Will '96 Vote Foster A New Status Quo?

By Rhodes Cook
CQ Senior Staff Writer

After rearranging the face of politics in the early 1990s, voters might well decide Nov. 5 to maintain the status quo -- re-electing the Democratic president and the Republican Congress. Yet what passes for the status quo in 1996 is downright revolutionary when considered against the backdrop of what has happened in American politics over most of the country's history.

For one thing, it would be a complete reversal of the combination of Republican president and Democratic Congress that voters favored most of the time from 1954 to 1992. But, beyond that, a federal government run by a Democratic president and a GOP Congress has almost never occurred in American history, and never at all for more than two years in a row.

In fact, there have been only four brief occasions when there has been such a combination -- in the last two years of Grover Cleveland's second term (1895-97), the last two years of Woodrow Wilson's second term (1919-21), the immediate postwar years (1947-49) after the ascension of Harry S Truman, and the current Congress coinciding with the last two years of Bill Clinton's term (1995-97).

At the end of each previous two-year run, voters rendered a clear-cut verdict. They turned both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue over to the Republicans in 1896 and 1920 and to the Democrats in 1948.

But a decisive one-party outcome will not necessarily be the case this time. The past few decades have seen a sharp decline in party loyalty, with voters showing an increasing willingness to cast their ballots for a presidential candidate of one party and a congressional candidate of the other. That was evident in 1992, when Democrats lost 10 seats in the House, even as Clinton was winning the presidency.

In addition, the current combination of a Democratic president and a Republican Congress was the result of an erosion in the Republican presidential and Democratic congressional bases that had been going on for a number of years.

The GOP presidential vote, which reached 59 percent for Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign in 1984, fell to 53 percent for George Bush in 1988, before plummeting to 37 percent in 1992, when Clinton became the first Democrat to win the White House in 16 years.

Meanwhile, the nationwide Democratic congressional vote, which reached 54.5 percent in 1986 (the sixth year of Reagan's presidency), declined to 53.3 percent in 1988, 52.9 percent in 1990, and 51 percent in 1992, before collapsing to 45.4 percent in 1994, when Republicans swept both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

At this point, neither party may find it easy to regain its old power center. Congressional Democrats have been struggling since Republicans cracked their base in the South, while Republicans have seemed stymied at the presidential level since the emergence of Clinton and his centrist brand of politics.

And with their own political futures at stake, neither Clinton nor the Republican Congress has been willing to risk upsetting the status quo by making this a clear-cut, high-stakes election.

That marks a sharp difference between today and the 1896 campaign, which capped the first period of a Democratic president and Republican Congress, and was waged energetically by the Democrats' young nominee, William Jennings Bryan. But championing the cause of rural America, Bryan was unable to convince an electorate that was growing increasingly urban and industrialized.

The Democrats were on the wrong side of political sentiment again in 1920, the second time voters had to weigh the merits of a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. President Wilson sought to make the election a referendum on his master work, the League of Nations, which had been rejected by the Republican Senate. His effort, though, was overwhelmed by an isolationist, pro-GOP tide.

Democrats fared better in 1948, as Truman effectively portrayed himself as the last line of defense against what he portrayed as a reactionary Republican Congress bent on gutting popular Democratic-passed government programs.

Clinton has used the same line of argument in this election, pillorying House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and the GOP Congress for assaults on popular programs ranging from Medicare to the environment. But unlike Truman, Clinton is not running in a decidedly Democratic era.

Rather, the nation seems in transition between political eras. Clearly, the Republicans do not dominate. But neither do the Democrats.

In this milieu, voters could well decide next month that rather than give control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to one party, they will opt, for now, to retain the new status quo of a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. If they do that, they will also be making a bit of history in the process.

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