A Cleansing Election

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Two days after the mid-term elections were over, we met at the Rolling Stone offices with two people we think are among the most acute observers of modern politics. Peter Hart, known for his non partisan poll for NBC and The Wall Street Journal, has conducted public-opinion research for thirty governors and forty U.S. senators, from Hubert Humphrey to Jay Rockefeller. David Gergen, now director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has served in the White House as a senior adviser to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton.

Bush is now the only president in history besides Woodrow Wilson to lose control of both the House and Senate in his second term. At his press conference the day after the election, even he was forced to acknowledge that it was a "thumping." How would you characterize the results?
David Gergen: It was a car wreck for the Republicans. We learned some years ago that American politics moves in cycles -- about every fifteen to twenty years we reverse directions. The conservatives had dominated our politics since the beginning of Reagan through this election, a longer period than normal. There was a view that government was not the answer to most problems, and the voters gave power to the Republicans. For a while they used it well -- but then they began to abuse it. I think this is the natural end to the Reagan era. It came with a smashup in this election. Voters said, "Hey, we gave you guys all this power and you mismanaged a war, you let this culture of corruption creep in, you couldn't handle Katrina" -- all these things that leave people feeling the Republicans may not be up to this.

Peter Hart: This defeat was wide, broad and deep. Wide, because it wasn't just the Northeast -- it extended from coast to coast. Broad, because it was way beyond the traditional Democratic coalition -- the party picked up ten of its twenty-nine or so congressional seats in districts that Bush carried by double digits two years ago. Deep, because it was not only on the congressional level, but six governors and nine statehouses also moved into the Democratic column.

Gergen: In class yesterday, one of my students said, "The headline for this election ought to be you're fired." That's essentially what voters did -- and I don't think it's going to magically get better for Republicans over the next two years. For the first time in twenty-five years, conservative government didn't seem to work. They bungled it. People were pissed.

So this was a broader-scale rejection of the Republicans, and not just a referendum on the war, as everyone keeps saying?
Gergen: I don't care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, this was a cleansing election in the same way that '94 was a cleansing election for the other side. The war was central to it, but the war became associated in people's minds with the administration's arrogance and incompetence. The arrogance factor is very, very big. It's a theme that runs through every single aspect of this.

Hart: Iraq was the top issue in this election. The most interesting period in the campaign was after the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Bush made the point that our security at home is tied to our success in Iraq, and that had some resonance at the time. But by the end of September, the voters had adjudicated that and said, "No, these are two separate things." In the exit poll, sixty percent of people said, "There is no relationship between Iraq and our security here at home."

Gergen: That's right. The GOP's comeback attempt was cut short by the Mark Foley scandal. They got about five days into it, and boom. Voters were not only rejecting Bush, they were also saying to Congress, "You have not acted as a watchdog on the war. You're complicit -- you've been lap dogs all the way through this. You guys are just lining your pockets when you should be looking after our needs in this war."

A third of white evangelicals voted Democratic this year. What does this election say about the power of the religious right?
Gergen: Not only did large numbers of evangelicals vote Democratic, so did mainstream Christian churchgoers. That's partly because of the Republican scandals -- but it's also because the Democrats ran a lot of new faces who convinced voters that they do not represent a godless party. The evangelical vote cannot be taken for granted now; Republicans are going to have to earn it back.

Hart: Karl Rove misunderstood the 2006 election. He believed it was all about the base. What he forgot is, the middle decides elections. Independents went two-to-one for the Democrats this year. I've never seen that before, in all of my years of polling. Independents decided this election. It wasn't even close -- they were the Colossus of Rhodes towering over this election. If you wanted to win, you had to go to them. What Rove did was drive the Republican bus right into the ditch. He left the independents right there for the Democrats, who secured them.

The Democrats control the Senate because of two key races: Jim Webb in Virginia and Claire McCaskill in Missouri. And in both cases, they did the antithetical thing for Democrats: They spent their final weekends campaigning in rural, conservative areas. Not going to their traditional urban base, but reaching out to rural voters, because they realized that they could talk about values. They reduced the margins in rural areas, and that was the difference for them.

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What about the power of the three hot-button social issues: abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research? There seemed to be solid shifts on gay marriage and abortion this year.
Gergen: Let's go back to a verb Peter used: how voters essentially adjudicate issues. On both abortion and gay marriage, people are adjudicating the issue in a way that does not involve an extreme conclusion. They're saying, "We don't like gay marriage in a church, but we find civil unions and the extension of rights to gay partners to be wholly acceptable. We don't like abortion on demand, but we think there ought to be abortions available to people in a whole variety of situations."

