The pundits are lousy with ideas for how the Democrats can reform their party
to come back in 2004. But while this is the story right now, it's really
not that big of a defeat. Democrats only lost two seats in the Senate
and five in the House. Compare that to 1994, when Democrats lost 53 House
seats (including the Speaker's) and 10 Senate seats.
Both elections had low turnout, which tends to favor Republicans. But in
1994, the B variable (which can be thought of as the difference between
the two parties' platforms) was spectacularly high, thanks to the Contract with
America. (Despite the high B, there was low turnout. Why? Probably
because only traditionally-Republican voters were fired up by the high
B, while voters who usually vote Democratic took a nap. If Democrats
had had a similar Contract-with-America-style platform, perhaps they would have
been able to energize their supporters.)
The important thing to consider is that the Contract with America was
decidedly not centered around the median voter. And this leads to the
median voter theorem's downfall: it is only useful in predicting elections when
nearly everyone votes. When the election is still mostly about getting out the
vote, the game is getting your supporters fired up, not centering in the middle.
Democrats would be wise to keep that in mind, and reject the contrary
view.
As I explained two entries ago, political parties target
the median voter - that voter who has an equal number of voters on either side
of her in the political spectrum. And yet because voter turnout is so important,
the parties must also focus on turnout, not just positioning.
Getting out the vote is about more than just phone banks. This election
featured recorded calls from Bill Clinton and Martin Sheen urging voters to mark
their ballots for Democrats. But when voters are faced with both unattractive
candidates (Gray Davis, etc.) and only a small perceptible difference between
the two parties' platforms (a small B value), even a phone call from
President Bartlet is not enough to get Democrats to the polls.
Paradoxically, the rational voter theory places a
premium on the B value for most voters, the benefit that
the voter will receive if his candidate wins. If both parties are centered
around the median voter, the B variable is necessarily zero. So in
order to win elections, parties need to do more than just target the
median voter. Because the median voter doesn't vote.
Turns out, the Democrats may have been paying a little too much
attention to this rational voter mumbo jumbo. Instead of trying to get the
Democratic party to move toward the center, why not get the center to move
toward the Democratic Party? What happened to the power of persuasian? What
happened to leadership? More and more I think it went out the door when Bill
Clinton left office, and Democrats simply forgot what it the Clinton
Administration was about. Was bailing out Mexico a center-position? Was NAFTA?
Was a tax increase? None of these positions were based around the political
center. Instead they were based on their merit. If only the current crop of
Democrats could learn the lessons of the Clinton years, they would most
certainly have won back the House and kept the Senate.