The Lay of the Land
A new report is likely to disappoint those who believe the electorate took a sharp left turn in 2006.
by Matthew Continetti
05/16/2007 12:00:00 AM
A NEW REPORT from the centrist group Third Way complicates one's understanding of the 2006 midterm elections. There are already several competing theories of why last Election Day turned out the way it did. The storyline popular on liberal blogs is that in 2006 Democrats were true to liberal principles, fought back against the Bush machine, opposed the war in Iraq, and as a result the electorate woke up and took Congress away from the GOP.
Another storyline that's popular among conservatives says Republicans lost control of both Houses for the first time since 1994 because the party strayed from the true Reaganite path and forgot its small-government principles. And a third storyline is that the unpopularity of the Iraq war, the corruption of the GOP Congress, and the vanishing credibility of President Bush all combined to produce narrow Democratic majorities in the House (233 to 202) and Senate (51 to 49).
That's about how things look to Jim Kessler, Anne Kim, and Mark Donnell, who wrote Looking Red, Voting Blue: An Analysis of the 2006 Election. They took the National Exit Poll surveys for 2004 and 2006 and "normalized" the results so that turnout was the same in both years. What they discovered will probably disappoint those who argue that the electorate took a sharp left turn in 2006. According to the report, the reason the Democrats took Congress in 2006 wasn't because they had "energized the base." Nor was it because the American electorate embraced their center-left policy agenda. It
was because typically Republican voters wanted change.
The authors found that between 2004 and 2006 the Democrats gained 4.7 million votes. If you take a look at the demographic profile of these new Democrats, you see that--all things being equal--they ought to be Republicans. Almost all of them are men. All of them are married. Most are white and live in households making more than $100,000 a year. The Third Way researchers also found that close to 3 million new Democratic votes came from people who attend church at least once a week.
In 2006 all things were not equal, however. The study finds that these new Democratic voters had three things on their minds: Iraq, corruption, and Bush. The share of voters who disapproved of the Iraq war went from 46.2 percent in 2004 to a majority 56.6 percent in 2006. All these new antiwar votes went Democratic. Of the 74 percent of voters in 2006 who said corruption was "extremely" or "very" important in deciding for whom to vote, 56.5 percent voted for Democrats and 43.5 voted for Republicans. And Bush's drag on the GOP is no secret. According to the Third Way study, the number of voters who said they disapproved of the president increased by 8 million between 2004 and 2006.
One storyline from 2006 that ought to be put to rest is that economic instability or the "Great Risk Shift" produced Democratic gains. This is the sort of thing that neopopulists like Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and James Webb of Virginia like to bring up. The problem is that it doesn't comport with reality. A recent Congressional Budget Office study found that income volatility has remained more or less the same since the Reagan presidency. And the Third Way report concludes that most of the Democratic gains in 2006 came from well-off voters who in general felt positive about the economy. The electorate may not have as great an appetite for Democratic policies on taxes, trade, entitlements, and health care as the neopopulists like to imagine.
As the authors of the Third Way report note, these results ought to give pause to those in the political class who have all but guaranteed a Democratic victory in 2008. The reason for this is that two of the three things on voters' minds in 2006 won't be a factor in 2008. The GOP congressmen implicated in the "culture of corruption" have all been voted out of office. If congressional corruption is an issue, it will be a Democratic Congress that takes the blame. And neither George W. Bush nor Vice President Richard Cheney will be on the ballot.
That leaves Iraq. If the voters in 2006 wanted a change in Bush's policy, they got it. The political market is efficient. Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld, chose a new commander in Gen. David Petraeus, and rejected the Rumsfeld-Abizaid-Casey war strategy of force protection, Iraqification, and counterterrorism in favor of Petraeus's counterinsurgency approach.
The Petraeus strategy has barely been implemented--today only four out of five additional combat brigades are in theater--but already Democrats are calling for a return to the old strategy, or a drastic reduction in American forces, or cutting off funding for the war altogether. Bush and Congress will continue to fight over war policy throughout the 2008 election cycle. No one knows what twists and turns are ahead. We do know, however, that the terms of the Iraq debate on Election Day 2008 will not be the same as those on Election Day 2006.
This could mean even more Republicans will cross the
aisle and vote Democratic. But there's a chance--just a chance--that the Republicans who left the GOP in 2006 will have reason to return to the fold.
Matthew Continetti is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD and author of The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine.
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