What the Ballow Measures : Start of Post-Reagan Era Ends Realignment Dream

Dreams die hard. And great hopes of new political era-building die hardest of all. So Republicans are already at work trying to counter Tuesday’s loss of Senate control with proclamations of their relative success in the House of Representatives and the notable addition of eight new governors to their current 16. But since the elections, it’s become difficult to take their continuing realignment claims seriously.

Last week’s message is that no great new conservative era lies on the horizon--in large part because so much of the more realistic portion of the conservative agenda has achieved fruition over the last decade and a half. Now, though, the Reagan Revolution is falling in the public-opinion charts, and if the President isn’t exactly a lame duck, the Democrats’ autumn guns have cost him a tailfull of pin feathers.

Control of the Senate, after all, was the GOP’s only other federal-level beachhead; now it’s gone. On Tuesday, the Democrats gained eight Senate seats to give them a 55-45 majority that should survive for the foreseeable future. With the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, the President’s agenda is in trouble, all the more so because the electorate yawned at maintaining a GOP Senate for Ronald Reagan’s sake. Farm-belt voters may be tired of hearing about America as the Shining City on the Hill when bankers are about to foreclose on the Little House on the Prairie, and rust-belt citizens can cringe at rhetorical uplift about “Morning Again in America” when it’s twilight in the trade statistics. Certainly the voters’ non-response to the President is hard to ignore. The public seems willing to let Reagan ride off into the electoral sunset. After he asked Americans to cast one more vote for the Gipper, turnout appears to have fallen to its lowest level since 1942.

Of course, it would be a delusion to overstate Tuesday’s Senate results as a major rejection of the President. The principal dynamic was the famous “six-year itch” that colors Senate elections midway through the second term after a new party has swept to power in the White House and brought a host of new senators on its coattails. Usually some are second-raters, and in six years, when they have to run on their own, they bite the dust. However, the process is aggravated if voters have begun to be disillusioned with the Administration or its policies, and these attitudes were definitely visible in the 20 to 30 states suffering from regional or local economic dislocations.

Farm-belt unhappiness was most vivid in the victories of two Democratic populists--Kent Conrad and Thomas A. Daschle--for Senate seats in North and South Dakota. But lack of Washington exertion on behalf of troubled economic sectors was an issue from Maine shoe factories to Gulf Coast oil rigs and Pacific Northwest lumber yards. Indeed, in Louisiana, a state the GOP had confidently expected to capture, even the president of the Louisiana Assn. of Business and Industry acknowledged a painful political truth: The winning Democratic Senate nominee, John B. Breaux, had been able to convince local voters that Reagan Administration free-market economics and free-trade policies were partly responsible for Louisiana’s plight. If the President and his advisers don’t realize that such assessments were part of Tuesday’s outcome, they should.

The Democrats, for their part, are now in a position to start originating and implementing ideas. And they may be just in time to benefit from an increasing public desire for more active Washington problem-solving. Other forms of that sentiment began to appear in many candidates’ October campaigning about how they could get things done in Washington and use government more effectively than their opponents. Surveys found even Republicans moving in this direction. If the public truly is tiring of feel-good rhetoric and passive government, the Democrats’ assumption of Senate leadership may not be the embarrassment some cynics feared. The party that nominated Walter F. Mondale in 1984 on a platform of reactionary liberalism may yet develop an appealing agenda for 1988.

Indeed, with the Republicans’ 1981-86 hold on the Senate ending--a creative and responsible one by most measurements--a fair analogy can be made to the Woodrow Wilson era, when the Democrats held the Senate by narrow margins for six years and then lost it back to the Republicans. The shortfall of larger hopes left nothing but an interregnum. And that is what we have just seen--not the sort of great upheaval Reaganites claim is transforming American politics from the White House down to the courthouse.

True, Republican showings in the contests for the House of Representatives and 36 contested governorships were respectable. But that doesn’t change the larger dynamic: What we are seeing is dealignment and the weakening of party loyalties, not a pro-Republican realignment.

