Not So Fast

            I don’t want to come off as a Republican ostrich with my head buried in the sand, so let me put this out there first.  I am a strong Democrat and a liberal. When I look at the current Republican party and its presidential candidates, I confess to a satisfying feeling of schadenfreude.

            But I experienced no such feeling after reading “2016 Could Scramble the GOP,” by Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg in Sunday’s Washington Post.

            Greenberg argues that a new, more Democratic America is emerging from demographic, technological, social and economic revolutions now taking place, just in time for the 2016 election.  Noting that 63% of the electorate will be composed of people who strongly support Hillary Clinton, Greenberg says that “the United States has reached an electoral tipping point.”

            The Republican Party’s “counterrevolution,” he says, has also reached a tipping point.  It has been left with an electoral base of “tea party supporters, evangelicals or religiously observant” people who have “catapulted to the top of the Republican presidential race candidates who promise to challenge this new America before it’s too late.”

            Greenberg predicts that the 2016 election “will confirm that the new America is here and that the counterrevolution has lost.”  The result, he says will be “shattering for the Republican Party as we know it.”

            The Democrat in me wants to stand up and cheer.  But the political scientist that I am is clamoring for the partisan to sit down and look at the situation more carefully.

            Greenberg is a Democratic pollster, and he is, no doubt, working with carefully developed data.  The problem is that he seems to be conflating political support with electoral and governmental power. 

            In our system, national power doesn’t necessarily accrue to the party that wins the most votes on Election Day. We do not have a national electorate, even for presidential elections.  We have at least 51 electorates--even more if you count each Congressional District and each state legislative district separately—and power depends on what those electorates do on Election Day.

            In our political system, it doesn’t help the Democrats if they are all clustered inefficiently in a few states.  Winning California and New York by millions of votes can’t overcome bare Republican majorities scattered across states holding enough electoral votes to win an Electoral College majority.

            Of course, Barack Obama has twice shown that the Democratic coalition holds majorities in enough states to give Democratic presidential candidates both popular vote and Electoral College majorities.  It’s fair to say that Democrats probably have a lock on the White House for the foreseeable future.

            But that’s about it.  With respect to almost everything else in American politics, the Republican Party still has considerable strength.

            Control of the Senate may bounce between the parties, but Republicans are likely to control the House of Representatives until at least the end of Hillary’s first term in 2020 and possibly longer.  Republicans also have a strong advantage at the state and local government level where they control the governorship and legislatures of of 20 states, including 5 states Obama won in 2008 and 2012.

            That means that the gridlocked federal government we have now is likely to be the government we have into the foreseeable future.  Because the national government won’t be able to act, the states, where Republicans hold an advantage, are likely to step in to enact local policies that fit their ideology.

            This is the result of both structural and political factors that cut against Democrats.  First, the Republican population is more efficiently distributed than is the Democratic population, and that means that while Democratic congressional candidates can win their districts with huge margins, Republicans can win a larger number of districts with much smaller margins.  That Republicans benefit from more gerrymandered districts than do Democrats certainly doesn’t help.

            Second, Democratic voters haven’t been turning out in non-presidential years as reliably as have Republican voters.  States tend to hold their elections in these off-years, and with relatively more Republican voters, Republican candidates have been able to win in places such as Massachusetts and Maryland where they would have gone down to landslide defeats had the presidential year electorate shown up.

            Not only does this give Republicans a stronger hand in drawing up legislative districts after each decennial census resulting in more Congressional districts that advantage Republicans, but it also allows the Republican party to develop its bench.  Governorships have proven to be a more reliable stepping stone to the presidency than has any other office, and Republicans simply have more people with that credential than do the Democrats.  For Democrats it should be worrisome that party leaders are relatively old—though Martin O’Malley is 53, Hillary Clinton is 68 and Bernie Sanders is 73.  Republican leaders—think Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Rick Santorum and Rand Paul—by contrast, are in their 40s’ and 50s.

            Until Democrats find a way to fix their off-year turnout problem and cultivate more young leaders, the battles that really count are likely to be fought on a Republican playing field controlled by Republican ideology.  That makes it far too early to write the Republican party’s epitaph.