Voters Poised to Execute Another Sharp Turn in ’96

As the 1996 campaign moves into high gear with the national party conventions this month, American voters appear poised to execute another of the hairpin turns that have defined the nation’s politics throughout this decade.

Virtually left for dead after the Republican sweep in the 1994 midterm election, President Clinton heads into the final stages of the campaign with a commanding and broad-based lead in national surveys over Bob Dole, the presumptive GOP nominee.

In some respects, Clinton’s advantage--which has hovered between 15 and 20 percentage points for the last five months--represents an island of stability in an ocean of political instability that has tempest-tossed both parties.

But in a more basic sense, the president’s stunning recovery during the last 21 months continues the pattern of political turbulence that has rumbled through American politics since the second half of George Bush’s presidency.

Politically, this may be remembered as the decade of second thoughts. In the last six years, American voters have rejected Bush for Clinton in 1992, abandoned Clinton and embraced the GOP in 1994, and they appear to be turning back toward Clinton, largely in exasperation with congressional Republicans.

This sustained volatility is rooted largely in distrust of the political system, declining allegiance to the two major parties and anxiety about the country’s direction. It could yet threaten Clinton’s seemingly impervious advantage over Dole, some analysts believe.

But even if Clinton holds his lead through election day, few political strategists see signs that the cycle of evanescent loyalties and shifting partisan control is about to stop spinning any time soon. Even if Clinton ran strongly enough to lead his party back to narrow control of one, or both, chambers of Congress, that majority would immediately be at risk: Historically, the president’s party has suffered large congressional losses in the midterm election of a second term.

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“I think we are in a period of volatility here for probably the next several years,” said Don Sweitzer, the former political director of the Democratic National Committee. “It will not surprise me if control of the Congress flips back and forth a couple of times before we get well into the next century.”

This pattern of rapid repudiation and unstable alignments most closely echoes American politics of a century ago. As America was racked by fundamental changes--urbanization, industrialization and massive immigration--during the last years of the 19th century, both parties appeared unable to adapt their vision of limited government to the new challenges.

Increasingly frustrated, the public flirted with third parties such as the Populists and snapped back and forth between the two major parties with breathtaking speed, routing the Republicans in the elections of 1890 and 1892, then crushing the Democrats in 1894 and 1896.

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Today some of the same conditions that unsettled politics in the 1890s are present again. Polls and focus groups show that Americans feel they are living through a period of fundamental change, as the nation moves from an industrial economy to one increasingly based on information; the Cold War’s end obliterates the rules guiding America’s interaction with the world; and social changes raise doubts about society’s ability to transmit values from one generation to the next.

In this period of insistent change, both parties again face doubts that they have answers sufficient to the challenges. “At least for the moment, Americans fear we have lost our capacity to make progress on these key issues,” said Richard Harwood, an independent opinion analyst. Once again those doubts are translating into third-party challenges and sharp swings between the major parties.

This new turbulence intensifies the political instability America had already experienced since the late 1960s. From 1968 through 1992, American politics was marked by an unusual division of power, with Republicans holding the White House for 20 of those 24 years, and Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress for all but the six years under Ronald Reagan, when the GOP held the Senate. Control of the White House and Congress had not been divided between the two parties for such a sustained period since the late 19th century.

But even that relatively orderly--if splintered--arrangement has further disintegrated in the 1990s, producing political upheaval at regular intervals.

From the pinnacle of February 1991--when his approval rating soared to 89% in the Persian Gulf War’s wake--Bush lost support so precipitously that his 1992 defeat marked the fourth largest election-to-election decline for an incumbent in American history.

Clinton immediately stepped onto the same roller coaster: During his rocky first six months in office, he saw his job-approval rating drop more rapidly than any new president since the Gallup Organization began taking such measurements in 1952.

Then the Democrats were routed in the midterm election of 1994. Conservative thinkers openly speculated that the landslide marked the prelude to a realignment that would provide the GOP with lasting control of the White House and Congress.

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But in 1995 the Republican Congress saw its public standing decline almost as quickly as Clinton’s did in 1993.

During the tense partisan standoff over the budget that led to repeated government shutdowns beginning in November, most of the public sided with Clinton. In the crisis, Clinton’s approval rating pushed back above the critical 50% line he had rarely crossed during the previous two years. In almost all surveys since, he has remained above 50%.

Likewise, since the budget standoff, Clinton has consistently led Dole in preelection polls. Of the 87 national surveys publicly released since October, 84 show Clinton leading Dole, according to a comprehensive compilation by the PoliticsNow Web site. The president has led Dole in every national survey publicly released since Jan. 15.

