Election Watch
November 4, 2004
Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording
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Noon |
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Panelists: |
Karlyn H. Bowman, AEI |
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Norman J. Ornstein, AEI
William Schneider, AEI |
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Proceedings:
MR. GLASSMAN: Welcome to the final Election Watch or we should say election watched for the 2004 election.
As I guess most of you know, President Bush was reelected on Tuesday, by a margin of almost 4,000,000 votes. He's the first President to receive a majority of the votes cast in the Presidential election since his father did it in 1988, and before that--actually, there hasn't been a Democrat who's done it since 1976.
And, as the New York Times pointed out today, or actually as Matthew Dowd pointed out to the New York Times today, the - he is the first president of either party since Franklin Roosevelt to be reelected while gaining seats in both houses. 55 Senators now, up from 51. And what 331 something like that--231 house members.
Those are--you can't see this, but I'm going to hold it up anyway, but I think the most dramatic part of this victory can be seen visually in the map that's on page A-28 of the Washington Post this morning, which shows--people here can see it, but you can't--that shows the red states--the red counties and the blue counties here.
Essentially, it looks like the Democratic Party has been reduced to enclaves kind of around the edge of the country, as if they're all trying to get out, but they were stopped at the border. That's not a partisan comment.
But I think it does reflect part of the problem, which we may want to discuss today. I only have one comment, and then I'm going to turn it over to the experts.
My comment is that there has a been a secular change in American politics that began around 1980 that has been quite dramatic. And, you know, I think the reasons that President Bush won this time that are specific to this race.
But when you look at the sweep of the last 25 years, something major has changed since 1980. In the 48 years between 1932 and 1980, Democrats held the White House in two-thirds of those years, and held Congress in all but four.
In the 24--well, let's count Bush's term--in the 28 years since, Republicans will be in the White House for 20 of those 28 years. They will have held the Senate for 16 out of 26 years and the House for 12 years in a row. And not only that, but state legislatures are now at parity, roughly at parity. In 1990, Democrats held majorities in both houses of 30 state legislatures; Republicans six.
Republicans now have 30 governorships; Democrats 20. And of those 30, those 30 include the four largest states in the country.
Something important has happened, and I don't think it has--it goes beyond the particular candidate in the 2004 election.
But let's talk about the 2004 election. And are you ready, Norm? Oh, Oh. I'm sorry. Karlyn is going to go first.
Karlyn Bowman is a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Karlyn Bowman.
MS. BOWMAN: Thank you very much, Jim. I'd like to begin this morning by thanking the conference center. As you probably all know, it takes an enormous amount of work to get ready for these sessions overall, and the conference staff is absolutely indispensable to us in getting ready or election watch.
I'd also like to give a special word of thanks to Brian O'Keefe and Mike Billet. Those are our research assistants, and they're in large part responsible for this hand out that you have before you. It has a lot of very interesting information, and especially the information on the back, looking at exit poll subgroups from the 1980 election on. That will be, I think, very valuable for you to study when you go back to your offices later today.
In the penultimate Election Watch session, we hand out a ballot, and quite a number of you returned the election ballot with your predictions, and one person had an almost perfect record of prediction. And this is somebody who's been attending Election Watch for many years, and we'd like to think that his prescience is a result of his attendance at Election Watch, but I see him in the audience today. Ed Williamson, could you raise your hand?
[Applause.]
An absolutely perfect record of prediction overall.
Let me begin by saying a word about the final pre-election polls. We've heard a lot about the polls in this election, and we've printed all the final results in the top left hand corner of the hand out. For the most part, as the hand out shows, they did a very good job. The Pew Research Center for the People in the Press called it right on the nose. But several others were very close overall.
Let me now talk about some of the actual exit poll results. In our first Election Watch this season, I talked about a Gallup release that showed the country at a rare moment of partisan parity. Gallup looked at the result of 40,000 interviews taken in 2003, and found the country divided: 45.5 percent Republican; 45.2 percent Democrat. This represents a significant gain for the GOP from a generation ago. In Harris' data on the partisan identification measure, the Democrats had a 21-percentage point lead in the 1970's.
Now, party ID is important, but issues and candidates are more important. But your partisan identification anchors you as you think about politics throughout the campaign. On election day, just as in the Gallup poll from January, the electorate was divided, once again, down the middle, absolutely evenly; 37 percent of voters were Republicans and 37 percent were Democrats.
In the last several elections, Democrats have outnumbered Republicans ever so slightly on that measure.
On ideological identification, most Americans call themselves moderates, but once again, conservatives outnumbered liberals 33 to 21 percent.
Voters' views on ideological identification don't look that much different from the general population's views, and those views have not changed in 30 years. Although Massachusetts liberal may not have had the sting in 2004 that it had for Michael Dukakis in 1988, it clearly contributed to Kerry's defeat.
Earlier this year, I talked about Ben Wattenberg's book, the Real Majority, written in 1970. In it, Ben and his co-author, Dick Scammon, talked about what they called the social issue. Today, we call it the values issue. And we saw its importance not only in the exit polls, but also in many initiatives and referenda around the country.
You could see it when Californians struck down easing the three strikes and you're out law; when Alaskans voted against legalizing marijuana; and when Berkeley, California, residents voted against legalizing prostitution.
MR. GLASSMAN: But that was close.
MS. BOWMAN: That's true. It was close.
Last night, I heard two commentators, Jim Lehrer of the Lehrer Show, and Aaron Brown of CNN, asks us how the media could have missed the emergence of the values issue. I'd like to ask where these reporters have been.
A number of observers have suggested that the big turnout of White evangelical Christians propelled the values issue to the top. They certainly may have contributed to it, but concern about moral values, as Ben Wattenberg, showed many years ago is not new, nor is it only tied to religion. Let me explain.
The exit poll consortium asked voters which issue mattered most to them in casting their votes. This is something they've done in all recent elections. But this year, for the first time, the poll included a category, moral values. Twenty-two percent said it was the most important issue to them in casting their vote. It edged out other issues that the exit pollsters listed. The economy and jobs was mentioned by 20 percent. Terrorism by 19 percent, and Iraq by 15 percent.
But there is another national exit poll, and this one is done by the Los Angeles Times. The Los Angeles Times exit poll has included moral values in its 2004, 2000, and 1996 exit polls, and in all of those years, moral values was the top issue for voters. So, this is not new.
The values issue is much more than gay marriage. It's about crime, drugs, out of wedlock birth, the belief that American values aren't as strong as they were in the past, the belief that it's harder to raise children into crass culture.
Values issues have contributed to one of the biggest gaps in our politics, and that is the marriage gap. Married voters, and especially married voters with children, look more Republican than unmarried voters. 9/11 may have produced some additional security moms, but married women, like married men, look pretty Republican to begin. The marriage gap is much larger than the gender gap.
In one of the earlier sessions, we talked about three big important groups: independents usually vote for the winner. In this election, they didn't. They broke just barely for Kerry, someone that they had supported throughout this election campaign.
Catholics, another important swing group, with a perfect record in recent elections, broke for Bush this year. Religiosity, that is, how actively people live their faith, was, again, extremely important. Sixteen percent of Americans attend church more than weekly, and 15 percent never. These two groups were mirror images of one another.
