Why the Next Election May Well Be Decided by the Vice Presidential Nominee
The Pattern
Winner | Loser | |
| 1984 | (R) Reagan/Bush | (D) Mondale/Ferraro |
| 1988 | (R) Bush/Quayle | (D) Dukakis/Bentsen |
| 1992 | (D) Clinton/Gore | (R) Bush/Quayle |
| 1996 | (D) Clinton/Gore | (R) Dole/Kemp |
| 2000 | (R) Bush/Cheney | (D) Gore/Lieberman |
Ronald Reagan and G. H. W. Bush did have some ideological distance in 1980, but the Carter/Mondale presidency was overwhelmed by economic and foreign policy disasters. As incumbents in 1984, Reagan and Bush could successfully argue that their differences were no longer meaningful. Former VP Mondale and New York Representative Geraldine Ferraro, however, had longstanding policy disagreements that they tried to portray as differences of method rather than principle. In spite of the bold decision to run a woman vice-presidential candidate -- the first and only gender-balanced major party ticket in US history -- the Democrats only won over hard-core loyalists.
In 1988, George H.W. Bush and Indiana Senator Dan Quayle were neither politically nor personally close -- Bush appealing to the economic Republicans and Quayle to the religious Republicans -- and could have been vulnerable. But they faced one of the most deeply divided tickets in recent history: liberal Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis and conservative Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen. There was hardly a policy issue on which the two agreed, which was supposed to broaden their appeal. Bentsen would have made a better running mate for Bush, people quipped: this was supposed to weaken support for Bush and transfer it to Dukakis. But the contradiction in the Democratic ticket was too deep to be plausible, and the Bush/Quayle ticket rode Reagan's coattails to victory.
In 1992, though, the Bush/Quayle ticket, still trumpeting its divided appeal (and presiding over economic malaise), faced Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and Tennessee Senator Al Gore, both New Democrats, with matching liberal social positions and strong pro-business records. Clinton and Gore were both Baptists from the South with Ivy League educations. Though they were certainly very different people and stylistically distinct, their ideological unity was unquestioned and they won.
Kansas Senator Bob Dole and former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, the Republican challengers in 1996, were a mismatch nearly on a par with the Dukakis/Bentsen fiasco, particularly by contrast to the ideological unity of Clinton/Gore. Both Dole and Kemp had legislative careers full of bluster (mostly Kemp) and evolution and compromise (mostly Dole), not flaws in themselves but difficult to present as a "clear vision" in a presidential campaign. Both were qualifying past positions and trying to smooth over obvious differences with each other, struggling with campaign positions neither of them fully endorsed and campaigning in styles neither of them entirely enjoyed. They lost.
In 2000, VP Gore joined up with conservative Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, which was immediately apparent as an attempt to broaden his appeal beyond moderates deep into Republican territory with Lieberman espousing both social and fiscal conservativism. Lieberman might also have served to shore up wavering Jewish support for the Democratic party: conservative Jews have been shifting to the Republicans for some time now. This was a stark echo of the Dukakis/Bentsen strategy, but unleavened by administrative experience beyond Gore's VP years. The Republican opposition was Texas Governor George W. Bush, son of former president George H.W. Bush, and the VP candidate was former President Bush's Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney. Bush and Cheney were both in the energy business -- Texas oil -- and both were considered centrist Republicans, faithful to the Reaganesque vision of domestic libertarianism, anti-government rhetoric, religious social mores, and the unique leadership position of the US in international affairs. Again, ideological agreement won out over diversity.
What it Means
In all these cases, the most ideologically unified candidates beat painstakingly balanced tickets. What does this mean? It's O.K. to balance personal styles: none of the winning tickets over the last 20 years have been similar in presentation or personality. It's fine to have complementary careers, in fact it may be an advantage. The governor/senator or governor/career bureaucrat pairing balances a concrete administrative portfolio with a national policy perspective, which is good, but not decisive. But it is political death to struggle with political reconciliation in the harsh light of a national electoral campaign.
Partisans will argue that the more unified tickets are indicative of either greater party unity or a closer match to the "national mood," but I find neither of these arguments persuasive. Neither major party can claim a strongly unified base: both are coalitions of factions, both include a vast array of single-issue groups and both openly admit to being "big tent" organizations. True, both parties have tried to impose greater coherence and discipline, through things like the Democratic Leadership Council and the Contract With America, but the best they've achieved recently is temporary unity of message. Every election cycle brings news of the various ethnic, religious or social types (soccer moms, NASCAR dads, etc.) and formerly "secure" districts that shifted from one party to the other. Nor do the unified tickets strongly reflect any kind of national consensus: none of the last five presidencies represented moderation or compromise. What centrism there was is explained by the fact that the US has been under a divided government -- executive and legislative branches controlled by different parties -- for most of the last quarter century. Ticket unity does not seem to have the kind of secondary effects that you would expect if these explanations were correct.
