[NOTE FROM PROFESSOR BURNHAM: "This essay is in rough-draft, unedited form and will probably be extended somewhat prior to publication. I should like to request that in any professionl reference to the presentations in Tables 1A and 1B, users contain an explicit citation of this source."]

A TRANSFORMING ELECTION: 1994 IN CONTEXT

1. The 1994 election is very widely perceived as an exceptional turning point in the electoral, party and policy history of the USA. This perception is quite correct. The situation is also "unusual" in another dimension. The vast majority of the time, off-year elections modify or confirm an underlying state of affairs, but they do not appear to inaugurate a turning-point in the organization and articulation of the political system. Historical cases that come to mind of elections with systemtransforming potential include only 1854, 1894, (possibly) 1930 and 1994 -- three or four cases in all, out of 52 off-year congressional and state elections. Certain other elections -- 1838, 1874, 1910, 1918, 1946, 1958 and 1974 (eight in all) -- involved considerable electoral and policy shifts, but fell below the "mega-event" range. The other 40 cases were for the most part articulations of "politics as (then-) usual" with marginalto -minimal impact on the system as a whole. Of all these elections, the structure of the 1946 election in many ways most closely resembles that of 1994. This should remind us of something. 1946 was a very large event, temporarily recreating the electoral structure of the 1920s; and it was significant in its policy consequences (notably in labor law -- the Taft-Hartley act but also otherwise). But it electorally did not lead anywhere; it was a "sport," promptly repealed in 1948. The possibility should not be excluded that 1994 will resemble 1946 in this regard as well, but I rather think not.

2. Is 1994, then, Really Realignment? It would of course help to know the results of the next four or five congressional elections; but since that knowledge is not given to us, I can only express the provisional view that it leads toward a marked acceleration of crisis/conflict politics in the USA and that, both electorally and in policy terms, some of its consequences are not likely to be reversible in the foreseeable future.

3. Let us recall the immediate past, and then contrast it with what happened in 1994:

a.) Conventional wisdom had had it that the decline of partyin -the-electorate had led, in a candidate-centered world, to huge and bilaterally-distributed district advantages for incumbents of both parties. Along with the near-disappearance of open seats, this process reached its apogee in the 1988 election, in which competitive district outcomes also nearly vanished. In turn, of course, it has lead to a congealing of the electoral process (tiny swing ratios, very low partisan and personnel turnover) that formed the perfect background for a populist drive for term limits. What had been produced was a near-perfect re-election machine, with Democrats congressionally dominant for 40 years in the House (and 30 of 40 years in the Senate), while since 1968 Republicans have normally won presidential elections. This formed a kind of "division of labor" in a deadlock or interregnum state, with (cf. Cantrell and Roll, 1967) "ideological conservatism" represented in the presidency and "operational liberalism" (also then at the majority mode of public opinion) represented in Congress. It also meant that there were in effect _two_ majority parties in this period rather than _one_: following Lowi (1964) an ideal condition for making the system as a whole unresponsive to growing demands for change.

i.) These trends began showing signs of reversal in 1990 and, even more, in 1992; while I should have been more alert to their implications than I was, they were still movements in minor key. 1994 was an abrupt, brutal and fundamental change, in which Democrats lost 56 USHR seats (35 incumbents and 21 open seats) to for open-seat losses for the Republicans. In sheer volume of turnover, 1994 ranks fifth of 21 off-year elections since 1918 -- just a shade behind 1946. But 1946, like all other of the top seven -- and also chronologically the last of these seven -- was held long before the development of candidate-dominated elections and massive incumbent-insulation effects.