Jews in this election gave Bush only a slightly larger share of their votes than they had in 2000.
Bush did better with Latinos in this election than he did four years ago, and he did especially well in - among this group in Florida.
Gallup started tracking attitudes toward lowering the voting age in 1942, when Senator Jennings Randolph first proposed a Constitutional Amendment to do that.
In 1971, newly empowered young people had the legal right to vote, and Gallup found that only 34 percent of this group bothered to register that year.
On many occasions, we've heard that the youth vote would make the difference in the election, and each time it hasn't happened; despite high levels of interest in the 2004 campaign, young people's share of the electorate did not increase.
In terms of the big issues in this campaign, voters, like Americans generally, felt safer from terrorism. The electorate, like the country, was divided about the wisdom of the Iraq War, and how well it was going.
Voters who voted that issue voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. Fifty-four percent of voters thought the war in Iraq was part of the war on terrorism. They voted 80 to 19 for Bush. Those who said it was not part of the war on terror voted 11 to 88 for John Kerry.
Forty-six percent thought the economy as in excellent or good shape. They voted 86 percent for Bush; 52 percent said that it was not good or poor. They voted 80 percent for Kerry.
That's a quick summary of some of the most important exit poll results, and I'll be happy to talk about others in the question and answer series. Thank you.
MR. GLASSMAN: There must be a reason that--I can't remember who you just--those media people--Aaron Brown and somebody else--said that they were shocked about the values issue. Maybe it's--maybe just sort of give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it's kind of a difficult issue to define. Maybe they were thinking of it more, you know, maybe they were thinking more like gay marriage or something like that. Can you define it a little bit in more detail?
MS. BOWMAN: I think it is a much broader issue. I think it includes things like crime, drugs, out of wedlock births, the country is going to hell in a handbasket. It's that cluster of issues that people think of as moral and social values, and it is hard to get a handle on. But it isn't driven strictly by religion or it wasn't driven in this election strictly by gay marriage.
MR. GLASSMAN: Norm Ornstein is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Norm.
MR. ORNSTEIN: Thanks, Jim. I also want to pay a little tribute to Ben Wattenberg, our colleague, who also wrote a book called Values Matter Most. Ben is not always right on the little things, but he is on the big, and that is very significant. But I also do believe this time that if I were Carl Rove, I would send large bouquets of the finest roses to all the members of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, because--
MR. GLASSMAN: [Inaudible] Janet Jackson.
MR. ORNSTEIN: To Janet Jackson, well, Bill Clinton already sent her a bouquet [inaudible]. You're too late with that one. But the fact that we had in 11 states, in particular some of the key battleground states, and in particular Ohio, constitutional amendments on the ballot, initiatives on the ballot on gay marriage, I think did have some impact on turnout this time, and that did make a difference.
And what it did as much as anything was to bring some of those key values issues into a sharp relief at just the right moment, and did it in a fashion that didn't backfire, where it looked as if an Administration had brought them up--the issues or use them.
This was done in a fashion that didn't backfire, where it looked as if the Administration had brought up the issue itself to cynically exploit it. Instead, others brought the issue up so that they could cynically exploit it without having to take direct aim at it, and exploit it simply because it really does resonate with voters.
One other comment. What Karlyn said, and that is the dog that did not bark, which is the younger voters, and particularly the younger male voters. For 20 years, we've had MTV basically alone out there with this campaign to get young people to vote called Chose or Lose. That had no appreciable impact.
This time, we had a dozen organizations pouring large sums of money, lots of prestige, and talent to lighting a spark under young people, ranging through and up to Howard Stern, who made it his crusade, thanks to Janet Jackson, and to an extraordinarily powerful M&M video that was on the Internet and shown on MTV and seen by tens of millions of young people. And it appears to have had no impact on votes. Had larger numbers of young people gone to the polls, it might have made a very significant difference. What we've learned is that registering, if it's not accompanied by motivation, does not result in sharp increases in voting.
We've also learned that voting by mail does not result in substantial increases in turnout unless people are motivated to actually go out and do something about it; and that, while there's no question the Republican Party has, in the last 10 years, transformed itself to develop an extraordinarily impressive get out the vote machine, it's probably just about the equal of what the Democrats and their outside surrogates have.
Where Republicans succeeded this time is they had more motivated voters. You have to get people not only out there, but waiting in line and willing to do it. And I think is a larger number of habitual voters among Republicans, and a greater motivation, some of which was probably sparked by the same sex marriage issue.
Now, some other broader comments, and then a little bit on the policy world as it develops.
What's striking about, to me, what we saw out there is not just the stability of the electorate an the parity, but the stability as we see it throughout the election process. Forty-eight entities in America didn't change from where they were in 2000. We had only three switches.
The first one, which was the only one we had through most of the evening was one that went in Kerry's direction--New Hampshire. And then, in the wee hours of the morning, we had Iowa and New Mexico by very narrow margins switch from Gore to Bush. But that's not a sign of very significant change.
Of course, going into the evening, Bush had another large advantage that had come from the reapportionment occurring after the 2000 elections. Florida gained two seats. Texas gained two seats. I mean, two electoral votes. Colorado, Georgia, and North Carolina each gaining one, while Pennsylvania and New York each lost two. And Wisconsin, Illinois, and California each lost one.
So that map of where--California, I'm sorry--I can't remember who else lost the single seat.
What we're talking about is almost exclusively population shifts moving towards red states from blue states. That's been going on for a long time. It is likely to continue in the 2010 Census, and it will add to the hurdles that Democrats will have in presidential politics, even in a country that is at parity in terms of partisan identification.
Now, at other places in the election, this was not simply a uniform, if small, shift towards Republicans, which clearly showed up in small gains in the House, very significant gains in the Senate, as well as a popular vote change that was quite striking that moved from a 500,000 vote deficit to a three and a half plus million dollar--million vote surplus for President Bush.
In the state legislative chambers, Democrats actually picked off three chambers held by Republicans in states carried by Bush, in the North Carolina House, the Colorado Senate and House. And let me note that in Colorado, while Bush easily carried the state, the Democrats gained--took over a Senate seat from Republicans, took over a House seat from Republicans. The congressional delegation there went from 7-2 Republican to 5-4. They took away the State House and the State Senate. It's the first time that Democrats have held the legislature in Colorado since 1960. And the Democrats and progressives were three for three on key initiatives involving taxing specific services.
So, there, plus the overall movement of state legislative numbers actually worked modestly to the benefit of Democrats, but mostly just at a point of moving towards emphasizing the parity that exists at all levels of our political process, but with the structural advantage for Republicans in the presidential contest. And looking towards 2006, Democrats are no doubt hopeful that this will result in a--the--typical six-year itch. But it is going to be very hard for that to occur, even if there is a shift in the tectonic plates as people begin to turn against an incumbent Administration. Policies aren't working well, and usually you get large internal divisions.
When you look at the House of Representatives, after three successive redistrictings, and if you look, even on your--the chart that we have given out, in terms of the changes in the six-year margin, nearly 50 in the last--in the six-year elections of '58, '66, and '74 for Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon, respectively, and then moving to a change of five in 1986, albeit a different time, but a movement towards the incumbent president of five seats in 1988--1998. Going from typical six-year itch elections of a loss to the President's party, on average going back a long time of 40 seats plus, now to where we're talking in the low single digits.
