The Nationalization of American Political Parties

America is a big diverse country. Big diverse democracies usually have lots of parties, but American winner-take-all elections provide a natural political gravity towards a two party system. But this natural gravity doesn't necessarily result in the same two political parties everywhere in a nation.

Early American political contests were divided between two political ideologies, Federalism and Democracy, with the Federalists winning the fight over the Constitution, and then the Democrats winning the government in 1800. America was functionally a one-party (with many internal factions) nation for the next thirty years, until the contested election/Jacksonian reformation of 1824-32 resulted in the first nomination convention for the Democratic party. After this period a national two-party system arose (with first the Whigs and then the Republicans being the other party). But these two parties only existed within the context of Presidential races. Different regions, states, and even municipalities had a variety of parties.

By the twentieth century, most of these parties called themselves either "Democratic" or "Republican" parties (the last holdout is Minnesota, whose Democratic party still refers to itself as the Farmer-Democratic-Labor Party), but they weren't the same parties. Conservative Democrats in the south partnered with northern liberals to enact the New Deal, but balked when it came to universal health care because that would have meant integrated hospitals.

The coalitions that made up the Democratic began to fray under the strain of mass media, and the Civil Rights Act fractured the party. Beginning with Goldwater in 1964, Southern Democrats began to vote Republican in Presidential races, while voting for their conservative (and still Democratic) congressional representatives. During the age of Nixon and Reagan/Bush, this trend continued — the great era of bipartisanship, brought to you by Republican Presidents and Southern Democrats who agreed to put party aside in order to pursue shared racist goals.

After Clinton was elected in 1992, however, the GOP recognized that they needed congressional power to thwart Clinton's progressivism. Gingrich targeted conservative districts and states, mainly in the south, that had voted for Bush but re-elected a Democrat to congress in 1992. Ignore any other hogwash about that election — it was this re-alignment that gave the Republicans the Congress in 1994. Similarly, in 2006, anti-Bush backlash returned the Democrats to power — but not the old Democratic majority of the twentieth century, but rather through the old Republican stronghold in the North.

We have had, over the past two years, a new situation in American politics. The leftmost member of the party of the right (the Republicans) is more to the right than the rightmost member of the party of the left (the Democrats). Or to put it another way: every Democrat in congress is now more liberal than every Republican. The parties are now ideologically coherent national parties.

This means, among other things, that not very many people are going to "ticket-split" (vote for one party for President and another for Congress) this year. It also means that those numbers showing a huge advantage for Democrats in Partisan ID actually mean a huge advantage for all Democrats at the ballot box.

Pundits gazed in wonder at the 1994 election, marvelling that Gingrich had managed to "nationalize" the election in an off-year. In 1998, pundits were shocked that Clinton had managed to "nationalize" the impeachment backlash, to punish the Republican congress in an off-year. In 2002, the Republicans vanquished conventional wisdom by being able to "nationalize" the aftermath of 9/11 into a mid-term victory. And in 2006 Democrats surprised everyone by running against Bush and therefore being able to "nationalize" the election and take over congress.

In 2008, everyone will be taken aback that all of those people who said they were going to vote for the Democrats vote for both Obama and Democratic congresscritters. And in 2010 we'll have more surprises!