ii.) 1994 is striking in another respect, to which we shall return when we attempt a synthetic overview of what is going on. In the past 76 years there have been 10 (of 21) off-year elections in which the presidential party had a gross loss of at least 40 seats. All of them except 1994 are associated with abnormal short-term contextual stresses for the presidential inparty. In rank order (though some elections were a mix of more than one stress), these stress factors were: (1) economic slump; (2) the impact of war or reconversion/stabilization stress immediately following war; (3) (for 1974 only, and in addition to economic stress en route to deep recession following the first oil price shock of 1973), basic presidential scandal (Nixon's resignation and his pardon by his successor). NOT ONE OF THESE CONDITIONS WAS PRESENT IN 1994.

iii.) Associated with this, there is something else: the widespread "c.w." view that presidential parties take their biggest hits in the sixth year (or later) rather than in the second year of a newly incumbent administration. In partisan-controlduration terms, the only historic cases of a second-year "bath" endured by the presidential party were in 1914 and 1922, prior to 1994. But the 1914 result was a political artifact (massive entry of Progressive candidates in 1912 siphoning off the Republican vote and leaving Democrats with 295 seats to defend, followed by partial collapse of those third entrants in 1914 and their voting streams rejoining the "normal vote" of the time); and can therefore be set aside. In 1922, Republicans had 303 seats to defend following the greatest landslide in modern GOP history (1920); and moreover with effects of a very deep postWorld War I recession. Adding the two factors together accounts for most of the 80-seat GOP drop in 1922, which even at that left the party with an overall majority of nine in the 1923-25 House. In 1994, by contrast, Democrats had 256 seats to defend (not much different from the 244 in 1946), and this was no artifact of landslide in the preceding presidential-election cycle (on the contrary, the Democrats lost ten seats net in 1992, and another two in 1994 before the election). A loss of this magnitude in the second year of a new presidential party is thus substantively UNIQUE so far as the historical record is concerned.

b.) As Tip O'Neill used to say, "all politics is local." A standard theme of much congressional literature has been that of effective localization by incumbents of the terms of their election, such that (largely by effectively claiming "delivery of the goods" from the Washington policy machine for the benefit of their districts) they could and did easily survive adverse presidential tides in those years. In 1984, all Democratic congressional incumbents had to do to breast the Reagan tide was to run more than 19 points (on average) ahead of Walter Mondale in their districts; and Reagan actually won more districts returning Democrats at the same time than Republicans.

i.) The Republicans in 1994 chose to run a campaign which, to the maximum possible extent, sought to "nationalize" the election. They were resoundingly successful in, essentially, overcoming enough of the orthogonality between the two opinion modes of "ideological conservatism" and "operational liberalism" to win power and taking rather thin but I think policy-decisive control of both Houses of Congress. Certain other off-year elections have had this characteristic; but at least in post-1968 terms, the only one that one can point to is 1974. In both 1974 and 1994, we should add, very clear signals of upheaval were given long in advance by the presidential party's consistent loss in a string of bye-elections.

c.) "The party's over" -- or so we've heard for the past twenty and more years. The congelation of congressional election results, the entrenchment of incumbents and the usual "allpolitics -is-local" syndrome all reflect a steep decay of party as the dominant entrepreneurial organizer of the electoral market. As usual when talking about any aspect of electoral politics (including critical realignments or anything else), we deal here not with "everybody" but with politically decisive minorities (and with considerable residual strength, after all, in party ID measures, for example).

i.) 1994, in contrast, has many (though by no means all) characteristics of an old-fashioned PARTISAN ELECTION. One of the most striking of its features is that it reflected an abnormally large and consistent Republican surge at all major levels: whether one is looking at elections to the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, state governors or (both houses of ) state legislatures, the pattern of Republican surge carries across the board. It also does so geographically. Much is said about the South, and for good reason -- since after 1994 (and for the first time since 1872), the Republicans have a majority (64 to 61) of the 125 seats in the former CSA. This has fundamental long-term structural implications. But in terms of swing, the South in the main by no means stands out. Apart from New England, every region of the country showed strong Republican swing and Democratic losses, with the Midwest in particular leading the way. And, of course, Spokane, Washington, where House Speaker Tom Foley lost his bid for a 16th term in the House, forms no part of the old Confederacy. (Indeed, both at the state-office level -- governor and judges apart -- state-legislative contests, and in the congressional races, Texas in the end showed less Democratic erosion than most states, not only in the South but in the rest of the country.)