At best ticket unity might indicate general agreement among the leadership of a party, but it appears to be a fragile thing. It might also have an effect on fundraising. Money, going by the euphemism "campaign finances," is the elephant in the living room of all political analysis. The candidate with the most money (usually the incumbent, whose fundraising begins as soon as the election ends) wins elections in the U.S. so often that it's almost not worth talking about anything else, though like the mystics who reject the utility of language to describe the true nature of reality, we can't seem to stop. Since 1984 (some sources say 1976) the candidate with the most money one year before the general election has won their party primary; money isn't the sole factor in presidential elections, but gross disparities usually show up in the final results. The same argument about broad appeal that should work in the election itself should also work in the fundraising stage, but it doesn't seem to. Ticket unity also seems to be associated with better organized campaigns, though that might be a mirage based on the fact that they win and that the "balanced" tickets immediately get labeled as fractious.
This pattern of electing the most unified ticket is only dominant back to 1984, which is important. The 1980 election result was overdetermined by the economic situation and Iran hostage crisis. Elections of the 1970s were so affected by fallout from Nixon's scandals (1976) and by the Vietnam War (1968 and 1972) that ticket unity was irrelevant. Before the 1970s, ticket balancing, particularly geographic balancing, was a common practice and seems to have worked better. But since 1984 we've had a pretty stable political and economic system that has not been overwhelmed by single issues. And all five elections from 1984 on have been won by the most unified ticket.
It's easy to beat on the news media, but there is some real complicity here. Before the 1980s, the media focused more on the presidential candidates and less on dredging for controversies. The vice presidential candidate was much less prominent and differences of opinion were less damaging. Add the rise of controversy-driven journalism to the longer campaign season, and minor differences, like slight shifts in poll numbers, have and will become much bigger stories than they deserve. Attack ads are picked up by the media and "analyzed" over and over again, giving the campaigns bargain-price exposure. The media has become increasingly dependent on the campaigns themselves -- and the associated party organizations, consultants and think tanks -- for information and analysis, so they are more frequently becoming the conduits for negative information like internal disagreements. The longer campaigns, shallow reporting and attack strategies contribute to an increasingly unengaged electorate, one that is less likely to be forgiving of the lack of clarity of a "balanced" ticket.
The incumbent Bush-Cheney ticket, one of the tightest pairings in recent presidential politics, can and will trounce any Democratic challenge that attempts to unify the party and appeal to the electorate through political diversity rather than ideological focus. It will be particularly obvious if the vice-presidential candidate comes from the pool of failed presidential candidates, because the primary campaign sniping will be replayed immediately in the press and by the other side. To overcome the Bush/Cheney advantages of unity and money will require near-perfect candidates running a better-than-perfect campaign and some luck to boot.
What will determine the outcome of the 2004 election? Vietnam War historian Fredrik Logevall once wrote on the H-Asia list, "It's not enough merely to list x number of causes. It is the task of the historian to reduce a given list of causes to order by establishing a causal hierarchy, and to relate the items in this hierarchy to one another." As important as ticket unity is in recent history, the history of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrates that ticket unity can be overwhelmed by other issues. Confidence in the economy is a powerful influence on moderates and swing voters, but it will only matter if it moves out of its ambiguous "jobless recovery" into either collapse or sustained job growth. The situation in Iraq could become more polarizing or more positive, and another terrorist attack on the U.S. is a true wild card, impossible to quantify or even guess at this point. It is worth noting however, that foreign policy will play a larger role in this election than in any other since 1980. There could always be a devastating scandal, either within the Bush administration or regarding a poorly screened Democratic challenger. There is the possibility, only whispered about so far, that Cheney might not be the Republican vice-presidential candidate, but Bush would be very unlikely to select a replacement who wasn't thoroughly attuned to his positions. And this election may feature a greater disparity in funding than any presidential election in modern history.
All of these things could make subtler analysis irrelevant. But assume that the economy stays ambiguous, that the situation in Iraq remains only mildly troubling, that no new terrorist attacks happen. Or even assume that these factors don't remain stable, but counter each other: if the situation in Iraq becomes a crisis, but the economy improves, for example. Then political clarity -- ticket unity -- will decide the next election, as it has decided the last five.