In both cases, the electorate has adjudicated the issue in a way that is more in accord with traditional values than it is hardcore conservative. They're saying, "You have a certain amount of personal freedom, and we're going to ask you to live in a constructive way, but we're going to respect you to live your life as you want." The same thing is true on stem cells. People reject cloning, but they are in favor of therapeutic research. Stem cells are increasingly going to be a winning wedge issue for Democrats -- one of the first they have found in years.

So the ugliness on these three issues -- the central issues for the religious right and the Bush wing of the Republican Party -- is waning? Are we done with this for a while?
Hart: "Done" is the wrong word. But there is a tremendous change in terms of attitudes. Voters opposed gay marriage in seven of the eight states where it was on the ballot this year -- but not by sixty-five percent like they did two years ago, but by fifty-something percent. If the Republicans are hoping to make this their linchpin for 2008, they're just wrong.

Gergen: I can't guarantee it, but I sense that these issues have lost some of their electoral potency. They're not going to be as central to national races as they have been. Which is not to say that the conservative movement is going to stop pushing them. The electorate may be changing its mind, but conservatives have put an awful lot of judges on the federal bench, and they will remain there for a long time and continue to approve a variety of restrictions.

Do the election results indicate that Rove's strategy of "smear and fear" -- slime your opponents and rile up the base -- has lost any of its impact and appeal?
Gergen: This election showed that there are lines -- and when you go over the line, it backfires more easily. In Massachusetts, the Willie Horton-type ad run by Kerry Healey backfired badly on her. Mike DeWine paid a price, in Ohio, for some of the negativity of the advertising there. It wasn't just how harsh some of the ads were -- it was that the ratio changed between negative ads and positive ads. Some states, you'd turn on the television and all you'd get was a barrage of negative ads.

Hart: The most fascinating two races were Jim Webb's in Virginia, which he won, and Michael Steele's, in Maryland, where he lost narrowly. Neither of them should have been competitive -- but they both communicated directly to voters in a civil and respectful manner, and they came across as authentic versus political.

Gergen: The Republican strategist Matthew Dowd has a new theory out. He's the one who went to Rove after the 2000 election and said, "You know, we always used to think fifteen or twenty percent of the electorate was undecided, but that's shrunk down to seven or eight percent. So the way to win the election is to no longer go to the middle but to energize your base." Now Dowd is saying, "That's true, but there is something else happening. There is a broader group in the middle of the spectrum who no longer feel their parties are speaking for them. If one party goes to the extreme, these people are open to the other party and can cross the lines." That's a pretty persuasive way to look at what happened this year.

Hart: Dowd is absolutely right. The best model for 2006: Arnold Schwarzenegger. He came in believing the Rove strategy, got his head handed to him in a series of ballot initiatives, and said, "Hold it, I want to get re-elected, here's my new strategy: I'm bringing in all Democrats, I'm going to promote the environment, I'm going to promote education." Now we have a Republican governor governing like a Democrat.

Is this the end of Rove's dream of building a "permanent Republican majority"?
Gergen: The old Republican majority has died, and it will be harder than Lazarus to resurrect. They are going to have to form a new majority -- one that includes, for example, far more Hispanics. The problem is, the Republican share of the Hispanic vote went down a dozen points this year because of the party's immigration stance.

Let's go to Ohio -- what do you make of the remarkable change there?
Gergen: Ohio is the best hope for the future of Democrats. Here's a state that is a bellwether state. They're feeling the effects of globalization, especially in northern Ohio. I was in Toledo ten days ago, and it's like, "Whoa, it looks like a war zone." They're very much feeling the economic squeeze, but their elected representatives were not paying attention to the economic issues, plus they have scandals at the statehouse and they have a bad war. It was a disaster for Republicans.

Hart: It was never close. I call it "Goodbye, Columbus." Look at how the city has changed over the past forty-five years. In 1960, Jack Kennedy said, "There's no place in America that gives me a warmer welcome and fewer votes than Columbus, Ohio." Since then, the city has grown by forty percent. The median age has gone from twenty-seven to thirty-four. The nonwhite vote has gone from twelve percent to twenty-eight percent. The economy has gone from General Motors and manufacturing to high-tech and insurance. And the gubernatorial vote has gone from sixty-two percent Republican to sixty-two percent Democratic. The ability to understand America is the ability to understand Columbus. In 1990, there were something like twenty Somalians in Columbus -- now there are 20,000. It is right in the vortex of what's going on.

