At the beginning of this century, in the spring of 2001, before the September 11 attacks and just after the dispute over Florida’s electoral votes—and the outcome of the 2000 presidential election—was settled by the Supreme Court, I wrote an Introduction for the 2002 Almanac of American Politics, entitled “The 49 Percent Nation.”1 It began by noting that the percentages of total votes cast for re-electing Bill Clinton in 1996, for Republican and Democratic candidates for House of Representatives in 1996, 1998 and 2000 and for presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000 were, rounded off, 49, 48, 48, 49, 49, 49, 48, 49, 48. Each party came up just short, but within shouting distance, of 50 percent of the vote.
Two decades and two years later, American voters have been repeatedly producing similar results. They no longer give landslide re-elections to presidents credited with peace and prosperity, as they did when most voters had living memories of the Great Depression and World War II. No presidential candidate has won anything like Ronald Reagan’s 59 percent of the vote in 1984 and none has even topped George H. W. Bush’s 53.4 percent in 1988. Barack Obama did come close twenty years later in 2008, with 52.9 percent, but in 2012 he was re-elected, as was George W. Bush in 2004, with just 51 percent of the vote. In 2016 and 2020 Democratic nominees Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried the popular vote, with 48 and 51 percent, but Clinton lost an electoral vote majority by a total of 77,736 votes in three states while Biden won an electoral vote majority by a total of 42,918 votes in three states—microscopic percentages (0.06 and 0.03 percent) of the 137 million and 158 million votes cast.
Contests for the House have also remained close. While Democrats have won the presidency in four out of seven elections in the three decades starting in 1994, Republicans have won House majorities in 11 of 15 congressional elections during that time. The popular vote, however, has been excruciatingly close: by my count, Republicans have averaged 48.3 percent of the House popular vote, Democrats 48.2 percent.
These results are in vivid contrast with the four decades from 1952 (when turnout first spiked upward with full participation by the G.I. generation) through 1992. When that period began, it was conventional wisdom that Democrats enjoyed a national popular majority, based on their five consecutive presidential victories from 1932 to 1948 and the congressional majorities they won in every election except one (in 1946) between 1930 and 1950. But the last three of those presidential victories may have owed more to foreign policy during the wartime decade of the 1940s, and their congressional majorities owed much to their near-total sweep of the 124 to 140 seats of the 14 states of the South. As the 1952-92 period went on, the conventional wisdom shifted, to the idea that Republicans had a national lock on the presidency and Democrats a natural lock on the Congress, or at least the House of Representatives. Republicans won seven of ten presidential elections from 1952 to 1988, and by an average popular vote majority of 6.1 percent. But Democrats won majorities in 20 of 21 House elections from 1952 to 1992, and starting in 1958 they won House majorities of at least 243 seats, 25 above the majority of 218. By way of contrast, Democrats’ popular vote majorities in presidential elections from 1992 to 2020 were lower by an average of 3.7 percent, and starting in 1994 Democrats won more than 243 House seats only once (in 2008) and Republicans also only once (in 2014).
Michael Barone, “The 49 Percent Nation,” The National Journal 33, no. 23 (June 2001): 1710. https://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/articles/barone.htm.
Closely divided presidential and congressional elections have produced divided government—with presidents facing one or both houses of Congress controlled by the opposition—58 percent of the years between 1992 and 2022. That is actually less than the 64 percent of the time with divided government in 1952-1992, when Republican presidents routinely faced Democratic Congresses. In 1992-2202, Democrats have won trifectas—control of the White House, Senate and House—just three times, in 1992, 2008 and 2020, and in each case lost it two years later. Republicans’ trifectas last a bit longer—for the sixth months after 2000, then after the 2002 and 2004 elections, and again for the two years after 2016. But during most of the last 30 years, both parties have believed, plausibly, that they have had a chance at a trifecta in the next presidential year, and so have been reluctant to support bipartisan compromises when it seemed possible they could get more than half a loaf soon. In 1952-92 it was obvious that compromises had to be worked out between Republican executives and Democratic legislators. In 1992-2022 officeholders have had to deal for at least two and no more than six and a half years with each of all eight possible combinations of Republican or Democratic White House, Senate and House.
