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Next Election: No Sure Bets
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11134 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1986 |
2,723 Words |
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Claudio Campuzano
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The sign hanging on the wall of the pediatrician's waiting room read: "Which way did they go? How many of them were there? How fast were they going? I must find them. I am their leader."
Intent on learning if my son's checkup had turned out okay, I forgot to find out why the sign was there, but I couldn't help fancying my own answer: the good doctor must have entertained the idea of running for Congress this year.
And, if the sign hanging from his wall was an indication of the way he looked at it, he is a wise man. Because, as we will see, this looks like the year where all bets based on conventional wisdom are off.
Formula 1
To get out of the way first, the bottom line of this wisdom is that the party that controls the White House loses heavily in the election that takes place in its sixth year in power. Both in the distant past and recently the cold numbers are there to support this wisdom.
Politics, however, is not cold numbers. Under Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 and Gerald Ford in 1974 Republicans suffered severe losses in Congress. But the country was undergoing a recession under Eisenhower and his prestige was tarnished by improprieties committed by his chief assistant Sherman Adams, while Ford presided over elections that took place shortly after the Watergate incident had caused Richard Nixon's resignation. The Democratic losses in 1966 under Lyndon Johnson had much to do with the decline in his popularity as a result of the Vietnam War.
With President Reagan's popularity at an all-time high and the economy showing no signs of a possible recession--if at all--until 1987, next November's election hardly qualifies as the typical mid-second-term election whose results conventional wisdom would predict. Confirmation for this view comes from an unimpeachable source--the Democrats.
Last November the Democratic nuts-and-bolts officials, the state party chairmen, met in Orlando, Florida, to discuss strategy for 1986. Although Reagan's popularity had not yet reached its present level they agreed that they had little to gain, and possibly something to lose, if they turned the 1986 elections into a political debate on the president's policies. Some went as far as to suggest that an anti-Reagan campaign might turn voters against the Democrats.
Formula 2
But, when conventional wisdom doesn't seem to work, Washington opinion rises to the challenge and comes up with…more conventional wisdom. As it becomes increasingly clear that this year's elections cannot be classified in the mid-second-term category, "inside the beltway" political commentators are saying that it should then fit into the business-as-usual-election category, where most incumbents succeed and there is little change in Senate and House seats, just a blip on the way to 1988.
There is, however, another possibility. We might witness the congressional equivalent of the 1980 presidential election, when all prognostications based on past form were found inadequate to
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