Now, it can be different, and Newt Gingrich himself has pointed out that 1994, which was a first mid-term that resulted in a Democratic loss of 52 seats, was after a reapportionment that had structured large numbers of safe seats. If voters want real change, they'll throw out safe members. But it's getting harder and harder to make that happen.
We had seven incumbent House members lose in this election, and the number of target seats for 2006, even seats within 10 percent of a change, is dwindling to a small enough number that it will make very hard to see a change in the double digits even. And if you also look at the 2006 Senate races on this map--on this chart, there, too, the numbers work against Democrats, once again, because they did well in the 2000 election that brought Bush in. They gained four seats in the Senate. They have 18 seats, more seats up, including--I'm including Jim Jeffords in this category--to only 15 for the Republicans. This time it was 19 to 15 for the Republicans. And when you look at those states and look at states where there's a potential easy change, and that includes some that may be firmly in the hands of one party or the other, but where we may see a departure, a retirement, or the like, for example, Kay Bailey Hutchinson may very well end up moving to the governorship or running for Governor of Texas, and we know Bill Frist will be leaving the Senate in 2006. But when you look across that board, there are clearly more vulnerable Democratic seats, including West Virginia, where Robert Byrd is likely to be departing, and a state that has moved from a border state now firmly to a southern state, which gave a handy reelection margin to President Bush, and a number of others, Minnesota with Mark Dayton, among them.
So, for Democrats to be able to pick up six seats and gain back the Senate would require something probably on the order of a Great Depression to bring it about. Not likely to happen, and they're going to be stuck for some time in the minority in both houses of Congress.
In the Congress. The shifts in the House are relatively modest overall. We don't know because we have two Louisiana seats that will not be decided for another month. One that had been in the hands of Democrats, and one that had been Billy Tauzin's seat in the hands of Republicans. But if they split, the way conventional wisdom would suggest, it's a Republican gain of three in the House. That was within--most of those observing the House thought that we would probably end up plus or minus three, either way. A modest shift, but obviously now moving the Republicans to a position that gives them a larger margin than they've had since 1946 in the House of Representatives, and a large enough margin, even with the addition of three seats, that they can probably can continue if that is their approach and if President Bush decides that that's the approach he wants them to take to passing, on pretty pure party basis, very conservative measures and then trying to push the Senate as far to the right in what it can do, as it is able to do.
In the Senate, a Republican gain of four brings a change, but not as significant a change as you might think on the surface. When you look at the members leaving, and the ones who are replacing them, on the Democratic side, we have two new members replacing Republicans--Salazar in Colorado replacing Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Barack Obama replacing Peter Fitzgerald in Illinois. That's a shift. Generally, Salazar being a moderate, probably a very modest shift, maybe a half a vote towards the left. Obama a full vote. That's about one and half. And when you look at the Republicans, Johnny Isaacson replacing Zell Miller is actually a movement probably a little bit to the left.
[Laughter.]
Mel Martinez replacing Bob Graham, about a half a vote or a little bit more to the right. David Bitter replacing John Breaux. Not much of a change. Maybe even a little less than half. Richard Burford--John Edwards is a full vote to the right. Tom Coburn for Don Nickles, which leaves now Jim Inhofe in the position where he's the moderate Senator from Oklahoma, which is maybe the most amazing thing about the 2004 elections. From Don Nickles is a move to the right on social issues--and a little bit on economics as well, in a way that may prove to be a little vexing for President Bush, because he will be very strong against spending. And Jim DeMint replacing Fritz Hollings is a half to three-quarters of a move--of a vote--and Thune for Daschle is a full vote. Put it all together, and it's a shift of barely more than two votes in a conservative direction.
The more significant question there is whether the overall dynamic in the Senate, with now 55 seats, the President who's won a clear popular vote margin can use that and exploit it to a point where he can keep filibusters to a minimum and succeed on controversial policy issues.
There, it will be a very interesting choice for President Bush in terms of how he'll govern and for Democrats in the Senate in terms of how they will respond. And I do not think they will develop a proactive policy. They're going to wait and see what President Bush does. His speech yesterday was extraordinarily conciliatory, but I would remind you that he--after we ended our 36-day ordeal in 2000, he very deliberately went to the Democratic Texas House of Representatives chamber to talk about how he had run as a uniter, not a divider; was introduced by the Democratic speaker, Pete Laney, at the time, to underscore that, and to show where we've come since then, it was the same Pete Laney who subsequently led the Democrats to Ardmore, Oklahoma, to protest that had happened to the partisan relations in Austin, and we had, of course, very harsh partisan relationships. Whether we have now a different kind of governing style is an open question, but I think unlikely. And the most interesting question is going to be what President Bush does with what Vice President Cheney called rightly a mandate now in the first six months, when there's an opportunity to do something.
Let me just remind you as well that we have certain characteristics that are almost there for a second-term presidency. There is a usually a drop in initiatives, because they've exhausted their ideas in the first term. That's not going to happen this time, partly because there wasn't much out there on the domestic agenda, but also because George Bush I think is determined to now move forward and make his mark on history. I suspect we'll see a greater push in some of these areas, but if it isn't done within the first few months, it will be very hard to make it happen.
Almost always with a second-term President, there's an increase in hubris, and there is usually some kind of scandal that trips up an Administration along the way, whether it's Watergate or Iran Contra or Bill Clinton's problems, something happens. And I don't know what it will be or if it will be there this time, but I suspect that they're going to have a few more headaches as they move along, including keeping all of their own troops together over a period of time.
As nervousness will increase towards 2006, despite these structural reinforcements that Republicans have, and as you begin to get some of the fishers in a party that we have seen, unhappiness among many conservatives about increased spending and a failure to deficits, divisions over foreign policy that range from the Pat Buchanan types through the neoconservatives to the realists that now that we've gotten through the election may reemerge a little bit more. It will be an interesting challenge ahead, just as great a challenge for Democrats. The replacement of Tom Daschle as leader by Harry Reed means a very different style. But actually, the kind of leader who is particularly appropriate in this kind of a setting, somebody who doesn't have great public skills will not be the chief spokesman on Meet the Press or Face the Nation, but whose skills are in using the rules and procedures to the advantage of a minority, which works in the Senate, even if there is a move made to change the Senate rules. The first sign, of course, of what kind of confrontation we'll have between the parties and what kinds of relationships we'll have may come fairly soon on a Supreme Court nomination, something we can talk about along the way.
MR. GLASSMAN: Applaud. Okay. Go ahead.
[Applause.]
MR. GLASSMAN: We will definitely talk about the Supreme Court nomination. Let me just ask you question because nobody's talked about the campaign.
Do you, Norm, do you think that Kerry could have run a better race?
MR. ORNSTEIN: Yes. But I don't think that--I think in the end, partly because of the popular vote margin, that you can make the case that it was Kerry's campaign that cost him this election. In fact, you know, it could easily have come out, it wouldn't have taken much to have it come to the point where were sitting here wondering how Carl Rove could have been so wrong. You know, we were dealing with a question of relative mobilization and also what was happening in the final week or ten days of the campaign.
But I thought in the end that, while President Bush to a considerable degree tried to make this a referendum on the challenger, that wasn't the basis on which voters -- in the end--voted in the end.
