good reason: She represents the views of her constituents both in San Francisco and in her party’s caucus. She wasn’t elevated in spite of her hard-edged ideological stance, but because of it.

Her party is looking not for a new route to power, but for a return to the true faith of the 1970s, and the politicians who are already vying to be the party’s standard-bearers in two years know it. The best weathervane among these folks is, of course, the ubiquitous Al Gore who is always prepared to “reinvent” himself.

Gone already is the “New Democrat” who partnered with Bill Clinton to make triangulation a household word. An anti-war populist leftist who has developed a healthcare proposal that makes Hillary Clinton’s old plan look like something concocted by Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has replaced him. Al has never been quite able to make the sale, but you have to give him credit for trying.

The problem with this is that millions of voters have also come gradually to recognize the Democratic Party for what it has become and are rejecting it. It is possible, as Bush advisor Karl Rove is the first to admit, to explain away the loss of the Senate if you are a Democratic spinmeister, and it’s even possible to dismiss the fact that the GOP held onto the House.

But a look at the overall results tells a different story. The Republican victory was not confined to the House or the Senate. Republicans did better than they or their opponents expected at the gubernatorial level, and the roots of the victory went deeper than anyone even suspected.

Republicans picked up nearly 300 state legislative seats when they might have been expected to lose that many. They now hold more such seats than at any time since 1928.

What strikes me as of equal importance is the fact that in race after race, Republicans ran strongest among younger voters. These younger voters contributed less to the Republican victories this year because they make up a smaller percentage of the overall vote than they will in two years, but the fact that they are flocking to the GOP does not bode well for the Democrats.

Oh, the GOP can still blow it. There was talk of an emerging Republican majority before Watergate and after the Reagan election. And some were certain the world had really changed when the GOP won the House in 1994, but neither side was sure because succeeding elections seemed to rebut such hopes. We seemed to have become what Michael Barone described so succinctly as a “49 percent nation.” We had gridlock on a grand scale and it seemed, even after Sept. 11, that it would continue.

The sound we heard on Nov. 5, however, was the sound of ice breaking. It may not have been an earthquake, but as Barone has pointed out, the overall breakdown was no longer 49-49, but something like 53-47 and that, on the political Richter scale, puts what happened this year right up there with the results in 1994.

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David Keene is chairman of the American Conservative Union and a Washington-based government affairs consultant