As I wrote 22 years ago, so it is today, “We haven’t had such stasis in successive election results since the 1880s, which was also the last decade when a president was elected despite trailing in the popular vote, and when the Senate was equally divided between the two parties.” That was a time of high voter participation, which we have also seen increasingly in this century, and of strongly held partisanship, based on fundamental issues some of which were economic—the tariff—but the most divisive of which were cultural—where voters stood on the Civil War and Reconstruction. The electoral stasis of the 1880s ended, however, in the 1890s, when events and politicians raised new issues and created different lines of division. Republicans abandoned the struggle for Black Americans’ rights and, even as industrial innovation produced new urban masses, William Jennings Bryan seized control of a laissez faire Democratic party with a demand for inflationary silver coinage. William McKinley responded with a program of sound money and orderly growth, and in 1894 and 1896 Republicans emerged for the first time since the party’s founding in 1854 with a reliable majority lasting with few exceptions for a long generation. It was strengthened by a nationalism symbolized by construction of the Panama Canal (still politically resonant in the 1970s) and by recoil against Democrats from the inflation, recession, hard-fought strikes and anarchist bombings in the two years after World War One. Bryan’s vision of a nation of virtuous but debt-ridden farmers turned out to be, in a country rapidly urbanizing, at a competitive disadvantage against McKinley’s vision of a nation of a vigorous urban working class; and Bryan’s pacifism and isolationism proved less attractive than Theodore Roosevelt’s vision of a nascent superpower exerting international influence through a growing navy and proactive diplomacy.
No such vision has secured enduring majority support in the three decades starting in the 1990s. Instead, the United States has continued to be a 49 percent nation politically, even though political alignments have not remained static. As new issues have arisen and novel candidates have emerged, the electoral gains one party has made have been offset, if not instantly than at least rapidly, by countervailing electoral gains for the other. In Newtonian terms, to every reaction there has been something like an equal and opposite reaction. The result has been significant changes in the political map but a continuing close balance nationally.
Thus Bill Clinton’s major gains over previous Democratic presidential candidates, symbolized by his double-digit percentage margins in California, the nation’s largest state, whose electoral votes Democrats won just once in the ten elections between 1952 and 1988, were offset by his weaker showing, relative to his fellow Southern moderate Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, in the 14 states of the South. Carter in his first campaign carried 13 of them, Clinton only 6. Similarly, Newt Gingrich’s Republicans’ smashing surprise capture of the House in 1994, the first time in 40 years, owed much to the capture of Southern districts whose voters had long voted Republican for president. In 1996, Clinton’s moderate stands on crime and welfare helped Democrats make significant gains in affluent parts of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, while Republicans’ conservative stands on cultural issues like abortion provided the potential for significant gains in modest-income areas outside big metro areas. The long-term effect of these changes can be gauged by comparing Bill Clinton’s performance in 1996 with Hillary Clinton’s two decades later in 2016. Hillary Clinton won 61 percent in California, 10 points higher than Bill Clinton’s 51 percent there. Her popular vote margin in the state of 4.3 million accounted for all of her national popular vote plurality and more, and dwarfed Bill Clinton’s 1.3 million margin. But in the interior of the country the trend went the other way. Bill Clinton carried every state touching the Mississippi River except Mississippi and every state touching the Ohio River except Indiana, while Hillary Clinton lost every one of those 13 states except Illinois and Minnesota.
Seven of those interior states switched to support George W. Bush in 2000, including Al Gore’s home state of Tennessee and perennially Democratic West Virginia; had he carried either one, Gore would have been elected, with no need for any recount in Florida. Those seven states, with 51 electoral votes in 2024, joined 13 others which have always voted Republican since 1992, with 104 electoral votes, for a twenty-first century Republican bloc of 155 electoral votes. Another 15 states (except for one of Maine’s electoral votes) plus the District of Columbia, have constituted a faithfully Democratic bloc with 193 electoral votes. That leaves 15 states (and the other of Maine’s electoral votes), with 190 electoral votes that have cast their electoral votes for both parties in the elections from 2000 to 2020.
In the Introduction to the 2002 Almanac, with the 2000 election results in mind, I identified “the demographic factor [that] separates voters more than any other as religion, to which I would add the degree of religiosity within each sectarian group,” and that applied to the first dozen years of the new century as well. George W. Bush emphasized his evangelical faith, while Al Gore did not echo Bill Clinton’s ready familiarity with religious themes. Partisan alignments scarcely changed in five years, as Republicans maintained exceedingly narrow majorities in the House of Representatives and only three small states (IA, NH, NM), each decided by a point or two, changed their electoral votes between 2000 and 2004. This stasis was all the more remarkable given the 16 percent rise in total turnout, the biggest increase since 1952 and almost but not quite equaled in 2020. Some good government advocates assume that high turnout is driven by satisfaction and consensus; these results suggest it is a product of polarization and conflict.