This was a referendum on the incumbent. The extraordinary thing about it was that you had an incumbent who, by almost all the objective standards, should have lost that referendum.
Remember that Matthew Dowd, the President's pollster, has said for more than a year that the figure to look at is presidential approval. If it's 53 or above, we're home free. If it's 50 or below, we're in deep trouble. It was 50 or below. And we had, I think on average in the surveys that I saw, about 56 percent right at the end saying we were on the wrong track. Certainly, it was well over 50.
But this turned out to be a referendum not on the President's performance and the traditional issues or even that larger judgement of whether they thought he was doing such a great job, but on leadership qualities and on the war on terror. And I think a question of whether people were going to take a leap at that moment to make a change given what was out there. For that, I credit the Bush campaign and President Bush himself more than I fault Kerry.
Kerry ran a traditional challenger's campaign. It faltered at many stages along the way, so did Ronald Reagan's in his campaign against Jimmy Carter. Had the conditions on the ground been the same against Bush as they were against Carter, I think we would be talking about a President Kerry coming in. He left it in a position, especially after the debates, where he was there to win if people decided firmly enough that they were ready for a change.
And they weren't, and, for that, I think the Bush campaign, including its mobilization of its base, and the way you frame the issues, had more to do with it than any mistakes that Kerry's campaign made or Kerry himself made.
MR. GLASSMAN: Let's see before Bill gives his presentation whether he agrees with that. I just remember that both of you said in one of the very early sessions of Election Watch that reelections are referenda on the incumbent. And then we saw the incumbent trying to make it a race about the challenger.
And I know that Norm said that, you know, just you wait. Things will change after the debates, and at least it was my impression that, in fact, he was right. But do you agree with Norm that essentially it was a referendum on the incumbent, and there wasn't that much that Kerry himself could have done to change it?
MR. SCHNEIDER: Well, I think he might have reconsidered his decision to go wind surfing. But I agree partly with Norm, especially his last comment about the personal referendum, because I think that was crucial. And let me get to that in a minute.
I think, in part, it was a referendum on Kerry as well as Bush, because of something that Carl Rove did that he emphasized in interviews that hasn't been given enough--well, it's been given recognition.
He defined Kerry as a flip flopper from the very first day. Kerry invited that, of course, by the worst mistake he made, aside from wind surfing, which was to say he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it. The Bush campaign latched on to that as a golden opportunity, and for eight months running, a day did not go by in which they didn't depict Kerry as a flip flopper. That deprived Kerry of an opportunity to do what he needed to do to win the race, which I'll get to in a minute.
MR. GLASSMAN: Okay. Properly introduce Bill Schneider, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. And he does something else at CNN.
MR. SCHNEIDER: Well, among the things I do, which is probably the first question I can answer is I report the exit polls. And, of course, I've been doing nothing but talking about what went wrong with the exit poll for the last day. And I'm here to give the answer, which I've given to many other people, but I'll share it with you. The answer is nothing. Nothing went wrong. The exit poll that was widely disseminated early in the day was the early exit poll. If you take an early poll result before the poll is completed, you're likely to find any crazy thing. And when I briefed my colleagues at CNN about the results, I said be very cautious about this. Some of this doesn't smell right. There are too many females in the sample. It's a very preliminary result. What it showed was Kerry about, I think, three points ahead of Bush; 51-48 I think was the number. The actual result turned out to be just the reverse. That is not--way outside the margin of error. It's a predictable discrepancy early in the result of an exit poll, and, as the day and evening wore on, the exit poll results kept coming in, and the exit poll got more accurate.
What went wrong wasn't the problem of inaccuracy; it was the problem of overreaction. We have the Internet. The early exit poll results, which have no real reliability, got out there on various web sites--bloggers were touting it--and the word spread around the country, and may I add around the world. I was getting calls from Zagreb saying that Kerry was about to win the election. How did this happen? What's going on? Because it got--the Internet is global. And everyone assumed Kerry was going to win. And the Democrats were dusting off their resumes, and the Republicans, including some in the White House, were forlorn and a little despondent and were also dusting off their resumes, as Norm points out. And you had this growing conventional wisdom that Kerry as headed for a great victory. That is the world we live in, ladies and gentlemen. It's nothing wrong with the exit poll. It was a partial result. It was an early result. We look at them all the time. I've been doing it for over 20 years. And you always see that sort of thing, and I alerted my colleagues: do not report this on the air. I can't be responsible for what people say on Crossfire, but our newscasters and analysts were very careful not to make very much of this. So, I simply give that to you that that is a new condition of elections today that we're going to have to figure out some way to deal with.
There were some interesting things, by the way, in the exit poll that I should point out.
Bush did make some serious with a couple of constituencies that should be noted: women, for instance. Gore carried women by 11 points in 2000. This year, they went for Kerry by three points, 51 to 48. That was very close. Bush nearly closed the gender gap, because he made very significant gains with married women, the so-called security moms.
One of his biggest breakthroughs, one that could be very significant for the future, came with Hispanic voters nationwide. He got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. That's nationwide, so it includes a wide diversity--Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans. So, there's a lot of diversity there, but no Republican presidential candidate has ever gotten that much of the Hispanic vote. I think Reagan was the highest, somewhere between 38 and 40 percent in 1984. So, that was a real breakthrough for President Bush to do that well with Hispanic voters.
He did not make breakthroughs with a couple of groups that a lot--that some people thought he might. There was some hope he might do better with African Americans. He did marginally better. He got nine percent of the African American vote in 2000. He got 11 percent this time, which is not much of a breakthrough.
Jewish voters, there was some belief that because of his ardent support of Prime Minister Sharon and for Israel he might do better with Jewish voters. But he did do better. He got 19 percent last time. He got 25 percent this time, but only a marginal improvement.
And I think it's worth noting that Catholics, who are a crucial swing constituency always vote for the winner, especially white Catholics. In 1980--I'm sorry--1960, we had the first Catholic President Ken--candidate for president, John Kennedy. Kerry--first--no, second--first Catholic president, second Catholic candidate, John Kerry being the third.
In 1960, John Kennedy got nearly 80 percent of the Catholic vote. This year, the Catholic vote went slightly for George W. Bush, about 51 to 49. The white Catholic vote, that is non-Hispanic Catholic vote, even more so. So that it's worth noting that the Catholic candidate did not carry the Catholic vote. As usual, the Catholic vote went with the winner, and it wasn't--his Catholicism was not a particular draw for Catholic voters, not at all indeed.
On the issue of values, we noted the exit poll had the fact that moral values were a big issue to a lot of voters, one of the major issues driving people to the polls. I would urge you to be very cautious in interpreting that. Democrats are now adopting the viewpoint that this election was Rove's army of galoots, haters, radical people from all over the country marching to the polls in protest to stem cell research and gay marriage and abortion rights; that somehow this is the revolt of the rednecks, to put it crudely. And Democrats have begun to pick up on this and adopt it as their theory of the election. For evidence, I suggest you read articles on the op ed page of today's New York Times, one by Maureen Dowd, and the other, a rather shrill and hysterical piece by Gary Wills, saying that this was a rollback of the enlightenment in the United States.
[Laughter.]