We should be careful not to over interpret this. State-level regressions among gubernatorial, senatorial, and congressional percentages Republican of the two-party vote still produce R squares insignificantly different from zero (a post-1968 development; earlier in the century, values ranging from .75 to .95 were common enough). Nor, of course, has the distribution by party of CD outcomes suddenly "snapped back" to full approximation of 1940s levels. But they have moved in that direction.

There are various ways of attempting to size up the relative deviation of an election result from what could be called "expected." Ideally, as we have said, we should like to use something like iterated t tests or R squares, or discriminant analysis of the sort employed, for example, in statistical geography. But alas, while we can do this for the past and thus identify the temporal location of critical-realignment upheavals and midpoint crisis "moments," and while the geographers always have the whole territory to analyze, we cannot see into the future. The next best recourse is to evaluate the 1994 shift in two-party percentages of the vote and the seats (the latter both for the USHR and state legislatures), and then measure the nextyear deviation from the mean of the past five elections, dividing this figure by the five-election standard deviation. In the overwhelming majority of cases, this will produce a number smaller than 2.00 (29 of 34 so far as votes are concerned, or 85.3% of cases from 1918 to 1994; and 30 of 34 so far as seats are concerned, or 88.2%). When one iterates across an entire field of data in this way, "turning-points" of various absolute and relative magnitudes duly emerge (see Tables 1A and 1B).

TABLE 1A: CUTTING-POINT ELECTIONS: US HOUSE

  Election-    %Dem   2-Party   Next      Value     Dev. fr.  dev./  Non-South:
  year band    Mean   s.d.      Year                M         s.d.   dev./s.d.
  ---------    ----   -------   ----      -----     -------   -----  ----------

  1884-92 V    52.2   1.58      1894 V    44.3      -7.9      -5.00   -7.21
          S    58.6   9.56           S    29.8      -28.8     -3.01   -3.14

  1922-30 V    43.4   2.27      1932 V    56.2      +12.8     +5.65   +4.93
          S    44.7   4.58           S    72.2      +27.5     +3.64   +6.62

  1948-56 V    51.6   1.58      1958 V    56.7      +5.1      +3.24   +3.01
          S    54.2   4.12           S    65.0      +10.8     +2.62   +2.98

  1964-72 V    52.8   1.81      1974 V    59.2      +6.4      +3.55   +2.08
          S    59.0   5.00           S    66.9      +7.9      +1.58   +2.08

  1984-92 V    53.8   4.19      1994 V    46.3      -7.2      -6.29   -5.67
          S    59.7   1.32           S    47.0      -12.7     -9.66   -7.43

        TABLE 1B: CUTTING-POINT ELECTIONS: STATE LEGISLATURES

  1884-92 Sen  53.8   4.19      1894 Sen  42.3      -11.5     -2.75
          HR   52.8   4.45           HR   36.2      -16.6     -3.73

  1922-30 Sen  45.3   1.67      1932 Sen  63.7      +18.4    +11.00
          HR   46.1   4.28           HR   64.4      +18.3     +4.28

  1948-56 Sen  55.2   3.01      1958 Sen  66.2      +11.0     +3.65
          HR   54.5   3.08           HR   65.4      +10.9     +3.54

  1964-72 Sen  60.4   4.70      1974 Sen  67.5      +7.1      +1.51
          HR   60.6   3.46           HR   67.9      +7.3      +1.84

  1984-92 Sen  60.8   0.89      1994 Sen  53.3      -7.5      -8.45
          HR   59.5   1.08           HR   52.6      -6.9      -6.40

While the crucial dimension of durability cannot of course be tested in this way, the extraordinarily high values of the dev/s.d. figure achieved in 1994 are certainly worthy of comment. This is to some extent an artifact of the very low standard deviations found in the 1984-92 period. But this can be read _also_ reflecting some sense of the magnitude of the 1994 break from most recent history, marked as that history has been by all the factors that led to the remarkable damping-down of interelection swings culminating in the 1988 nothing-but-actuarial-change election. And considering that very large parts of the "candidate-dominated" election profile continue in 1994 as they have over the past generation, even the size of the absolute deviations from the previous five-election means registered this year is remarkable.

