The 1988 Election

Norman J. Ornstein and Mark Schmitt

From Foreign Affairs, America and the World 1988/89

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Summary:  Analyzes the 1988 US presidential election; concludes that the Democrats did not exploit the weak points of the opposition, and that they were out of step with mainstream America when it came to basic values.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-director of the Gallup/Times Mirror survey of the American electorate. Mark Schmitt is a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute.

In 1988 a Republican won the presidency for the fifth time in the last six tries, and for the seventh time in the last ten. In the past six presidential elections-over a quarter-century-Democrats have averaged approximately 43 percent of the national popular presidential vote. Over the past forty years Democrats have managed to exceed 50.1 percent of the popular vote only once, in 1964, in the wake of the Kennedy assassination.

The American public is sending a message with its voting behavior. Is it a profound message about what Americans want in their government at home and how they want America represented and projected abroad? Or are they separate messages for individual elections, unique reactions to specific circumstances that happen to mesh into a pattern of Republican hegemony? The answer is not at all clear, but which answer is correct matters less than which answer prevails in the interpretation of the 1988 vote.

The approach that each political party takes toward governing during the new administration comes down to whether the 1988 election is viewed as a seminal event involving a significant choice between two well-matched opponents, or a predictable and narrow victory for continuity over change. The more significance each party assigns to the outcome of the election, the more aggressive that party will be in the branch of government it controls.

Even before the results were in, the media seemed to decide the election was not important: "issueless," "personal," "trivial," "negative" were the usual expressions of disgust. There was a good deal of overstatement here, and it will take some time before we can fully understand the significance of 1988. In this essay we will try to put the election into context, examining the issues discussed and ignored, using the election to frame an analysis of the policy battles, options and outcomes ahead.

II

The analysis of American elections has become a cottage industry. Politicians, psephologists, pundits and press vie with one another first to predict election results and then to interpret them. One large school of analysis, bolstered by sophisticated mathematical models, believes that two simple factors can predict election outcomes: the state of the economy (measured by changes in real income levels) and presidential popularity. This school believed months before the campaign began-and without regard to what might happen through the fall-that George Bush would win by a very comfortable margin because of the economy and Ronald Reagan's public standing.

Another school of analysis believes that Democrats are losing presidential elections not because the results are predetermined by circumstances, but because the party is losing the battle of messages; the Democratic nominating process pulls candidates too far left of center, and they end up outside the acceptable range for a majority of voters. This school would accept George Bush's characterization of the campaign as a battle of values, which he won because of voter skepticism about the role of the government, fear of crime, belief in a strong defense and the need to project a ...

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