George W Bush may be elected to a second term in 2004 but his re-election is by no means a sure thing. After all, Bush is the first president since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to have obtained an electoral college majority while losing the popular vote. If Gore had carried his home state of Tennessee, Bush would not be president and the US and Britain would not be bogged down in Iraq. The US is still a "50-50" nation, with the demographic momentum (created by Democrat-friendly immigrants) favouring the Democrats, in the medium term of a decade or two.
The Republican majority in the US government is an artificial majority, manufactured by the US constitution. The influence of small states is exaggerated in the US electoral college, which chooses the president, and in the US Senate, where Wyoming, with fewer than half a million inhabitants, has as many senators as California with more than 30m. In 2000, more Americans who cast votes for Senate candidates voted Democrat than Republican-and yet Republicans won as many seats in the Senate, because of all of those underpopulated Republican states in the interior.
Even the House of Representatives, the least undemocratic branch of the US government, is rigged in favour of the Republicans. As bizarre as it seems to people outside the US (and to more than a few of us here), the districts of members of the House of Representatives in Washington are drawn by the state legislatures. Republican majorities in the state houses in recent years have rigged districts in favour of Republican candidates.
But one should not exaggerate Republican strength. Precisely because the Democratic vote is now concentrated in a few heavily populated states, the Democrats can lay their hands on lots of electoral college votes. (The electoral vote of each state is produced by adding the number of each state's US senators to the number of members of congress it sends to the House of Representatives). Bush can paint the map Republican on election night and still lose to a Democrat who takes California, New York and a few other populous states in the midwest.
People often vote against candidates, rather than for them, so if enough Americans are unhappy with Bush, it does not matter too much who the Democratic candidate is. This should be borne in mind, since much commentary assumes that the Democrats need a superhuman candidate to have a chance against one of the least impressive presidents in US history.
In every contested presidential primary, media criticism goes through three phases. In the first phase, the Washington-New York-Boston media anoint a middle-of-the-road senator as the front-runner. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts is the anointee. He should be worried, given the fate of the Democratic candidates who were prematurely anointed by the media in the past: Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie and (in 1992) Al Gore.
The "premature anointment" phase will soon be succeeded in media commentary by the "seven dwarves" motif. Pundits will shake their heads, wondering why the country can't produce better candidates than these squabbling nonentities. Needless to say, if Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison and Adams had been forced to give 30-second answers to "gotcha" questions by preening reporters, they would have looked like idiots, too.
Eventually, a front-runner will emerge. The mainstream media, dominated by centre-right Democrats, will then switch to a new theme: the "growing stature" of one dwarf.
Which dwarf will it be? On the basis of fundraising and internet polls, Vermont Governor Howard Dean has emerged as a strong candidate, to the surprise of those who assumed that this would be a race between John Kerry and Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. Nobody should have been surprised. Governors tend to become presidential nominees and presidents: Governor Carter, Governor Reagan, Governor Clinton, Governor Bush. No sitting US Senator has been elected president since John F Kennedy in 1960.
Governors have a number of advantages as candidates. Their fundraising machines are equal to those of US Senators and second only to those of incumbent presidents. They can run as anti-Washington populists. They can also cite their executive experience. Dean boasts that he balanced the budget in Vermont (no great challenge in a state inhabited by thrifty Yankees-it would have been more impressive in Mississippi or Louisiana). Most important of all, unlike senators, governors don't have long paper trails of votes on various inflammatory national issues that never come up in state politics.
Dean is considered the candidate of the "left," but he is a fiscal conservative, supporter of gun owners' rights and a traditional internationalist. Like Clinton, another small state governor, he favours gay rights (he is proud of Vermont's gay partnership law) and universal healthcare. A New Englander like Dean may not do as well as native-son John Edwards in the south. But in the Democratic heartlands of New England, the midwest and the west coast, Dean will appeal to the anger of left-leaning Democratic primary voters, who think the 2000 election was stolen and are furious about Iraq. The era of southern Democratic presidents may be over. In the new electoral geography, the Democrats can win the presidency with only a few southern states like West Virginia.
What about Bush's approval ratings? Public approval shot up to the 90s as a result of 11th September, but then declined toward 50 per cent, just before the Iraq war, which boosted his ratings again only briefly before decline set in once more. Between May and the end of June, the number of Americans telling a Democracy Corps poll that the country is on the wrong track rose from 41 per cent to 46 per cent-while those agreeing that the country is moving in the right direction dropped from 51 per cent to 41 per cent.
But these public opinion numbers really won't matter. Most voters in 2004 will vote the way they did in 2000. The election will be determined by pretty much the same group of swing voters, such as working-class whites in the industrial rust belt. The candidates will practically live in the states along the Ohio river valley. And what is on the minds of a small number of swing voters will determine the campaign and the outcome.
Polls show that the public trusts the Republican party most on defence, and if the election turns on that issue, the Democrats, still recovering from their post-Vietnam allergy to all things military, might very well lose. It is more likely, however, that the small number of swing voters in 2004 will be thinking more about the economy, jobs, healthcare, education and retirement.
Playing the national security card is also not simple for Bush. What is he supposed to say? "You're in greater danger than ever after four years of my leadership-vote for me"? On the other hand, if he boasts that as a result of his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US people are now safe from terrorism, he will be forced to compete on domestic policy, where the public tends to favour Democratic positions.
Populism? For a generation, Republican conservatives like Bush have run against Washington. That's harder when Republicans control the White House, congress and supreme court.
Values? Supreme court majorities recently delivered the American right devastating defeats on the issue of sodomy laws. Now that gay sex is legal everywhere in the US, the Republican right wants to turn gay marriage into a "wedge issue." But it is hard to imagine putting a plank in the 2004 Republican party platform demanding that gays and lesbians have sex outside marriage. A big vote winner? I think not.