These patterns were altered after Americans were repelled by scenes of chaos in the streets—the streets of New Orleans in 2005, the streets of Baghdad in 2005 and 2006, and on Wall Street in 2008. Democrats won congressional majorities in 2006 and gained the post-1992 high water mark in the presidential and congressional contests of 2008. Barack Obama, after narrowly defeating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, shrewdly and successfully targeted not only five states which Bush had carried narrowly in 2000 and/or 2004 (FL, IA, NV, NM, OH) but also four states (CO, IN, NC, VA,) which had voted Republican in 1996 as well as 2000 and 2004 but where large Democratic gains could be made among upscale and relatively secular upscale suburbanites and/or among previously relatively unorganized black populations. As with Bush, so with Obama, the incumbent president was re-elected with just 51 percent of the popular vote and with only a few states (IN and NC in 2012) changing parties, but with the distribution of popular and electoral votes in those years putting Republicans at a disadvantage: Bush’s 51 percent netted him only 286 electoral votes while Obama’s 51 percent netted him 332.
If Obama’s victory in 2008 was a surprise, Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 was an astonishment. Within months of his ride down the escalator in the Trump Tower, Trump had jumped to the lead in a 16-candidate contest for the Republican nomination. He eschewed many generally accepted rules of conduct—calling his opponents insulting names, declining to promise to support the eventual party nominee—he also renounced the positions of previous Republican leaders, opposing the Iraq war, attacking free trade agreements, and criticizing policies permitting high levels of immigration. He did staunchly oppose abortion, but divided Republican primary and general election voters not so much on lines of religion but on education. The 2008 and 2012 contests for the Republican nomination came down to battles between candidates (John McCain, Mitt Romney) supported by suburbanites in large metropolitan areas and candidates (Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum) supported by residents of the small non-metropolitan counties beyond. As I wrote in March 2016, however, in primaries Trump fared best in places with low social connectedness (Nevada, West Virginia) and worst in places rich in community organizations (including but not limited to churches) and social connections (Mormon Utah, Dutch-American Grand Rapids).1 In the 2016 general election, he ran behind earlier Republican nominees among white college graduates and ahead among non-graduates—in geographical terms, behind other Republicans in million-plus metro areas, especially in their affluent, high-education suburbs. At the same time he ran ahead, in some cases far ahead, of other Republicans beyond those metro areas, in sparsely populated rural and small town counties with relatively few college graduates. These patterns were perhaps fortified by Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of half of Trump voters as “deplorables” and by her fashionable-Brooklyn-based campaign’s apparent assumption that non-metropolitan blue collar voters in the factory and farm belts of the Midwest and Pennsylvania were locked into voting Democratic as they had for Al Gore, John Kerry, her husband and even Michael Dukakis in 1988.
Just as George W. Bush had switched 112 electoral votes from Democrats in 2000 and Barack Obama switched 105 electoral votes from Republicans in 2008, so Donald Trump switched 100 electoral votes from Democrats in 2016—though by agonizingly small and almost entirely unpredicted margins. Florida and Ohio switched, as they had in the last two open races. So did Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, long thought to be part of an impregnable “blue wall,” but which in fact had given Democrats only 1, 2 and 3 percent margins in 2004. Iowa, the largest state with no counties in a million-plus metro area, and very marginal in 2000 and 2004, gave Trump a 9 percent margin, the north woods Maine 2nd congressional district a 10 percent margin. As I wrote in December 2016, the key movement in the 2016 campaign was in the “outstate” Midwest and Pennsylvania counties, where working class consciousness and union loyalties had kept people voting Democratic for years, but where Trump’s anti-free trade, anti-illegal immigration prevailed.
Trump’s three predecessors had each won re-election with popular vote percentages hovering around 50 percent and with patterns of support very close to those in their initial victories. Just five states switched parties in 1996, three in 2004, two in 2012. Switches cost Bill Clinton a net 9 electoral votes, gained George W. Bush a net 8, and lost Obama a net 26. But switches were fatal for Donald Trump, a candidate who had not won a popular vote plurality and whose 2016 margins in three critical states with 52 electoral votes were fractions of 1 percent. He lost all three—MI, PA, WI—by similar margins in 2020. He also lost Arizona and Georgia, which had not voted for Democratic nominees since the 1990s. In both, high-education voters moved toward Democrats as their counterparts in the Northeast and California had started doing a quarter century before, and in Georgia Democrats profited from an increasing number of black voters, many of them migrants from population-losing Northeast or Midwest metro areas.
Similar patterns are apparent in congressional elections. For the 2006 and 2008 elections, House Democratic campaign chairman Rahm Emanuel (later White House chief of staff, two-term mayor of Chicago, now ambassador to Japan) ran candidates of all ideological stripes and Michael Barone, “Does Lack of Social Connectedness Explain Trump’s Appeal?” Washington Examiner (March 2016). https://www.aei.org/articles/does-lack-of-social-connectedness-explain-trumps-appeal. Michael Barone, “Donald Trump and the Outstate Midwest Redraw the Partisan Lines,” Creators Syndicate (December 2016). //www.creators.com/read/michael-barone/12/16/donald-trump-and-the-outstate-midwest-redraw-the-partisan-lines raised House Democrats to their highest number of seats, 253 seats, since 1992. Democrats’ fortuitous and, it turned out, temporary capture of 60 Senate seats enabled Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pass by narrow majorities (60 votes overcoming cloture, 219-212) the legislation Republicans characterized as Obamacare until, after Obama left office, it gained popularity in polls. As Pelosi surely understood, many Democrats in Republican-leaning districts were defeated in 2010, and as a result the House’s Democratic Caucus and the Republican Conference have become more ideologically unified in the years since.