A rather astonishing piece, but I find that point of view has become dominant among Democrats; that it is Rove's army in tune on the values issue that dominated this election. There is some truth to that. There was a slightly higher turnout among evangelical voters. It's hard to tell because my rather foolish friends in the exit poll business changed the definition of evangelicals this year. So, we can't--do not have a comparison of the evangelical vote in 2000 and 2004 because they changed the way the question was asked.
But as best we can tell, using a definition of church going white Protestants, church going white Protestants were 15 percent of the voters in 2000; 19 percent this time. So, it looks like there might have been a marginal increase.
The turnout increase may have been a little bit overstated overall, however. I'm counting about 115,000,000 voters. It was 105,000,000 four years. Given the population increase, a 10 million voter increase is a sizeable, but probably not hysterical, rise in turnout. It's not a 120; it's about 115,000,000 voters. And, as my colleagues have said correctly, young voters did turn out in larger numbers, but so did everybody else.
Young voters were 17 percent--that is voters under 30 were 17 percent of the electorate in 2000. They were 17 percent of the electorate this time. In order to keep up with higher turnout, they had to turn out in larger numbers to do that. And they did.
The big change among younger voters was last time they were split between Bush and Gore. This time 54 percent of them did vote for John Kerry. So, there seems to have been some modest payoff to the mobilization campaign among younger voters.
But the biggest thing--and I'll go back to Jim Glassman's initial question. Values. The values issue was part of it. And I think you did see evangelicals coming out in large--maybe slightly higher numbers than we've seen in the past.
But the other thing that Carl Rove did was define John Kerry as a flip flopper. And that, I think, was consequential. I've always said, and I've said to this audience, as well as many others, that the way for John Kerry to win this election was to define himself as someone who could deliver what George Bush promised in 2000, and failed to deliver, to be a uniter, not a divider.
That is very difficult to do, to present yourself as someone who can unite the country if the voters see you as flip flopper, as a waiverer, as someone who is inconsistent. He essentially tried to nuance the issues. He had various positions on the Iraq War. But when Americans are looking for someone to unify the country, they're looking for someone who is a straight talker, someone who takes consistent positions. That's what unity means. I would compare the image of John Kerry, who tried to be a unifier and I think present himself as a unifier, and I think failed, with two other major politicians who really do have the image of unifiers. One of them is John McCain; is John McCain, who was handsomely reelected Senator from Arizona with almost 80 percent of the vote on Tuesday and who has the image of a straight talker. No one has ever called John McCain a flip flopper, even though he is the Democrats' favorite Republican, and takes a lot of positions that conservatives--makes their skin crawl. But he is a straight talker, very much unlike the image of John Kerry.
The other is Arnold Schwarzenegger, again not the conservatives favorite Republican, but is considered someone who's strong and forthright and a straight talker. When California voted rather handsomely for John Kerry on Tuesday, Arnold Schwarzenegger had a, among those same voters, a 69 percent job approval rating among California voters. He's a Republican governor; has taken a lot of different--he campaigned for George Bush in Ohio, and gave that speech at the convention, but yet he has a 69 percent approval rating among California voters. Those are personal qualities of McCain and Schwarzenegger and, may I add, personal qualities that John Kerry does not share.
So, for him to present himself as a unifier became all the more difficult when Carl Rove did a very shrewd thing and defined him from day one as the flip flopper.
In the end, I think this election really was a personal vote, and I agree with Norm on that. It was a vote--you know, of confidence in Bush's leadership; in his steadfastness; in his straight talk--even--I mean, a lot of people disagreed with him and his positions on the values issues did divide the country, and I think he did, he did show up as a divider, but it was easier for him to present himself as someone whom Americans could at least respect than Kerry, because at least you knew what he believed. With Kerry, that was just very, very difficult.
So, I think Rove's genius was not simply mobilizing the army of the great unwatched, but it was also in his ability to define John Kerry in a way that he wanted, and to stick with that definition for the entire campaign. And that, I think, contributed to Kerry's downfall.
One piece of good news for Democrats: there was speculation that the Osama bin Laden videotape, which was released few days before the election, might heighten public fear and help Bush. But the evidence from the exit poll, just like our pre-election polls over the weekend, indicated, interestingly, it was quite the opposite.
A third of voters described the bin Laden videotape as a very important factor in their vote, and a majority of them voted for John Kerry. The tape may have reminded voters that bin Laden is still at large, taunting President Bush, despite his promise to get bin Laden dead or alive.
[Tape flip.]
MR. ORNSTEIN: An entity is the single biggest story of this campaign. The Democrats had five senate seats in the South, all open seats they were trying to defend. Going in their goal was to win three of five, their realistic goal. They won none.
And, of course, Florida, which by the measure of those intending to vote in 2000 went for Gore--even, and--take those votes out that nobody would count, but they were still cast, and we get to that 537 vote margin. And this time a handsome victory for George Bush.
And then West Virginia, which seemed to be an aberration in 2000 that became a clear cut, large victory for Bush.
Looking to the future, though, Florida may be the most interesting presidential state. If, you know, we focused on Ohio, because it was so close this time. I'm not sure how much Ohio is a genuinely contestable state at this point. The state of the economy and a number of other things made it move from its normally Republican characteristics.
Florida is fluid, and we at least have some preliminary evidence, I talked to friends in Florida that the Cuban American vote, which has been a very large vote, is now in flux. Kerry did better among Cuban Americans than Gore did from what I can gather, and that's partly because you have younger Cubans who don't have the same political allegiances as their parents and because you had some others who were not real happy with the set of policies that kept them from giving aid to their families in Cuba.
But Bush clearly made very significant gains among non-Cuban Hispanics. Some of that may have been the social issues, but there may be other things going on there, and I think you've got a very substantial group of non-Cuban, non-Mexican Hispanics in Florida, many of them along that I-4 corridor, from Orlando to Tampa, who have not been tethered to a political party. They are up for grabs, and if Bush can solidify those gains, then Republicans may have an even greater bit of traction in Florida down the road.
MS. BOWMAN: Just another point on Florida. Cubans are no longer the dominant Hispanic group in Florida. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans are larger, and, as Norm said, those second generation Cubans don't look like first generation Cubans overall.
I recommend to you an article by Bill Frye in the most recent issue of American Demographics if you want to understand how Florida is changing; a state of extraordinary in-migration, a younger state, much younger than obviously Ohio and Pennsylvania, an important state to watch.
MR. SCHNEIDER: Since we're talking about Florida, a couple things. The Hispanic vote--I think one factor, and this is only a guess is that many Hispanics have ties to the military. They are very much overrepresented in military families and they have a lot of military values.
A second factor in Florida was interesting. We asked people how would you rate the Government's handling of hurricane relief in Florida, and 85 percent said--86 percent said it was great. And they voted 55-10 --
MR. ORNSTEIN: They each got a billion.
MR. SCHNEIDER: Yep. They said they had no problem. The Government responded well to the hurricanes, and those people who thought the hurricane response was fine voted overwhelmingly for George Bush. So, when Norm says the situation in Florida is fluid, he means that literally.
MR. GLASSMAN: Let me ask one question to Norm and Bill and then we'll go to the floor.
Soros Sperling, the guy from Progressive Insurance, it was huge amounts of money that was poured into these 527s on the Democratic side, and also fairly large amounts on the Republican side. It was mostly on the Democratic side. Was there--did you see any effect from that spending, and, if so--if not, why not?