Should this be read as "realignment"? The reader (or listener) can take his or her choice. All I can say is that, the more closely I scrutinize the 1994 outcome, the bigger it looms in my own mind. Before turning to a more interpretative or expressive mode of discourse, I should note that at one point the Southern transformation looms structurally quite large in the probably future partisan history of the of the House of Representatives. Once, Democrats automatically received a 100-seat bonus from this then one-party region. Thorough a series of pro-Republican "ratchets," this majority was scaled back to the 29-seat majority of recent elections. But the 1992 balance of 77 D, 48 R, was transformed in 1994 to 61 D, 64 R. Nor, in all probability, is this the end: at least another dozen seats may well fall to the Republicans before some relatively stable balance is reached. Without speculating in detail, we may note that the huge Democratic majorities following 1964 and 1974-1976 were importantly based on a Southern Democratic "bulge" that has completely disappeared, and may be replaced eventually by a Republican "bulge" of perhaps 25 to 30. These "ratchets," including 1994, point in one direction. There is little reason to anticipate a major reversal in the foreseeable future.

There are two important implications involved, particularly when one considers both intrapartisan and interpartisan congressional dynamics in the near future. The first is that, barring a proDemocratic national punctuational-change flipover at some point in the future, any Democratic House majorities that may emerge will be much smaller than has been the norm since 1933. And one could expect that partisan turnover of majorities in the House will become much more frequent in the years/decades ahead than over the past two generations. Secondly, 1994 was an election where, in a significant number of cases, Democrats who claimed to be conservative-to-moderate were defeated (particularly in the South and the border states). The electorates there opted for the real thing and will of course get it. The growth of the Southern congressional Republican party has been almost exclusively concentrated on the far-to-extreme right -- a prime reason, along with perhaps less marked developments in the party north of the Mason-Dixon line, why Newt Gingrich rose to commanding influence in the House GOP well before the nominal minority leader, Bob Michel, retired in 1994; and why, in January 1995, Newt Gingrich will become the next Speaker of the House. On the Democratic side, the disappearance or defection of the party's right wing will inevitably mean that the party's congressional caucus will find its center of gravity shifted to what passes for the left in this country. Growing interparty polarization -- quite likely extreme polarization -- seems inevitable in consequence.

WHY DID IT HAPPEN, AND WHAT DOES IT PORTEND?

Some causes appear to be the following:

1. The long-term and continuing deterioration in the living standards of "middle America," not merely among the working class but among large parts of the middle class as well. It is probably for this reason that in October of 1994 (_Newsweek_ survey), 59% of Americans believed that the country was still in a recession. There certainly has been a recovery since early 1992, but largely "jobless" in character. So far, no quarter has shown growth of much above 3.5%, while occasional quarterly growth rates of 5 or 6% are needed to create conditions for "classic" expansion. And the Fed -- having to worry about the bond market and international currency traders -- will continue to ratchet up the rate of interest to head off any trend toward inflation (if it can), thus producing a growth ceiling. For very many Americans, serious anxieties not only about one's own economic future but those of one's children remain at high levels.