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In Connecticut, the Democratic leadership was furious at MoveOn for sponsoring Ned Lamont when the party had the larger goal of trying to win back the Senate. What do you make of MoveOn's potency now?
Gergen: MoveOn and these other groups have given great energy to the Democrats. But if the Democrats embrace their agenda, the party is going to wind up as a vociferous minority. Charles Schumer, who ran the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, embraced a pragmatism about how to win. MoveOn was very responsible during the election about accepting that as an electoral strategy. They were willing to say, "OK, we're going to support this person even though we don't like everything they stand for." But now that they've won, the question is, will MoveOn be willing to embrace that same pragmatism as a governing strategy? Or are they going to say, "No, no, you have to adopt our agenda"?

In the West, every Rocky Mountain state except Nevada, Utah and Idaho now has a Democratic governor. What does that mean?
Hart: California, Oregon and Washington have been in the Democratic column for years. What we learned in this election is that the ability to be competitive now extends to the Rocky Mountains -- to Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana. The important issues in the region are clearly environmentalism, personal freedom and fiscal conservatism. The Republicans moved away from that base, opening up the advantage to the Democrats.

Gergen: The other thing is that the Northeast has become solidly Democratic. The Republicans are down to one member of Congress in New England. Christopher Shays in Connecticut is the last guy standing. Everybody else got wiped out.

Hart: The Northeast is now the Ninth Ward of New Orleans: It's underwater for the Republicans.

The Southern strategy that Republicans have pursued since Nixon also seems to be eroding. Can Democrats just write off the region in 2008 and still win?
Gergen: Some people are suggesting that, but I think it's a terrible mistake. When you begin thinking in those terms, you effectively write off the same electorate you find elsewhere in the country. It's much better to look for a candidate who's competitive in the South. Look at Virginia: If the Democrats can get a candidate who can win there, it changes the whole electoral map.

To me, this election had more vindication for Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy than I ever imagined. He deserves some credit for thinking, "We ought to be building from the grass roots up, and we've got a shot at doing this." A couple of those Indiana races that they won, he put organizers out there early, at a time when it seemed crazy to think you could ever take those seats.

Looking ahead, what would you tell Democrats to do -- or not do -- to expand on this victory?
Hart: The challenge for the Democrats is which playbook they should follow. One model is 1960, when the LBJ Senate passed legislation that gave John Kennedy a platform to run on. The other model is the Newt Gingrich model of 1994, when Republicans essentially said, "This is the time to pay the Democrats back for all their excesses." The challenge for Democrats is to not misread their mandate, which comes back to central issues: health care, minimum wage, education, the environment.

Gergen: I agree with that absolutely. This is the time to set the table for 2008. They ought to be coming forward with a series of domestic initiatives. If the president signs them, he gives Democrats a victory on substance. If the president blocks them, he gives Democrats an issue for 2008.

Democrats should also use the statehouses they now control as laboratories. Eliot Spitzer, for example, could do some innovative things in New York that could serve as a model for the national level. They need to pursue long-term Democratic objectives, but with new means, more consistent with the new generation, which doesn't want to get stuck with the old solutions.

On the international side, they're going to be under the microscope on how they deal with Iraq. The public wants them to be a watchdog, but not a Rottweiler, in terms of oversight. Voters don't want a whole series of confrontations over the next two years. They want to find some sensible way out of Iraq. Democrats have got to be willing to work with the administration and not just say, "We've got to leave today." That's going to be very hard for them to do.

The same question regarding the Republicans: What should they be doing now, and what should they avoid?
Gergen: They have to find a way to get independent voters back. The question is, how to do that? Some Republicans think the only way to win is to move to the hard right, back to the Goldwater and Reagan roots, and stay out there on the social agenda -- abortion, gay marriage, things like that. Other Republicans think the way to go is to move back to the middle, to win back the independents who walked away from the party because it became too extreme for them. Republicans are going to have to make a fundamental decision, and right now their voices are pulling in both directions.

Hart: And Democrats couldn't be more delighted with that fight. The way they're headed, the Republicans are taking a page right out of the Democratic playbook -- the circle as a firing squad.

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Gergen: This election is about the sensible center resurrecting itself and wanting to be heard. Republicans ought to be paying attention to that. They also have to make a fundamental decision about Iraq. There are two alternatives: escalate or disengage. Had the Republicans miraculously saved the House, I'm persuaded that they would have gone for escalation. There were numbers floating around Washington on the order of 100,000 more troops for Iraq. But having lost, the president still doesn't seem prepared to move toward disengagement. Disengaging would mean that by the end of his watch, Iraq could be even more of a shambles than it is now -- and that's his legacy.