MR. ORNSTEIN: I think certainly there was an effect. If it hadn't been there, we might have seen a different campaign to begin with, and it might have been a different outcome.
A large part of that money went into advertising, certainly. And there, the biggest impact, given the overall mass of advertising, was for local television stations, which made out like bandits in this process.
But a lot of it went into the get out the vote efforts as well. And there--you know, there were massive get out the vote efforts. In the battleground states, you did see sharp increases in voting, but they didn't work the way that they had intended. And once again, it's you can put a lot of money into it, but if people are not motivated, deep down, to vote, and there weren't just enough in this case among the Democrats, it's not going to make the difference for you.
MR. SCHNEIDER: Forty-eight percent of the vote is pretty good. I mean, I think the money did pay off. It made the election close.
MR. GLASSMAN: Questions from the floor. Okay. Fine. One, two, three. There are two microphones. Wait for the microphone and tell us who you are.
MS. WITTMAN: I'm Barbara Bowie Wittman. In 2000, I was a strike force captain in--[inaudible] people who do to get out the vote effort. Like, I haven't heard any observation--about the motivation of the people--get out the vote effort as--voters--because what we got constantly in West Virginia from the folks who talked to us, and how much are they paying you for this. [Inaudible] because we support [inaudible].
MR. SCHNEIDER: Interesting, by the way, one of the factors that has made West Virginia increasingly Republican is the large number of gun owners. I think something like 60 percent of the--71 percent of the families in West Virginia have a gun in the household.
So, if West Virginia is now becoming more and more Republican, there is a reason.
As far as the activists are concerned, I would point to the emotional content of this campaign. Among Republican activists, it was clearly enthusiasm for President Bush. That is real. I think it is deep. He has turned on the conservative base as much as, if not possibly more, than Ronald Reagan did, because he's governed really as a strong conservative president, and I sensed out there, and from the activists I know, absolutely genuine enthusiasm for President Bush.
Among Democrats out there, there was a different emotion. It wasn't enthusiasm for Kerry. It was anger, sometimes even rage. Democrats there--out there were angry, no so much--it was per--a little bit personal, but it was also, when you asked them, when you talked to them, they were angry about Bush's policy. You know, what are you so angry about? They would say, Iraq, stem cell research, Iraq, John Ashcroft, the Patriot Act, Iraq, the Supreme Court, and Iraq. They were angry, really angry, and right now they're kind of beaten, but the anger is still there. Read Gary Wills.
MR. GLASSMAN: Okay. There's a question, actually, over here, was I think the next one.
MS. : [Inaudible] with [inaudible] Norm, you mentioned just in passing the issue of filibuster. I would if you could talk in more detail about that, particularly on fiscal issues.
MR. GLASSMAN: A little musical interlude there.
MR. ORNSTEIN: It was hard to hear. Something about fiscal issues.
MR. : The ability of the Democrats in the Senate to sustain a filibuster, particularly against tax cuts or any other policy that would really add to the deficit.
MR. ORNSTEIN: The filibuster issue becomes a very, very interesting one in a host of ways. And, of course, the real battlegrounds to begin with are on the judicial nominations. And we're going to see I think some tests of that early.
One of the questions that the White House is going to have to deal with, answer, along with its allies in the Senate early on, is if they want to change the rules in January, the easiest way to modify the filibuster is an approach that was actually discussed and very briefly, it was implemented in an earlier era.
It first came up when--actually, Nelson Rockefeller was Vice President during the middle of congressional term, and then it was discussed by President Carter and Vice President Mondale. And it's basically this: the Senate, when it comes to its rules, has a Catch-22 built into them. The Senate has always been viewed as a continuing body, because two-thirds of its members do not change from one election to the next. So, its rules continue in place. And the rules include a provision that a rules change, effectively, requires a two-thirds vote, because it can be, unlike the normal filibuster, it takes two-thirds to break a filibuster on a rule change.
So, you can't alter the filibuster rule unless you have two-thirds going in. What Vice President Rockefeller did at one point, not really understanding what he was doing, was to sit in the chair and rule that the Senate is not a continuing body and that a simple majority can change the rules, as you have in the House of Representatives when it starts anew each Congress. And that's what the Democrats actually contemplated back in he 1970's.
If Vice President Cheney takes the Chair on January 3rd, when the new Senate convenes, and they put the rules into place, and says, there are no rules, and that's a ruling of the Chair that can be appealed and a majority can uphold it, then they could eliminate the filibuster at least for judicial nominations, but that would be, as they call it, the nuclear option.
[Laughter.]
And the reaction of Democrats would be not just to use filibusters on other issues, but to use all the other mechanisms of the Senate, which runs by unanimous consent, to basically clog up the works in a whole host of ways, and to argue that this is a radical transformation, and, this is, once again, the divider not the uniter. It would--there would be a price to be paid for that. Otherwise, they may wait until we see a number of fights over the judicial nominations. Along with that, of course, the weapon the Democrats have in a 55-45 Senate, if they can't get a majority of votes for something, to block something, is to use a filibuster. That's a limited tool. In some cases, remember you're going to have a number of Republican Senators from Lincoln Chafee to Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, and on many issues John McCain and Arlen Specter, George Voinovich, who are not going to go for radical or dramatic changes. That's why the first six months become critical.
If the President has something bold to do, and he does it early, it will be very difficult for Democrats to filibuster that. And I think their ability to filibuster a number of things on the fiscal front are limited.
But if we're talking about dramatic change, like dramatic tax reform, or Social Security, the first thing they're going to do is to see if Republicans will support it. And if there is enough Republican support to get it through, then they may very well turn in that direction.
I think the President when it comes to tax reform, if he pushes something very bold, which by definition will mean undoing a lot of the incremental things that he did in his first term with all the tax cuts, but also means a lot of upheaval in terms of haves and have nots, he may find it just as difficult, as he has on budget questions in the last two years, to keep all his Republicans singing on the same page, as he does having to worry about a Democratic filibuster.
MR. GLASSMAN: There's a question in the back here. Do you want to ask Bill a question?
MS. : Yes. I have a question for Bill.
One of the things that really struck me in the exit polls were the results of a question that asked people when they decided for whom they were going to vote. And, unfortunately, on that question, they didn't use the exact wording that Michigan has used over time. The wording is slightly different.
About nine percent of voters said that they made up their minds on election day or in the last three days of the campaign, and they broke 54 to 43 for Kerry. But the number that struck me, and I just finished going through all the state exit polls one by one, is that in nearly every state, 75 percent or more of voters said that they made up their minds before October. Does that underscore their personal nature of the vote, too, or is it just a--
MR. SCHNEIDER: No. Those are partisans.
MS. : Those are just partisans.
MR. SCHNEIDER: Those are partisans. We find that in election after election, a solid majority of voters, usually two-thirds or more, say I know--knew how I was going to vote in January, honey, if you ask them, and, because they do. And those are--by the way, those are the people--those prevail among early voters. What happens is when you allow early voting, the people who took the polls are people who are the hard-core partisans who just can't wait to vote. And they just--nothing is going to change their minds.
MR. GLASSMAN: They don't call everybody honey, only Bill. So, only Bill. Yes. Go ahead.