Take the minimal nature of GOP losses in the House. By historical standards, for the Republicans to have lost only eight seats is very creditable, especially during an Administration’s second midterm election. Although six-year-itch voters did scratch away eight Republican Senate seats, they left GOP House strength with only a nick. On the other hand, remember that when Reagan won reelection in 1984, he carried only 182 Republican House members with him, the weakest House showing of the 20th Century for a party that had just won the White House. There just weren’t all that many marginal House seats for the Republicans to lose.

And another bit of history is worth noting: The GOP’s Nov. 4 total of 175 or so House seats leaves them below a dozen other postwar Republican House membership levels ranging from 245 in 1946 down to 177 in 1962. Numbers like those won on Tuesday certainly aren’t the stuff of impotence, but they’re also not the stuff of plausible voter-revolution arguments.

Neither is the GOP’s crop of eight new governorships, meaning that Republicans will occupy 24 statehouses in January, up from 16 now. Admittedly, they’ll help the GOP build party power in a few states where it’s weak, but there may be less to these statistics than meets the eye. Given the lopsided ratio of Democratic-controled statehouses up this year--27, versus just nine for the GOP--and given that 15 Democratic governors retired, creating open situations, it would have been surprising had the GOP not added five to seven governorships to its list.

Besides, governorships just don’t have all that much to do with signaling national political realignment. Since World War II, the GOP has managed to win a majority of statehouses three times--in 1946, 1952 and 1968--without successfully reweaving the fabric of grass-roots loyalties.

The fundamental problem facing GOP theorists is this: Reaganite true believers like to think that a whole new era in American politics began with his 1980 victory, but a much better case can be made that Reaganism has been just a subchapter in the larger conservative upheaval story that began in the late 1960s. If so, we’re looking at an aging political movement that has seen its best days, not a youthful enterprise with its greatest hours ahead.

Let me underscore with more history. When Reagan’s term expires in January, 1989, the Republicans will have held the White House for 16 of the 20 previous years going back to 1968. In this, they’re following an important framework. After each of the acknowledged political watersheds of U.S. history--1800, 1828, 1860, 1896 and 1932--the party taking control held the White House for at least 16 years out of the next 20. These have been the eras when politics pointed the United States in major new directions, whether aiming the Civil War cannon at Fort Sumter or overcoming the Great Depression. Now 1968 appears to be another such milestone, and if so, Reagan may be remembered less as the engine of late 20th-Century U.S. conservatism than as its jaunty, if somewhat wayward, caboose.

Does this thesis forecast GOP ignominy and defeat in 1988 and the rise of a new progressive era? Not at all. It does suggest that conservatism’s momentum has been overstated by many observers during the 1980s, that the clock is running down (witness Tuesday’s results) and that 1988 is more likely to be a closely fought race than another conservative triumph.

Buoyant Democrats, for their part, would do well to remember that midterm elections are usually overblown as predictors of the next presidential election. Today’s Democratic preening could be tomorrow’s miscalculation. For example, the sharp GOP losses in the 1982 elections gave little clue how resurgent Reagan conservatism would be by 1984. Nor did the reassuringly minor Democratic congressional losses of 1978 suggest how badly embarrassed the national Democratic Party would be by 1980, led by the first President in U.S. history to have his job approval drop below the prime rate.

Similarly, the 1974 elections, while documenting Republican post-Watergate disarray, conveyed no message of the Democrats’ fateful 1976 rendezvous with the “born-again” Georgia peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter. And the 1970 midterms fooled commentators into prematurely burying the GOP and its “Southern Strategy” only two years before the Democrats’ disastrous nomination of George McGovern helped Richard M. Nixon roll up still-unequaled Dixie GOP margins. It’s more than likely that 1987-88 developments will undercut no small part of last week’s post-election punditry.

In the meantime, the Republican Party would be well-advised to forget both its increasingly far-fetched grass-roots realignment theses and its attendant, overambitious ideological blueprints keyed to these notions. Tuesday’s voting suggests that both realignment and Reagan Revolution vistas are waning, and that the Grand Old Party would be better served by a view of politics that accepts dealignment and a view of government that accepts its legitimate role in solving serious national problems.

This is the emerging framework of the post-Reagan era in American politics and government. Reagan’s own philosophies and preferences will be less decisive as 1987 lengthens towards 1988 and as politicians looking to the future, not the past, start competing for the re-emerging center that began taking dim shape in the Nov. 4 returns.