2. It has not helped that Clinton devoted so much domestic capital to a "Rube-Goldberg" 1,200+ page plan for universal health care. This caused economics to disappear entirely from view (stupid), while opening wide the gates for Republican/industry seizure of the agenda's "high ground" by attacking the threat of yet another vast, intrusive and expensive government program. Whether rightly or wrongly, most Americans (and especially most people who actually voted in 1994) are probably satisfied enough with the health care they have, and fear unexplained innovations that can be tapped into their modal ideological conservatism.

3. There is the sheer brute fact that Clinton is so widely unpopular (one survey indicates that 20% of respondents hate Clinton, and other 25% dislike him). At bottom, there is something not easily explicable about the extent of this dislike, though obviously the links between the RNC and key talk-show people like Rush Limbaugh help account for this (a real "mobilization of bias" on the airwaves, in Schattschneider's sense). But there are other factors.

a.) I think he never recovered from beginning his administration with the gays-in-the-military issue. Strategically concentrated as they may be in certain fields like the media, the arts and higher education, homosexuals are a small-to-tiny-minority of the American public and are intensely disliked (especially in the culturally conservative South). But connected with this is a whole range of other empowering efforts undertaken by Clinton in Washington (and I also suspect Ann Richards in Austin) on behalf of other minorities and -- from the main-street/middle-America point of view -- marginal, disliked outgroups.

b.) Other publicized issues feed into this, and also into the "religio-cultural wars." In addition to the standard Protestant religious right, Clinton from the beginning has been on the poorest of terms with the Catholic church and with the military establishment. Certain "lightning-rod" figures like Surgeon-general Joycelyn Elders have served to give additional personal concentration to this fury, and may help account for the report we hear that Republican turnout was mobilized in 1994 (and Democratic turnout demobilized) for the first time since 1970.

c.) More generally, the Democratic party since McGovern's time has acquired the image of being in favor of all sorts of minorities and social-activist interest groups against the cultural, but also the economic, interests of the white middleclass male population. The activities, preferences and public images of the Clinton administration not only reactivated this image but -- precisely because it now _was_ the presidential party -- attached the stigma to Democrats as a whole in 1994. It is striking that white males in the 30-44 age group showed among the largest of all demographic group swings to the Republicans in 1994. In a sense, the once-famous "quota" case of _Bakke v. Bd. Of Regents_ has become universalized and has come home to roost. And, what could perhaps be accepted in the economic environment of the 1970s is perhaps no longer tolerable in the continually diminishing, corporate-downsizing world of the 1990s: jobs as well as values are at stake.

4. Further exigency is given on the cultural front by apparently manifest signs of the growing rotting of the social fabric; focusing chiefly on the crime issue (particularly in dramatic cases, lavishly covered by the media, of various atrocities like husbands allegedly killing wives [O.J. Simpson] or mothers killing their own children [Mrs. Smith of S.C.], and the spread of violence and killing among subteenage children; and also on the perennial education and welfare issues. REVITALIZATION is called for, in a context (complete with ideologically polarized interest groups) uncannily similar to the pre-revolutionary "cultural distortion" Phase 3 in Chalmers Johnson's (1966) model of _Revolutionary Change_. When large numbers of people are stressed and find the present intolerable, they seek saviors with time machines. Since there is a growing market, such saviors regularly present themselves. Whether the dials on these machines are pointed toward the future or the past will depend entirely on the kind of society it is and the time in which this impetus occurs.

5. In the case of the modern USA, all revitalization movements will be firmly aimed at return to a past apparent state of bliss. This is because there is no organized left in the USA, and also because the only known incentive in a propertied-liberal hegemonic culture that could produce a desire for some leap into the future would be economic catastrophe equal to or exceeding that of the Depression period.

