A standing-room-only crowd filled AEI's Wohlstetter Conference Center on November 7 for the final seminar in this year's Election Watch series. The series panel dissected the results of several close races and looked back at the long campaign season.
Karlyn Bowman reviewed the final polling data. She reported that this year's gender gap was the largest to date in a national election and confirmed that this celebrated discrepancy in voting patterns between men and women has become "a permanent feature of our politics." While Robert Dole edged President Clinton among male voters, women preferred the incumbent by a margin of 54 to 38 percent.
Mrs. Bowman added that even more interesting--and more pronounced--than the gender gap is the marriage gap, which was twenty-eight points in this election. Married people preferred Mr. Dole by a three-point margin, but single voters overwhelmingly favored President Clinton.
Norman Ornstein began by commenting on the endless stream of polling data reported before the election. The quantity of polling was unprecedented, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the polls were less reliable than ever. Mr. Ornstein contended that the media have shown no aptitude for distinguishing competent, reliable surveys from bogus ones and that the entire polling profession is likely to be discredited if this shortcoming is not soon remedied. As for the actual election results, Mr. Ornstein observed that the coincidence of President Clinton's reelection with the loss of ground by Democrats in the Senate fit the pattern of the last three instances of presidential reelection (1956, 1972, and 1984). In each case, the president won by a wide margin, but his party lost two seats in the Senate.
Finally, Mr. Ornstein pointed out that almost two-thirds of the 105th Congress will have entered office in the 1990s. Many of these senators and representatives came of age politically after the fall of the Berlin Wall and are largely uninterested in foreign affairs. As a result, he argued that there is an urgent need for foreign policy leadership in both parties.
William Schneider emphasized the strategic use of money in the reelection of both the president and the Republican Congress. On the advice of consultant Dick Morris, President Clinton began to buy television advertising for his campaign a year and a half before the election; the resulting rebound in the polls never faded. This improvement, in turn, made the president look like a winner again and facilitated raising money. The success of this strategy all but ensures that future races will begin earlier than ever.
On the Republican side, Chairman Haley Barbour was widely criticized by members of his party for hoarding money while the AFL-CIO pounded away at the GOP Congress. But by spending those dollars heavily in the final weeks of the campaign, Mr. Barbour may have saved Congress for the Republicans.
Ben Wattenberg took issue with the fairly common view (repeated by Messrs. Ornstein and Schneider) that this was a status quo election. While acknowledging that the voters returned both the president and the Republican Congress to office, he reminded the audience that the latter result confirmed what was universally agreed to be a political earthquake just two years before: the Democrats' long-standing dominance of Congress has ended. In Mr. Wattenberg's view, the first stage of a realignment to the right has been accomplished. Conservative Republicans "captured a major beachhead" in 1994 and held it under heavy fire in 1996.
Mr. Wattenberg also pointed to a little-noticed aspect of the final results in the presidential race. Because Ross Perot won more than 5 percent of the vote, the Reform Party (not just Perot the individual) will receive federal funding in the next presidential election. The establishment of a publicly financed third party could have historical significance.
