George Friedman
The U.S. presidential election will be held a week from today, and if the polls are correct, the outcome will be extraordinarily close. Many say that the country has never been as deeply divided. In discussing the debates last week, I noted how this year's campaign is far from the most bitter and vitriolic. It might therefore be useful also to consider that while the electorate at the moment appears evenly and deeply divided, unlike what many say, that does not reveal deep divisions in our society -- unless our society has always been deeply divided.
The U.S. presidential election will be held a week from today, and if the polls are correct, the outcome will be extraordinarily close. Many say that the country has never been as deeply divided. In discussing the debates last week, I noted how this year's campaign is far from the most bitter and vitriolic. It might therefore be useful also to consider that while the electorate at the moment appears evenly and deeply divided, unlike what many say, that does not reveal deep divisions in our society -- unless our society has always been deeply divided.
Since 1820, the last year an
uncontested election was held, most presidential elections have been extremely
close. Lyndon B. Johnson received the largest percentage of votes any president
has ever had in 1964, taking 61.5 percent of the vote. Three other presidents
broke the 60 percent mark: Warren G. Harding in 1920, Franklin D. Roosevelt in
1936 and Richard Nixon in 1972.
Nine elections saw a candidate
win between 55 and 60 percent of the vote: Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln,
Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Only Eisenhower broke 55 percent twice.
Candidates who received less than 50 percent of the vote won 18 presidential elections.
These included Lincoln in his first election, Woodrow Wilson in both elections,
Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Nixon in his first election and Bill Clinton in
both his elections.
From 1824-2008, 13 elections
ended in someone obtaining more than 55 percent but never more than 61 percent
of the vote. Eighteen elections ended with the president receiving less than 50
percent of the vote. The remaining 16 elections ended with the winner receiving
between 50-55 percent of the vote, in many cases barely above the 50 percent
mark -- meaning almost half the country voted for someone else. The United
States not only always has had deeply divided elections, but in many cases,
minority presidents. Interestingly, of the four presidents who won more than 60
percent of the vote, three are not remembered favorably: Harding, Johnson and
Nixon.
Three observations follow.
First, for almost 200 years the electoral process has consistently produced a
division in the country never greater than 60-40 and heavily tending toward a
much narrower margin. Second, when third parties had a significant impact on
the election, winners won five times with 45 percent of the vote or less.
Third, in 26 of the U.S. presidential elections, the winner received less than
52 percent of the vote.
Even in the most one-sided
elections, nearly 40 percent of voters voted against the winner. The most
popular presidents still had 40 percent of votes cast against them. All other
elections took place with more than 40 percent opposition. The consistency here
is striking. Even in the most extreme cases of national crisis and a weak
opponent, it was impossible to rise above just over 60 percent. The built-in
opposition of 40 percent, regardless of circumstances or party, has therefore
persisted for almost two centuries. But except in the case of the 1860
election, the deep division did not lead to a threat to the regime. On the
contrary, the regime has flourished -- again, 1860 excepted -- in spite of
these persistent divisions.
The Politically Indifferent
Why then is the United States
so deeply and persistently divided and why does this division rarely lead to
unrest, let alone regime change? Let us consider this seeming paradox in light
of another fact, namely, that a substantial portion of the electorate doesn't
vote at all. This fact frequently is noted, usually as a sign of a decline in
civic virtue. But let's consider it another way.
First, let's think of it
mechanically. The United States is one of the few countries that has not made
Election Day a national holiday or held its presidential elections on a
weekend. That means that there is work and school on Election Day in the United
States. In the face of the tasks of getting the kids off to school, getting to
work, picking up the kids on the way home -- all while fighting traffic -- and
then getting dinner on the table, the urgency of exercising the franchise
pales. It should therefore be no surprise that older people are more likely to
vote.
Low voter turnout could also
indicate alienation from the system. But alienation sufficient to explain low
voter turnout should have generated more unrest over two centuries. When
genuine alienation was present, as in 1860, voter turnout rose and violence
followed. Other than that, unrest hasn't followed presidential elections. To
me, that so many people don't vote does not indicate widespread alienation as
much as indifference: The outcome of the election is simply less important to
many than picking up the kids from piano lessons.
It is equally plausible that
low voter turnout indicates voter satisfaction with both candidates. Some have
noted that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney sound less different than they portray
themselves as being. Some voters might figure there is not much difference
between the two and that they can therefore live with either in office.
