In 1992 Bill Clinton won 370 electoral votes, receiving 48 percent of the popular vote and carrying 32 states and the District of Columbia. Clinton won more states than the last Democrat to win the White House (Carter’s 23–21 of them east of Texas). But nine of Clinton’s 32 states, with 70 electoral votes, he carried with less than 43 percent. He is the first Democratic incumbent since Roosevelt to run for re-election without opposition from within his party. And all three Democrats who have been elected since the Kennedy assassination have been Southerners. However, since the Civil War made the Democratie Party weak in every region except the South, only two Democratic presidents, Wilson and Roosevelt, have won consecutive elections. The South illustrates why Clinton could be the fourth president rejected at the polls since 1976.
In 1992 he carried only four Southern states other than Arkansas. Those four and his margins of victory in each are Georgia (0.6 percentage points), Louisiana (4.6), Tennessee (4.7) and Kentucky (3.3). In Georgia and Louisiana incumbent Democratic senators, who would have strengthened the Democratic ticket in 1996, are retiring. In 1994 Tennessee elected two Republican senators and a Republican governor. The four states, which send 21 Republicans and only 12 Democrats to the House of Representatives, have 41 electoral votes. Judging by the Democrats’ 1994 collapse in the South, Clinton should assume he starts his re-election race with his margin of electoral votes reduced to 59.
Since the 1904 elections Republicans hold the governorships of eight of the nine most populous states, with 218 electoral votes. Since 1992 New York (33 electoral votes) and Pennsylvania (23) have replaced Democratic governors with Republicans. Since Clinton carried Ohio’s 21 electoral votes with a popular vote margin of just 1.9 points, Ohio has given a landslide re-election to its Republican governor. Since Clinton carried New Jersey’s 15 electoral votes with a popular vote margin of just 2.4 points, it has replaced a Democratic governor with a Republican. Clinton should assume the loss of Montana’s three electoral votes (he carried the state by just 2.5 points), Nevada’s four (he carried it by 2.7) and New Hampshire’s four (he carried it by 1.3). He lost Florida’s 25 electoral votes by just 1.9 points and he can hope that cuts in Medicare and Medicaid by the Republican Congress will offend enough of the elderly to tip that state to him. If it does tip, it will be moving against a Republican rip-tide in the South.
The Congress produced by the 1994 elections–when desperate Democrats urged voters to remember that Clinton was not on the ticket–is one measure of the condition of Clinton’s party. In 1994 six Democratic senators retired and Republicans won all six seats. In 1996 eight Democratic senators are retiring, more than are running for re-election. The eight break the modern record for a single party. (Six Republicans retired in 1958, when Republicans lost 13 seats.) Four of the eight are Southerners. In the last eight election cycles–16 years–only one Southern Senate seat (one of Louisiana’s) has passed directly from one Democrat to another. Republicans might have 60 Senate seats in 1997, in which case it would be difficult for Democrats even to filibuster.
In the 16 presidential elections since FDR’s victory in 1932, eight times the election has followed a mid-term election in which the party holding the presidency lost at least 29 seats. In five of those eight the incumbent’s party lost the presidency. In 1994 Clinton’s party lost 52 seats. More than a third of the Democrats who won House seats in 1994 won with less than 55 percent. Only 5 percent of GOP winners had such small margins. Most of today’s Republican freshmen were outspent by the Democrats they defeated. They will not be outspent as incumbents. With the departure of one Democrat (Mineta) to the private sector and another (Reynolds) to jail, Democratic House strength is below 200 for the first time since the 80th Congress ended in 1948. In 1994 the Republican vote increased in every region and exceeded the Democratie vote nationally for the first time in a mid-term election since 1970. Republican House candidates got more votes nationwide than Democratic candidates for the first time since 1952, and a majority of the votes cast for House candidates for the first time since 1946.
Because the Democratic Party is so weak in presidential politics in most of the South and much of the West, Clinton must again win the 54 electoral votes of California, which has voted Republican in nine of the last 11 presidential elections. The Republican nominee may be tempted, for purely electoral reasons, to do the right thing for the country–to pick as his running mate four-term Rep. Chris Cox of Newport Beach, Calif., a 43-year-old member of the Republican leadership and a Catholic with degrees from Harvard’s law and business schools.
Of course among the large unknowns at the moment are the identity of the Republican nominee, not to mention the number of presidential candidates on the November ballot. And there is the long shadow east by Colin Powell. If he seeks the Republican nomination he might win it and the presidency. If he accepts the vice presidential nomination, the ticket probably coasts to victory. Will he? Well, does he know that in this century seven vice presidents (TR, Coolidge, Truman, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Bush) have become presidents, one unsuccessful vice presidential candidate became president (FDR) and one other vice president received a presidential nomination (Mondale)? These may be the most important numbers in the 1996 equation if contemplation of them causes Powell to approach the presidency through the vice presidency, rather than by asking voters to treat the presidency–as they rarely do–as an entry-level job.
