"All politics is local," said the late Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill. Not anymore. This year most politics seems to be national, with Republicans trying to turn congressional elections into a referendum on Bill Clinton and Democrats running against Reaganomics.
But nationalized politics is not new: 1992 was the biggest straight-ticket voting year since 1948. That fact was disguised by the independent candidacy of Ross Perot, but if his votes had been allocated as exit polls suggested, Bill Clinton would have beaten George Bush 52 to 46 percent -- almost identical to the Democrats' 51-to-46 margin in House races. Moreover, in seven of the country's nine regions, Clinton's margin was within 2 points of House Democrats' margin. He won the Pacific states by 12 points, and Democrats won House races there by 14, picking up a half-dozen seats that experts looking at past patterns and local factors expected to go Republican. In the South Atlantic, from Virginia to Florida, Bush won by 2 points and Republican candidates for the House, despite historic tradition, won by 1 point.
In 1992, Democrats were the beneficiaries of nationalized politics, as Bill Clinton broke the Republican string of White House victories. This year Republicans are the beneficiaries, as voters punish Democrats for Clinton's campaigning as a "new Democrat" and then governing, on the first-line issues of taxes and health care, as an "old Democrat." Or maybe voters are just returning to the basically Republican sentiments that they held for more than 10 years after 1980 -- and abandoned only briefly in 1992.
Why have elections become nationalized at a time when special interest groups are flourishing and both the print and electronic media are becoming increasingly segmented? The main reason is that Democrats have lost their major advantages in House elections. Democrats held the House securely in 10 elections from 1974 to 1992 for four reasons: superior candidates, the advantages of incumbency, favorable redistricting by Democratic judges and state legislatures and the ability to campaign as moderates locally while supporting a liberal national leadership.
Vanishing advantages. Those advantages have been diminishing, and this year they have almost vanished. The term- limits mentality is producing fewer smart liberal career politicians. Perks and pork have become liabilities, given an electorate with a growing contempt for government and its works. Because most federal judges have now been appointed by Republicans and because the Voting Rights Act has forced some states to pack Democrats into black majority House districts, redistricting has helped Republicans and hurt Democrats in the 1990s. And it has gotten harder for Democrats to campaign as moderates because the Clinton years have spotlighted the national Democratic leadership's liberal goals. In addition, some of Clinton's weaknesses -- excessive generosity and sloppiness, for example -- are widely seen as characteristic of his party, just as George Bush's great weaknesses -- uninterest in domestic policy and ordinary people -- were widely seen as characteristically Republican.
Until early October, Democratic strategists and the Clinton White House were advising endangered Democratic candidates to keep the focus on local issues. But with even some leading icons of the party -- Edward Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, Dianne Feinstein, Tom Foley -- seriously threatened, that wasn't enough. So the White House decided to go national by using the House Republicans' "Contract With America" to argue that Republicans would lead the nation back to the Reaganomics of the 1980s while Democrats will lead America in what Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg calls "a historic project to change the direction of the country."
It's not at all clear that this is a winning tactic, however. You have to ask some pretty loaded questions to get voters to say that they hate the 1980s and Reaganomics as much as Democratic politicians do. The abstract issue of budget deficits is no more likely to be a winning issue for 1990s Democrats still seething with hatred for Ronald Reagan than it was for postwar Republicans still seething with hatred for Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Republicans may or may not win the highest-visibility races next month, but even Democrats concede that their opponents are poised to make gains larger than almost anyone forecast a year ago. And the Republicans are winning on national issues: Those with good records in public life and attractive personal stories are featuring them not at all; instead, they are hammering home their "just say no" policies -- term limits, balanced budgets, capital punishment, stricter sentences, welfare cuts. Most politics is now national, and the country that two years ago was prepared to give Bill Clinton and the Democrats a chance to deliver better government is now intent on setting stricter limits on the bigger government most voters haven't wanted since Clinton's college days in the 1960s.