Another explanation is that
some voters feel indifferent to the president and politics in general. They
don't abstain because they are alienated from the system but because they
understand the system as being designed such that outcomes don't matter. The
Founding Fathers' constitutional system leaves the president remarkably weak.
In light of this, while politically attentive people might care who is elected,
the politically indifferent might have a much shrewder evaluation of the nature
of the presidency.
The Role of Ideologues
The United States always has
had ideologues who have viewed political parties as vehicles for expressing
ideologies and reshaping the country. While the ideologies have changed since
Federalists faced off against Democratic-Republicans, an ideological divide
always has separated the two main parties. At the same time, the ranks of the
true ideologues -- those who would prefer to lose elections to winning with a
platform that ran counter to their principles -- were relatively sparse. The
majority of any party was never as ideologically committed as the ideologues. A
Whig might have thought of himself as a member of the Whig Party when he
thought of himself in political terms at all, but most of the time he did not
think of himself as political. Politics were marginal to his identity, and
while he might tend to vote Whig, as one moved to less committed elements of
the party, Whigs could easily switch sides.
The four elections in which
presidents received 60 percent or more were all ideological and occurred at
times of crisis: Johnson in 1964 defeated Barry Goldwater, a highly ideological
candidate, in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination; Roosevelt defeated
Alf Landon, an anti-Roosevelt ideologue, during the depths of the Depression;
Nixon defeated George McGovern, an anti-war ideologue, during the era of the
Vietnam War and the anti-war challenge; and Warren G. Harding won in the wake
of World War I and the latter debacles of the Wilson administration and its
ideology.
Crisis tends to create the
most extreme expressions of hostility to a challenging ideology and creates the
broadest coalition possible, 60 percent. Meanwhile, 40 percent remain in opposition
to the majority under any circumstances. To put it somewhat differently -- and
now we get to the most significant point -- about 40 percent of the voting
public cannot be persuaded to shift from their party under any circumstances,
while about 20 percent are either persuadable or represent an unrooted voter
who shifts from election to election.
The 60-40 break occurs rarely,
when the ideological bent rallies the core and the national crisis allows one
party to attract a larger block than normal to halt the less popular ideology.
But this is the extreme of American politics; the normal election is much
narrower.
This is because the ideologues
in the parties fail to draw in the center. The weaker party members remain in
their party's orbit and the 20 percent undecided distribute themselves fairly
randomly, depending on their degree of indifference, so that the final vote
depends on no more than a few percentage points shifting one way or another.
This is not a sign of massive
divisions. Whereas the 60-40 elections are the moments of deepest political
tension in which one side draws the center to it almost unanimously, in other
elections -- particularly the large number in which the winner receives less
that 55 percent of the vote (meaning that a 5 percent shift would change the
outcome) -- the election is an election of relative indifference.
This is certainly not how
ideologues view the election. For them, it is a struggle between light and
darkness. Nor is it how the media and commentators view it. For them, it is
always an election full of meaning. In reality, most elections are little
remembered and decide little. Seemingly apocalyptic struggles that produce
narrow margins do not represent a deeply divided country. The electoral
division doesn't translate into passion for most of the voters, but into
relative indifference with the recognition that here is another election
"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
The fact that nearly 50
percent of the public chooses not to vote is our tipoff about the public's view
of elections. That segment of the public simply doesn't care much about the
outcome. The politically committed regard these people as unenlightened fools.
In reality, perhaps these people know that the election really isn't nearly as
important as the ideologues, media and professional politicians think it is, so
they stay home.
Others vote, of course, but
hardly with the intensity of the ideologues. Things the ideologues find
outrageously trivial can sway the less committed. Such voters think of politics
in a very different way than the ideologues do. They think of it as something
that doesn't define their lives or the republic. They think of politicians as
fairly indistinguishable, and they are aware that the ideological passions will
melt in the face of presidential responsibility. And while they care a bit more
than those who stay home, they usually do not care all that much more.
The United States has elected
presidents with the narrowest of margins and presidents who had far less than a
majority. In many countries, this might reveal deep divisions leading to social
unrest. It doesn't mean this in the United States because while the division
can be measured, it isn't very deep and by most, it will hardly be remembered.
The polls say the election
will be very close. If that is true, someone will be selected late at night
after Ohio makes up its mind. The passionate on the losing side will charge
fraud and election stealing. The rest of the country will get up the next day
and go back to work just as they did four years ago, and the republic will go
on.
George Friedman,
Stratfor,
October 30, 2012
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