Trial by Fire after Iowa

The Hill

January 20, 2004

Country singer Tom T. Hall might well have been thinking of the Iowa caucuses when he ended one of his songs some years ago with the plaintive observation that "it sure can get cold in Des Moines." Indeed it can, as some Democratic seekers after the White House discovered last night.

But they are about to learn a lot more about the trial by fire that prospective presidential nominees must survive as they wend their way through the primaries that await them in New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond. They will discover, in fact, that the heady dreams generated amid the cold winds of Iowa are as often as not dashed by voters elsewhere - who turn out to be less than willing simply to go along with the judgment of others.

Many Iowa caucus winners are remembered years later as just that and no more. I've ridden one or two of those roller coasters myself. Remember George Bush's "Big Mo" in 1980 and Bob Dole's victorious sweep of the caucuses in 1988? Taking the results of this first contest too seriously can lead to nightmares down the road and should for that reason alone be resisted. The one thing anyone who has been through one or two nomination fights really knows is that our system guarantees that it won't be over until it's over regardless of how easy it might look in retrospect.

My Republican friends are watching the current struggle in the other party with a sort of bewildered wonder. Why, they ask each other, are these guys fighting so hard for the right to be trounced by President Bush in a slam-dunk re-election? At first glance, it is easy enough to suspect they have a point. The president, after all, is doing better in the polls these days than any recent incumbent this close to a re-election contest. He is respected and voters seem to like the way he's performed as commander-in chief in the on-going war against terrorism. What's more, the domestic economy, which was seen as his soft underbelly by his opponents, is roaring back to life producing both new profits for the investor class and even manufacturing jobs for American workers.

Yet a close look at real numbers makes it difficult to be quite so sanguine about his prospects. If this were 1972, 1984 or even 1996, Bush's managers would probably be able to put his campaign on cruise control and look forward to administering to this year's challenger the same sort of thumping received by George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Bob Dole.

In 2002, the partisan and ideological make-up of our electorate has changed. Voters today are more evenly and deeply divided along partisan and ideological lines than at any time in our modern history. In any election, each candidate starts with a hard core of partisan supporters that make up his base and from which he strives to expand to get first a majority and then, if he's lucky, the votes needed to rout his hapless opponent.

Traditionally, this quest forces each candidate to the center, where the undecided and truly independent voters have been thought to reside. As recently as 1984, a fifth of all the voters expected to turn out on election day were to be found in the middle and were up for grabs. That year, Ronald Reagan ended up with 70 percent of them and thus a 49-state landslide.

Today, by contrast, these neighborhoods are just about vacant and wise candidates are forced to look elsewhere for far fewer undecided voters. Partisans make up something like 90-92 percent of the current electorate, and they are just about evenly divided between the parties. If Bush runs a spectacular campaign and, like Reagan in 1984, gets 70 percent of the swing voters, he may end up with as much as 52 percent of the vote, which is enough to win but does not a landslide make.

There just doesn't seem to be much flexibility in these numbers right now. Republican partisans tend to really like the president, and their Democratic counterparts tend to, well, despise the man. Cross-overs from one camp to the other will be few unless either Bush or his general election opponent makes a mistake so boneheaded that it forces even the most partisan voters to hold their noses and vote for the other guy for the good of the country. That could happen, of course, but neither side can count on it.

Bush's managers know this, and so do the Democrats. They both know they have a real chance at a win, because unlike many of those who are watching the contest on television, they realize that this is one election that ain't going to be over until it's over.

David Keene is the chairman of the American Conservative Union and a managing associate with the Carmen Group, a Washington, D.C.-based governmental-affairs firm.