This yearned-for state of bliss requires for its achievement a reinstatement of the older cultural, social and political order of things so far as it is possible to achieve it. The country, and particularly the active electorate, is in the main hostile to government as such, tolerating it only when it delivers concrete goods and the tax price is not too high. Back in 1800, the triumph of the Jeffersonians involved absolute victory of the Country party and its ideology over the Federalist Court party and its ideology. Key elements of the doctrine were: (1) that government governs best that governs least; (2) state and local government, where any is needed at all, is to be preferred to federal; (3) the majority is wiser than the minority. Since the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s, we have abandoned the ancient truths -- so the argument goes, as framed, inter alia, by Speaker-designate Gingrich -- and must return to them. In the meantime, a vastly influential and thoroughly un-American cultural elite has come to dominate the media and the universities, inculcating pernicious doctrines that have profoundly corrupted the Republic.

Essentially -- again, so the argument goes -- Ronald Reagan's effort at revitalization was all well and good so far as it went, but it did not go anywhere near far enough. What is required is a genuine (counter-) revolution that, root and branch, digs out and destroys (or extirpates) the bad old system that got us into this mess and return to ancient truths. The way ahead in achieving this goal requires the dismantling of most of the federal government. It will also require, at some point, attending to the strategic role of secular-humanist "cultural elites" in the institutions which they control. At the end of the day, we will achieve this unity which so many ordinary Americans want, replacing and overcoming interest-group fragmentation and ideological polarization that characterized the old order.

Have we heard this sort of thing somewhere before in this century? If you think I am making this up, by all means read and ponder what Mr. Gingrich has been saying since the election, not to mention his effusions before. Once, not very long ago, he could be regarded as just another right-wing blowhard. Now he will occupy what many regard as the second most-powerful office of state. It is doubtful, to say the least, that he will be able to realize his maximum program, at least before 1997, on so fragile a base; and Senate Republicans, from Bob Dole downwards, will have their own and very different ideas of what the times require. Nevertheless, as the old slogan of 1968 put it, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

In sum, 1994 appears to have marked a major accelerating point in the political crisis which has been increasingly engulfing the United States in the past 20-30 years. We are in for explosively polarizing times. Whether 1994 turns out to be a "sport," like 1946, or the dawning of a new era is of course impossible to say with certainty. It may be nothing more in the end than an unusually empathic closure of the latest midpoint crisis in an ongoing regime order, though I think it is rather more than that. The public continues to grope for a satisfactory revitalization tool. Newt Gingrich, in his demand that the whole Republican "contract" be carried out and form the basis for further developments, has noted that if the Republicans in their turn fail to achieve this, the stage will be set for a public turning to third parties (or candidates). In this we may well agree with him. Events will decide whether the growing contradictions in American economic, political and social life can be contained or channeled through revitalization strategies that Gingrich and his allies propose. If not, then among many other things the liquidation of the traditional two-party system may indeed follow.

Whatever happens along these dimensions, the political jolt in 1995 will be tremendous. Forty years is a very long time; it is one-fifth of the history of the American republic and well over half the average life expectancy for individuals. It is as though a great sledgehammer blow was struck against a Capitol dome which appeared to be of iron but was actually of glass. It was shattered into bits. Just this sort of thing has happened in earlier American cycles of punctuated-change upheaval. The creative potential of electoral politics not to be eternally repetitive is again confirmed. As for myself, my memory of things political extends back to the 1940 election. In these more than fifty years, I have never experienced an off-year election of a transformative impact that remotely equals 1994, and only one or two presidential elections that are in the same range. In this half-century, both the Republican and Democratic parties have undergone profound transformations. We have not seen the House Republicans in a majority position since most of that transformation occurred. For one thing, the distance between Speaker Joseph W. Martin and Speaker Newton Gingrich is measured politically in light-years. The sequel seems bound to be not merely interesting, but dramatic in the extreme.

At the end of the day, the anxieties I have long felt about the future of democratic government in this country have been considerably sharpened in the wake of this election. And I should hasten to add that this heightened anxiety has nothing to do with the fact of Republican victory as such. But it has everything to do with the entire _mis-en-scene_ I have inadequately tried to describe in this discussion, one in which this Republican victory and this new cast of policy-dominant characters duly take their place.

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