MR.: : [Inaudible] Yes. Thank you. I wondered whether the panelists might wish to address what changes in personnel, in composition, to expect in the next Bush Administration. Any idea?
MR. ORNSTEIN: You know, it's the most interesting question we have right now as is always the case in a second term. Who leaves? There's almost a significant amount of departure, often because these jobs are brutal jobs, and people get burned out. But then you also have the President's desire and willingness often to clean house a little bit and to make some changes. This is not a President who likes to clean house. He doesn't like to fire people. He doesn't like to get rid of people in a way that even admit that he made a mistake in the first place. Notice that in the debate, when he was asked about mistakes, he said, well, I made a few personnel mistakes, but didn't identify which personnel mistakes he made--Paul O'Neill.
[Laughter.]
But--so, I don't think we're going to see the President do what many other presidents have done, which is to say to his Cabinet and sub-Cabinet and White House staff, please submit your letters of resignation by noon tomorrow, and then I'll go through them and decide which ones I'm going to accept.
So, I think we'll see a lot of continuity. Some people we know are going to be leaving. It is I think virtually certain that Colin Powell will depart and probably with him a substantial number of people who have served with him in the State Department. The only question I have is whether Rich Armitage, who will depart with Colin Powell from the State Department, might be enlisted for another job.
And if Don Rumsfeld leaves, if I were George Bush, I would think a lot about having a Rich Armitage as a Secretary of Defense, somebody who, by the way, has managed to articulate the Administration's foreign policy at different places around the world more effectively than anybody has been able to do.
But otherwise, I expect wholesale departures from the State Department, and I buy into the notion that the odds on favorite to be Secretary of State would be Jack Danforth, the current United Nations Ambassador. Very well respect on Capitol Hill from all of his service and extraordinarily strong.
With the Justice Department, if John Ashcroft leaves, I would bet on Larry Thompson, who had been the Deputy Attorney General replacing him.
Tom Ridge is going to leave, and I would think there's a very strong chance that his deputy, Admiral Lloyd might replace him.
And Tommy Thompson is leaving. That will be a harder one to pick.
The interesting question for me otherwise is whether the Chief of Staff, who's done a very, very strong job without getting much public attention, Andy Card, decides that he's burned and wants to leave. And if he does, I would think that Josh Bolton or possibly Don Evans, who's very close to the President, would move into that past. But I have no reason to believe he'll leave.
MR. GLASSMAN: Okay. We have lots of questions here. I'm going to try to just do this. One, two, three, four, and we might get to you. I'm sorry. Ben Wattenberg's name has been mentioned, very highly favorably, and I think quite properly several times today.
MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Values matter most. I have one very simple numerical question. I guess Bill and Norm had each mentioned that the Jewish vote did not increase substantially, yet, in the last, according to our chart here, in the last four presidential elections, going back to 1992, the percentage of the Jewish vote went from 11 percent to 16, to 19 in the 2000, and to 25 in this election. Going from 19 to 25 is about a 30 percent increase. And in a couple of those close states--Florida and Ohio--there is a significant Jewish population, not massive, but significant. And I think you undervalued that change. I mean, if you go from 19 to 25 in a single election in a close state, that's not bad.
MR. SCHNEIDER: Well, that's the Frank Lunds [sp?] theory that the Jewish, the gains in the Jewish vote might have turned Florida and Ohio around. We've actually done the calculations. There ain't enough Jews, even in Florida, and certainly not in Ohio to make a difference. And we're talking about, about three or four percent of the national electorate in Ohio, less than two percent in Florida, about five I think. So, it's a tiny, tiny electorate.
It was mostly of interest frankly to Jewish activists who were pledging to--who had pledged to increase Bush's [inaudible]. I think there was a time when they thought they could get--what was the highest Jewish vote was probably Ronald Reagan. Reagan in '84.
MR. : In '80, he got 39.
MR. SCHNEIDER: He got 39 percent of the Jewish vote. They were hoping to break 30 this time. They didn't quite do it. Twenty-five is a disappointment only because, I mean, no one would argue that George Bush has been the most ardent supporter of Israel, but, of course, Jews vote on many, many other issues besides Israel.
MR. GLASSMAN: Okay. Let's see. Yeah.
MR. WOLFSTETTER: John Wolfstetter, Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute.
A question on communications and how the candidates, particularly Bush, reached his audience. Did Bush basically reach his audience primarily through alternative media to the broadcast networks, or did he manage to slip through the filters that the older networks placed up. Do you have any feel for how those messages are getting through, and does it differ very much from how Kerry got his message through?
MR. ORNSTEIN: Boy, I think the answer to that, John, is that there was so much money floating around out there now that they didn't have to pick one media outlet over another. They turned on every single spigot. If you traveled to the battleground states, it's a point I made here before, there were two elections in this country. One where there was virtually no election, which is about three-fourths of the states, and the other where you couldn't escape it no matter what you were doing. If you tried to turn off your television, turn off your computer, and walk out your door to go to Blockbuster to get a video, there were three people lurking out there to grab you to make sure you were registered, to get you to sign a petition. They blanketed broadcast networks. A lot of ads on cable television. A lot of Internet messages. A massive amount of direct mail, where you can target more directly, and also use tougher messages that you simply would never put in a broadcast arena, through surrogates and outlets--churches, union halls, whatever it may be. Neither of them had a monopoly I think on any kind of advertising.
One thing that I thought would happen which is that with the rise of the Internet, direct mail would disappear. Direct mail has declined substantially as a fundraising technique, and I think will continue to do so as the Internet emerges. But as a message technique, it's going to continue to be a very potent force.
MR. SCHNEIDER: One little addition in the list Norm gave. There is one media source that I know Bush used extensively and effectively, and I think Kerry did, too, I'm not so sure about that. Local television news. Bush made himself accessible to local television news quite extensively. For many, many voters, particularly in those battleground states--Ohio, Pennsylvania--their principal source of news and information is local television news, not cable or broadcast, the network, national network broadcasts, but the 11:00 p.m. or five o'clock news that they watch every single day. And Bush was certainly very attentive whenever he went anywhere to the local news media and, my guess is Kerry was too, though I haven't seen the evidence.
MR. GLASSMAN: I think, just because we don't have that much time. I think I'm going to collect questions. So let's just get the questions, and then we'll do the answers. I know these two gentlemen here I had promised. You have any questions back there? Way back there? Way back? All right. Okay. We'll get to you.
MR. BETTS: This is Michael Betts with the German Marshall Fund. I've got a question for Karlyn and Bill. How do you explain the fact that Hispanic support doubled within the last eight years, which is an astonishing number for President Bush, and didn't make any difference in Ohio, and do you think that the Republican Party is going to be able to hold on to almost half of the Hispanic community in the future?
MR. GLASSMAN: Next question.
MR. MITCHELL: Gary Mitchell, from the Mitchell Report. I want to come back to the values thing for a minute and say that before we go sort of drinking the KoolAid on values, and this is a serious question, if they're so central, how do we explain eight years of Bill Clinton and his continued significant popularity?
MR. GLASSMAN: Okay. And then there's a question over here.
MR. MOLINAR: Peter Molinar with Dow Chemical Company. With the retirement of John Breaux, who are the new moderates center of gravity in the Senate, and how will they behave vis a vis their caucus. Democratic moderates.