How is the Republican candidate in 2008 going to distance himself from that legacy? Do they disavow Bush, or do they have to embrace his record?
Hart: I don't know that there will be anybody who runs in 2008 as a George Bush Republican. It's more a question of whether the right wing of the party can find an accommodation with a GOP candidate like John McCain, Rudy Giuliani or outgoing Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

Gergen: I agree with that. I think this election complicates the Republican search for a candidate in 2008. McCain went into this election as the strongest person in the party, the man who could beat anybody in either party in a national election. And in the next couple of years, he could emerge as the major dealmaker on Capitol Hill. He's the person who could build a bipartisan majority with Joe Lieberman on climate change and with Teddy Kennedy on immigration. If both of those bills get through in this next Congress and he's seen as the person who produced that, it will work in his favor. But it's going to be very hard for him to accept anything less than victory in Iraq, and he's likely to be increasingly isolated in the politics of what's coming. People want to start closing the book on the past and start looking at new people, new blood, new faces -- and that does not work in his favor.

Hart: McCain is the clear front-runner. His path is enormously complicated not only by this election and what role he will play in the upcoming Congress but also by his age and temperament. He could easily be the Howard Dean scream of 2008 -- one remark replayed a thousand times that essentially changes everything. Giuliani also has tremendous appeal out there, but his positions on social issues are antithetical to the Republican core. The most intriguing GOP candidate right now is Romney -- he has a real potential to emerge.

What about the Democrats -- how does this election affect Hillary Clinton?
Hart: One of the elements that comes out of this election is that voters are looking for authenticity. Clinton is one of the smartest people, but I'm not sure she comes across as genuine. She's seen more as calculating. She is the decided front-runner, but there are an awful lot of Democrats who are wondering if she can win. By contrast, I think Barack Obama is the most intriguing candidate for 2008. In my lifetime, only one other candidate approaches him, and that's Robert Kennedy. He has that same magnetism that attracts people to him. The issue for him -- indeed, for every Democrat post-9/11 -- is not going to be race but experience. Democrats are more likely to look in what I call the middle circle of tested people, whether it's a Joe Biden or an Al Gore or a John Edwards, rather than the outer circle of an Evan Bayh or a Tom Vilsack or a Bill Richardson, people who have never really been tested.

Gergen: A funny thing happened on the way to this election. Six months ago, all of us would have assumed that the day after this election was over, the clear front-runner would be Hillary Clinton. Instead, we woke up the day after the election with Democrats shopping. They're not certain yet. In a place like Iowa, there's a lot more talk about Barack Obama than there is about Hillary Clinton. It's much more fluid than we ever expected.

Where do Gore and Edwards stand?
Hart: If it's not Hillary, they become exceptionally formidable. Edwards has a very good ear for where America is at -- he's been the best politician on post-Katrina. Gore had probably the best 2006 of any Democrat, with the exception of Barack Obama.

Gergen: Gore is the sleeper candidate. If it's not Clinton or Obama, he's the guy. He's a very powerful and attractive candidate, because he has the gravitas and the experience, he can handle the international stage, he's made the environmental issue his own, and he was right on the war. He's the guy in waiting, but he has to find a way in.

The youth vote was up from twenty percent in 2002 to twenty-four percent this year. What do you make of that?
Gergen: That's very important. This election was one of the healthiest exercises of democracy we've had in a long time. The Republicans were held accountable. Had the Republicans -- after mismanaging the war, after mismanaging Katrina, after allowing all these scandals to creep up -- had they still won, the degree of cynicism, especially among the young, would be enormous. The younger generation would feel, "It doesn't make any difference, politics is a corrupt game, you can't have your voice heard." This election, more than any in the last fifteen years, has given the younger generation a sense that if you get out there, you can make a difference. An entire younger generation was rejecting politics. They wanted social change, but they didn't see politics as a way to achieve it. Now there's hope.

When all is said and done, how will Bush be remembered politically?
Hart: The Bush presidency will be at the bottom of the heap, period. It will be not only a presidency without accomplishments but a presidency that put America on the wrong track. This is an administration that knew how to play politics but didn't understand the sweep of history. The next administration and the administration after that will be digging out from everything that Bush has left us in. Iraq, civil liberties, human rights, basic domestic policies -- in each and every case, they played the political card rather than the American card.