Michael Barone, political analyst for Fox News and U.S. News & World Report, recently addressed a John Locke Foundation Headliner luncheon in western North Carolina. He also discussed the 2008 presidential campaign with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: As people begin to think more about the outcome of the 2008 election, what do the numbers tell you about what’s likely to happen?
Barone: I think anything can happen in the next year. We’ve been through a period of about 10 years from ’95 to ’05 when politics was: trench warfare, two armies, nobody deserted to the other side, about equal size, close elections, and very little change in the political numbers. I think we are in a period now of open field politics where there is possibility of major changes. The politicians are moving around. The voters are moving around. The incumbent president and vice president are retiring, and so we are in a political situation when a lot of things that go against the old rules could happen.
Kokai: The 20th century gave us the New Deal coalition, the Southern strategy, political alignments and realignments. Where do we stand with those sorts of patterns now? Is this a brand new setting?
Barone: I think we are in a situation where we could see new political alignments. I mean, political analysts are used to discussing red states and blue states and a relatively small number of states that are seriously contested. I think we are in a period where that could change, where states that have been safely Democratic or Republican may be open to challenge and where states that were formally very close could go over for one party or the other. We have seen examples of this in special elections — in the November ’06 elections, when Democrats did significantly better than they had done between 1994 and 2004. We saw [change] at the Massachusetts special election in October. That was a district that voted 57 percent for John Kerry, and in 2006 its Democratic index would have been about 61 percent or 62 percent. The Democrat won there but with only 51 percent of the vote. That tells me that voters may be moving around, may be considering voting for candidates of parties that they hadn’t backed in the past. And there are a lot of potentials. I think we are going to see a new set of issues as well. The press tends to concentrate on the issues of the past, whether it is Iraq or abortion or things of that nature. I think we may see new issues enter the mix, split the electorate along different lines from what we are accustomed to.
Kokai: What kinds of issues might be part of that mix?
Barone: I see a couple of issues coming forward in that Massachusetts special election that we haven’t heard much about in presidential election campaigns. Taxes. George W Bush talked about tax cuts, and in fact Republicans enacted them, but it wasn’t a big vote-moving issue. Immigration and enforcement of the immigration laws at the border and at workplaces. With the failure of the comprehensive immigration bill in the Senate in last May and June, that issue has taken on a different dimension. Last two presidential elections, the major-party candidates didn’t disagree much on immigration. You didn’t see it raised as an issue. I think we could see it in this cycle.
Kokai: Beyond political issues, are there other factors that will contribute to the realignment?
Barone: Well, I think other factors are that the electorate changes every four years, and the perspective changes. The American Petroleum Institute is currently running some ads called “Remember the ’70s,” arguing against oil price controls and conjuring memories of those gas lines in the 1970s. I think they are shrewd to do that because the median age voter in 2008 was 16 years old in 1980. They don’t remember the ’70s. They weren’t waiting in gas lines, or at least they were in the back seat in the car and not paying much attention to it. So I think Americans learn from the stagflation and the gas lines of the [1970s] that government bureaucracy and controls don’t work very well. Markets work better. I think those lessons need to be re-taught. I hope they don’t have to be re-learned the hard way because half the voters don’t have a recollection of that period. They’ve lived their adult lives at a time when 95 percent of the time we have had low-inflation economic growth. That’s different from the electorate that remembered the Great Depression.
Kokai: With a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama on the ballot — or both if they end up being the two members of the Democratic ticket — does that change the demographics? Does it change what each party needs to do to win?
Barone: Well, Hillary Clinton gets more support from women than from men in percentage terms in just about every survey. But that’s been true of Democratic candidates really since the election of 1980. She perhaps accentuates that a little bit. I am not sure that her being a woman is important. Remember, voters know her not just as a generic woman but as a specific person. They know a fair lot about her character. They have seen her respond to pressures and difficult times and to continue in the political fray. So, you know, we know some positive and we know some negative things about Hillary Clinton. About Barack Obama: in his background as an African-American, interestingly not a descendant of anyone who had been a slave in the United States, but his father was born in Africa. I think most Americans like in the abstract anyhow the idea of electing a black president. I think it’s something that we welcome, that we think would make us feel good about our country. I know I feel that way myself. And I think, you know, we saw it 12 years ago in 1995. Colin Powell zipped to the top of the polls, either as an independent or a putative Republican candidate. The positive reaction to Obama’s 2004 convention speech and the generally positive reaction he has gotten from the general electorate, I think, is due in part to that fact, that far from being a handicap, his background of being of African descent is in some ways an advantage.
Kokai: What would a Republican have to do to run against Clinton, Obama, or a Clinton/Obama ticket?
Barone: Well, I think a Republican, in order to win, [is] going to have to reframe the issues. They are going to have to bring new issues to the fore. And they are going to have to also place some stress on who can best protect the nation. This has been the weakness of the Democratic Party since the 1970s. Since then it has only won two presidential elections and won the … plurality of the popular vote … all at a time which was after the Cold War and before the September 11 attacks. And so I think a Republican nominee has to be able to demonstrate that he is better able to handle and protect the nation than the Democrat is.