Thanksgiving was still two weeks away when the Republican Party, to its evident shock, found itself stuffed, trussed, roasted, and ready to be served with all the trimmings. This was not the menu that the Party’s nominees, donors, and operatives had looked forward to. It was emphatically not the feast they had been primed to expect by their vulpine cheerleaders in the island universe of the illiberal media. ROMNEY BEATS OBAMA, HANDILY, Michael Barone trumpeted a few days before the election in the Examiner, Washington’s conservative giveaway daily. (The Chicago Tribune, back in ’48, had at least left out the “handily.”) “I think it’s this: a Romney win,” Peggy Noonan assured her Wall Street Journal blog readers the day before the polls opened. (“All the vibrations are right,” she explained.) Also on Election Eve, Dick Morris, a Fox News “analyst” reputed to be a pollster, promised “a landslide for Romney.” The same prediction—not just a win, a landslide—was bruited from the sinkholes (Glenn Beck) to the summits (George F. Will) of the right’s intellectual sierra.
News flash: the President won, handily. With late returns still trickling in, his popular-vote margin now exceeds four million, a million more than George W. Bush amassed when he ran for reëlection. (Obama’s electoral-college majority is also larger: 332 to Mitt Romney’s 206, as against Bush’s 286 to John Kerry’s 251.) When it came to this year’s thirty-three Senate races, Republican prophecies of a Republican takeover, universal some months ago, grew rarer as November approached, except on the farther-out reaches of conservative punditry. Human Events, which describes itself as Ronald Reagan’s favorite newspaper, and CBN, the religious-right TV network, each predicted a net gain of five seats for the G.O.P. Morris, who predicted a six-seat gain, gloated that a Republican Senate would be “Barack Obama’s parting gift to the Democratic Party.” That it was, except for the “parting” part. And except for the “Republican” part: not only did the Democratic caucus grow from fifty-three to fifty-five, Democratic senatorial candidates got a total of ten million more votes than their Republican opponents.
In 2004, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, conservatism’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, congratulated President Bush for “what by any measure is a decisive mandate for a second term” and exulted, “Mr. Bush has been given the kind of mandate that few politicians are ever fortunate enough to receive.” This year, examining similar numbers with different labels, the Journal came up with a sterner interpretation. “President Obama won one of the narrower re-elections in modern times,” its editorial announced. Also:
Ah, yes: the House. The Republicans will have seven or eight fewer seats in that body, but hold it they did, and this fact is what those among them who are stuck at Stage 1 of Mme. Kübler-Ross’s five-stage topography of grief (“Denial”), and even a few who are tentatively assaying Stage 3 (“Bargaining”), are clinging to. (Talk radio is permanently tuned to Stage 2, “Anger,” and Stage 4, “Depression,” hangs heavy.) In the view of these Republicans, the election was a tie; and on the legitimacy of their most cherished goal—keeping rich folks’ taxes at their current historic lows or lowering them even more—they claimed vindication. “We just had an election, and the House of Representatives was elected committed to keeping taxes low,” Grover Norquist, custodian of the notorious no-tax-hikes-ever pledge signed by almost every Republican in Congress, told CBS’s Charlie Rose. (Norquist attributed the Presidential result to the Obama campaign’s success in portraying Romney as “a poopy-head.”) On ABC, Jonathan Karl asked Romney’s erstwhile running mate, Paul Ryan, if the electorate had given Obama any semblance of a mandate. “I don’t think so, because they also reëlected the House Republicans,” Ryan replied. “So whether people intended or not, we’ve got divided government.”
Actually, “people”—a majority of voters, or even a nontrivial minority—never “intend” divided government. Most people always vote straight Democratic or straight Republican, which means that most people always vote to put one party in charge. They may disagree about which party, and they would rather have their party control part of the government than none of it, but almost all of them prefer _un_divided government. This year, as usual, “people” wanted one party to run the whole show. That party was the Democrats. Republican House candidates won more seats, but Democratic House candidates won more votes—in the aggregate, about a million more.
For one party to win a majority of House seats with a minority of votes is a relatively rare occurrence. It has now happened five times in the past hundred years. In 1914 and 1942, the Democrats were the beneficiaries. In 1952, 1996, and this year, it was the Republicans’ turn to get lucky, and their luck is likely to hold for many election cycles to come. Gerrymandering routinely gets blamed for such mismatches, but that’s only part of the story. Far more important than redistricting is just plain districting: because so many Democrats are city folk, large numbers of Democratic votes pile up redundantly in overwhelmingly one-sided districts. Even having district lines drawn by neutral commissions instead of by self-serving politicians wouldn’t do much to alter this built-in structural bias. Of course, the perversities of our peculiar electoral machinery can cut both ways. Before November 6th, there was much speculation that Obama, like Bush in 2000, might lose the popular vote while winning in the electoral college. It didn’t happen, but the speculation was far from idle. If Romney had run more strongly throughout the country, he might have beaten Obama by as many as two million votes and still have lost the Presidency.
Even so, the reëlection of a Republican House was no more a repudiation of, for example, levying modestly higher taxes on the highest incomes than was the reëlection of the President or the strengthening of the Democratic majority in the Senate. “You know what? It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires,” William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, a kind of Human Events for non-dummies, mused the other day on Fox News, of all places. Similar heresies are beginning to be whispered on Capitol Hill. But, given the track record of the past four years, it would be unwise to bet the farm on the proposition that the G.O.P. will edge away from nihilist obstructionism anytime soon. Stage 5, “Acceptance,” is still a few Republicans shy of a quorum. ♦