“Now we have,” I wrote with some exaggeration in a perhaps ill-tempered moment in December 2016, “a downscale Republican party and a Democratic party confined to its coastal and campus cocoons.” The Democratic party is heavily dependent on the Northeast and the West Coast (defined as the three Pacific Coast states plus Hawaii), which produced in the 2024 allocation 187 Democratic and only 1 Republican electoral vote. Similarly, in 2022, those 15 states elected 116 Democrats and only 39 Republicans to the House. In contrast, the balance of 2024 electoral votes in the other 35 states—the South and Midwest and mountain West—were heavily Republican, 234 to 116 in 2020, 287 to 63 in 2016. In 2022 those states elected 180 Republicans and 97 Democrats to the House. In contrast to the 2004 and 2012 elections, Republicans have had more recently an advantage in both the Electoral College and the House because Democratic votes have been so heavily clustered in central cities, sympathetic suburbs and university towns. But that Republican advantage may be diminishing, as many non-metropolitan districts become even more heavily Republican, while Democratic percentages have been declining among Hispanics and blacks in central cities and nearby suburbs.
A learned political observer at the beginning of the 1990s would be surprised at the political scene today. Surprised that Democrats were competitive, with something of an advantage, in presidential elections; surprised that Republicans were competitive, with something of an advantage, in congressional elections and were holding significant majorities of state legislative seats. Political observers familiar with the conventional wisdom that began to emerge in the 1950s and was fully developed in the 1980s, would be surprised to see the Democrats as the party favored by Wall Street and West Coast elites, in the affluent suburbs and among the highly educated, appealing sometimes loudly to the secular and the unchurched. They would be surprised to see the Republicans as the party favored by downscale Americans, by blue collar workers and those in struggling and left-behind communities, by white evangelical Protestants and tradition-minded Catholics, by whites without college degrees after two generations of increasing higher education enrollment, and with apparently increasing support from their Latinos and black counterparts. These surprising developments had come about as, one by one, talented political entrepreneurs like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, disciplined presidential candidates like George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and unpredicted and unpredictable political innovators—hucksters?—like Donald Trump and experienced political warhorses like Joe Biden chipped off part of one party’s coalition only to see dismayed groups in their own coalition chipped off by the other side.
Yet in the yellowing pages of past political ephemera one can find the forebears of the parties that have resulted from the Newtonian actions and reactions of the past three decades. Two elected politicians of modest dimensions appeared in the first volumes of The Almanac of American Politics half a century ago, both elected from constituencies in that least typical but always prominent redoubt of American political life, New York City. One was Democratic Congressman William Fitts Ryan, scion of a prominent Upstate New York family, graduate of Princeton and Columbia, opponent of the Tammany Hall machine, first elected to Congress from Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side in 1960, one of the few members to vote to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee and the first House member to speak out against the Vietnam war. Ryan was the prototype of political scientist James Q. Wilson’s 1962 book, The Amateur Democrat, a liberal crusader representing an affluent and highly educated electorate: a sliver of the Democratic party in those days, its dominant electoral and intellectual force now.
The other was Republican Congressman Paul Fino, a Republican who represented the then heavily Italian-American eastern quarter of the Bronx, a liberal Republican who supported Social Security and Medicare and a cultural conservative who opposed the policing policies of Manhattan-based liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay. After 16 years in Congress, Fino retired in 1968, for the usual reason then in New York to take a sinecure judgeship, and so was not a subject for the first Almanac that first appeared in November 1971. But he employed and his politics influenced the young Kevin Phillips, drafts of whose The Emerging Republican Majority helped guide Richard Nixon’s successful campaign in 1968 and which, after its publication as a book in 1970, forecast with startling accuracy the majority coalitions of Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Phillips foresaw how white ethnics in places like his native Bronx (and his younger contemporary Donald Trump’s Queens) would swing Republican in response to the tripling of crime and welfare dependency, and out of dislike of elite liberals like those behind Lindsay and Ryan. Phillips decried Republicans’ free market economics in the Reagan and Bush years
Paul Fino retired from politics at 55 in 1968 and William Fitts Ryan died in office at 50 in 1972, but their politics survived years in the wilderness until it arguably came to characterize the dominant forces in the two parties today. Which raises the question: which two politicians profiled in this edition of The Almanac of American Politics will provide the template for their parties fifty years from now?