Those numbers, especially the job-approval ratings, augur well for Clinton: As Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux noted in a recent article, no incumbent president with approval and trial-heat numbers as strong as Clinton this late in an election year “has ever been defeated, or even had a close result.”

But sustained national polling has only existed for elections since 1956, so those 10 contests may not be enough to define a clear rule. And, as Dole aides point out, the same polls that show Clinton in the lead also show widespread doubts about his character. Some recent polls also show improvement in the GOP’s prospects of retaining control of Congress.

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Still, even many GOP strategists privately agree that Clinton stands as a strong favorite for reelection--an astounding turnabout from last year. Even some of the most ardent conservatives are publicly suggesting that the Republican Congress--with its talk of “revolution” and resistance to compromise with Clinton at critical moments--may have contributed to his revival.

“American politics is decidedly non-ideological,” said Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian Coalition, a leading social conservative group. “Strongly ideological politics coming from either party is greeted by the electorate with a degree of reticence. I think by forcing Clinton to the center, and having Clinton as a check on the Republicans, the American people have sort of voted against ideology.”

Specific choices help explain each of the sudden political reversals over the last six years: Bush’s decision to break his “no new taxes” pledge and inaction in the face of recession; Clinton’s tilt to the left on health care, crime and gays in the military; the GOP decision to include large Medicare changes in its balanced-budget plans.

But many observers believe that larger currents run beneath the roiling waters of American politics in this decade.

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One is a decline in partisan attachment. Today the electorate comprises roughly one-third Democrats, one-third Republicans and a pivotal one-third who appear increasingly skeptical of both parties.

“We have a bigger percentage of people in the middle, swing voters, than we have ever had before, and they swing more dramatically,” said Martin P. Wattenberg, a political scientist at UC Irvine.

Moreover, Wattenberg notes, in recent years both parties have displayed an ideological rigidity that has inhibited their ability to court these swing votes. In 1993 and 1994, Democrats overloaded the public tolerance for expanding government by proposing a massive new health care plan; in 1995, Republicans exceeded the public tolerance for retrenching government by proposing to significantly slow the rate of growth in popular social programs.

Compounding the parties’ difficulties is the endemic public suspicion of politicians. “People have such an incredibly poor view of politics and politicians and such incredibly low expectations that it takes very little to make them convinced that what they are seeing [from their leaders] is the same old stuff,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff.

Finally, anxiety about the country’s direction has buffeted whichever party is seen as holding power. In good economic times and bad, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, for the last decade a substantial majority of Americans have said they consider the country to be on the wrong track.

Some Democratic thinkers are optimistic that Clinton has now set the party on course to construct a stable new majority.

Since the Republican gains in 1994, Clinton has tried to position himself between both parties by resisting many key Republican initiatives while courting moderate voters with his own budget-balancing plan, an array of proposals (from the V-chip to teen curfews) meant to help parents, and, most recently, his decision to sign the landmark GOP welfare legislation.

With that agenda, Clinton has enjoyed considerable success at drawing support from various voter groups that Republicans have owned since 1968; surveys consistently show Clinton winning nearly 1 in 5 Republicans overall from Dole, and as many as 1 in 4 Republican moderates.

“Is this the new coalition? It certainly is getting there,” said Al From, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

But many other analysts remain skeptical that either party can build a reliable electoral coalition in the years ahead.

Democrats still face deep ideological divisions over Clinton’s course. If Democrats return to power in Congress, it’s unclear if they will follow Clinton’s centrist agenda as quiescently as they have for the last year.

Republicans face comparable strains.

Though polls show the public shares their desire for smaller government, they have been unable to translate that general sentiment into support for their specific proposals to cut spending, taxes and regulation.

As the GOP has lost public support for its core economic agenda--the priority that most unifies Republicans--it has fallen into loud squabbling over issues such as abortion, the environment and gun control that divide the party along ideological, gender and regional lines.

Most important, both parties may find it difficult to attract lasting support unless they can demonstrate tangible progress against the systemic problems troubling Americans even in the midst of economic recovery--long-term trends such as the decline of the two-parent family, rising juvenile crime and stagnant wages for many workers.

“I don’t think you can hold together any coalition in American politics without delivering the goods for them,” said Ruy A. Teixeira, who directs the public-opinion program at the Economic Policy Institute.

“You can win an election. But unless you improve people’s lives afterwards, you’ll never develop solid loyalty from them.”