MS. : [Inaudible] of Capital Insights. Just a question about what's going to happen with the Democrats now. Who's going to lead them and what do they do with all the anger that they feel about George Bush?
MR. GLASSMAN: Okay. Two more questions. One, two. Right. One, two. That's it, and that's all.
MR. : Josh Shepard from Philadelphia. The generic question is judges. There's something delicious about three activists from the Supreme Court of Massachusetts leading, directly or indirectly, to a generation of more conservative judges in the federal courts.
MR. GLASSMAN: And last question. Yes.? Yeah, I got that one.
MR. : Ali Akbarsahani, Korean Embassy. I was wondering if your panelists would be able to talk about the incumbent rule that says the incumbent, if the incumbent has less than 50 percent support, then undecided voters will tend to swing towards the challenger, in which case I think we didn't see that. Could you tell us maybe why?
MR. GLASSMAN: Okay. Chose your questions, Karlyn.
MS. BOWMAN: Okay. I'll take a stab at Hispanics first.
I think this president connected very well with Hispanic voters. I mean, he speaks Spanish, I guess, pretty well, and the polls were pretty clear in the spring and the summer that, again, a socially conservative group, and they are that, like George Bush personally, and I think that's the explanation for that.
MR. GLASSMAN: Were Hispanics important in Ohio? Do you know? No?
Okay. Norm.
MR. ORNSTEIN: Well, a little bit on the values and without getting into great detail. I don't think that means if the values matter most, that automatically the most conservative or evangelical wins.
One element here, though Democrats are going to have to take into account, the faith gap is larger than the gender gap or even the marriage gap, which itself is much larger than the gender gap. Religiosity matters. People who go to church are more likely to be Republicans, and there are lot more of them than people who don't go to church. So, if the Democrats end up defining themselves increasingly as a secular party, and it's--you know, one area where Kerry had a big problem. He is very religious person actually, but never came across that way at all. Tried at the end, but it seemed as if he were straining to do so.
Bill Clinton, for all of his personal problems, is extremely comfortable with religion and the scriptures in ways that resonate with an awful lot of voters and southern voters, and as we saw repeatedly and heard, and it's true, George Bush's language and the choice of terms, the way he approaches issues, are just natural to an awful lot of evangelicals. He doesn't have to say anything for them to understand that he's one of them. And a northeastern Democrat has trouble with that. And that I think is a problem for Democrats. They can supersede some of these other more narrow concerns when other things emerge; and just because values matter most doesn't mean that matters of war and peace or the economy don't matter. It's--the balance and mix just from election to election.
Just a word or two on the moderates. There are still moderates in the Senate in both parties; very few in the House of Representatives. But if you take people like Joe Lieberman and Mark Pryor and Ben Nelson and probably Ken Salazar coming in now, and a number of others who are not reflexive liberals, like Jeff Bingaman, for example, and put those together with the Republicans that I'd mentioned earlier, and a few who are more conservative in their voting records, but are institutionalists, like Dick Lugar, you got a group of people in the middle who may very well provide a counterweight to some of the more dramatic things that the President or the House Republicans want to do.
I think the continuing tensions between the Republican House and the Republican Senate is likely to continue as much in this second presidential term.
MR. GLASSMAN: Bill, actually just taking up on what Norm said. Do you think the results of this election are going to hurt the chance--Hillary Clinton's chances in the next four years if she decides to run?
MR. SCHNEIDER: I think there's a lot of concern that if Democrats believe that they have a values problem, they're going to wonder about Hillary Clinton as a viable candidate. Yeah. I mean, the Democrats' problem is--oh, they got lots of problems. There are too many to list. But --
MR. GLASSMAN: Actually, why don't you talk about that in answer to the question about who will lead, at least who will lead the Democrats now, and where they're going to go--Vietnam?
MR. SCHNEIDER: I don't know. Look. It is not coincidental that the last, well, three, if you count LBJ Democrats elected president, Clinton, Carter, LBJ were all southerners. Massachusetts Democrats, they have elected in one of the--I think the closest election in American history, a 110,000 vote margin. That was a tough one to elect. He made it. They haven't elected one since then. They've nominated two more. The Democrats are painfully aware of that, and, you know, Clinton--I think in Clinton's case, you asked about Clinton, he was--because he was a southerner who had a kind of appeal for religion, I think he was seen as acceptable on the values issue. That wasn't what elected him, of course. He was elected because of the economy, and he was reelected because of the economy. He was seen as probably acceptable on values because of his accent, like Carter.
But he got--you know what got Clinton in trouble? Values. When I interviewed a leading conservative on the air during the impeachment proceedings, I said, you know, Bill Clinton's policies have not been particularly radical. He is best known--his best--his major policy achievements were welfare reform, free trade, and a balanced budget, none of which are very popular with Democrats. Why do you hate him?
And he said, memorably, I hate him because he's a womanizing, non-inhaling, truth shading, Elvis loving, war protesting, draft dodging, gun hating, abortion promoting, gay protecting baby boomer.
[Laughter.]
To which my response was, I see.
[Laughter.]
MR. GLASSMAN: Did he say money?
MR. SCHNEIDER: No. He did not. But the message there was Clinton got elected because of the economy, stupid. He got in trouble because of the values, stupid, because every single issue he mentioned, he didn't talk about balanced budgets and free trade and welfare reform, he talked about values issues.
Now, the Democrats know they have that problem. And I suppose there's beginning of debate. I have it with some of my colleagues. What do the Democrats need? And some of them say, they need an idea. The Democrats have always had an idea. It's an old idea, and it's a little shockworn and dusty. The idea is that the Federal Government should be used to promote economic justice and the Federal Government should be used to promote social justice. Those are great ideas, but they come out of the New Deal and the civil rights revolution, which even Newt Gingrich has paid tribute to as the single accomplishments and contributions of the modern Democratic Party. But they're almost 50 and 80 years old. Is that it?
So, ideas would be--new ideas would be kind of helpful, and I don't think Clinton really made a big contribution. I think what they need is a leader. I mean, Hillary Clinton is automatically I think the leading light for the Democratic Party, but I think there are lots of questions raised.
In this country, and in our culture, particularly in the television age, ideas don't sell themselves. The sell--a personality sells. And remember what I said, I think this election was a lot about personal qualities of leadership. Bush's record was not wildly popular. His approval rating was a little bit below 50 or around 50 percent. The War in Iraq was not the reason he got reelected. He got reelected despite the War in Iraq, which a lot of voters and a lot of Republicans as well have serious reservations about.
The economic anxiety--I'll put it this way: in our exit poll, 46 percent of voters said the economy was in good shape. Four years ago, 86 percent said the economy was in good shape. You had a problem there. You had a problem with the economy. You had a problem with Iraq.
But he got elected, largely because of personal qualities. So, Democrats, you know, if they want to sell any new ideas, they've got to come up with a leader, and that's--you know, aside from Hilary and maybe John Edwards, I don't know who that is, but we never know.
MR. GLASSMAN: Thank you, Bill. A leader and new ideas all the Democrats need. Thank you all for attending these many sessions. We'll see you, and thanks to Karlyn Bowman, especially. And we'll see you in two years. Bye.
