The Historical Presidency: Clinton's Elections: Redividing Government in the 1990s

Republicans emerged from the 1988 election as confident of their supremacy in presidential politics as Democrats were of their dominance of Congress. Republican vice president George Bush's 40-state, 426-electoral vote triumph over the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, was the GOP's third victory in a row and its fifth in the last six elections, all but one of them by a landslide. The Democrats' sole victory came in 1976 when former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter narrowly defeated President Gerald R. Ford in the post-Watergate depths of Republican unpopularity. Entering the 1992 contest, some even speculated that Republican control of the presidency was so strong as to amount to an electoral college "lock." Twenty-one states with 191 electoral votes had voted Republican in every one of the six most recent elections. Another 12 states, with 142 electoral votes, had gone Republican in every election but one. Only Minnesota, with 10 electoral votes, and the District of Columbia, with three, had been comparably loyal to the Democrats. The Democrats' primacy in Congress in this period was just as impressive as the GOP's hold on the White House. The House of Representatives had been a Democratic preserve since 1954, never once going Republican. In 1988, the Democrats added three seats to their majority, raising it to 260-175. They added one to their ranks in the Senate, giving them 55 of 100 seats in that chamber, which they had controlled for all but six of the last 34 years. Bush's election made him only the third newly elected president in history, after Zachary Taylor in 1849 and Richard Nixon in 1969, to take office with a Congress controlled by the opposition party. No new president ever had faced a Congress that included so small a fraction of fellow partisans. Divided government, in which the political party that controls the White House does not also control Congress, long had been the exception in American politics. Nearly always the voters gave the president a Congress controlled by his own party and then assigned that party credit or blame for the government's subsequent performance in the next election. From 1901 to 1969, divided government prevailed only 21% of the time, just 14 years out of 68. Starting with Nixon's election in 1968, however, divided government became the rule, with Carter's four years of united party government the single exception through the end of Bush's tenure in 1993. In every instance, divided government in this period entailed a Republican president and a wholly or partially Democratic Congress. Bill Clinton's eight years as president marked not the end of divided government, but rather its redividing. In a mirror image of the previous 24 years, Clinton's election in 1992 began a quarter-century in which Democrats presidential nominees handily won four of six elections (carrying the national popular vote in five) and lost the other two narrowly. In 1996, he became not only the first Democratic president in 60 years to be reelected to a second term, but the first in history to be elected with a Republican Congress--which in turn was the first since 1928 to remain in Republican control for more than two years. In late 1996, Clinton White House political director Douglas Sosnik declared "the beginning of a Democratic electoral college advantage" based on Clinton's having carried 29 states with 346 electoral votes both times he ran, including 18 states that had gone Republican in all or all but one of the six previous elections (USA Today 1996). In congressional elections, however, the Democrats soon became the minority party. Although Clinton enjoyed a Democratic Congress during his first two years as president, in 1994, the first midterm election of his presidency, the Republicans won control of both houses and maintained it for nearly all of the next 12 years. Never before had a Democratic president had to serve more than two years with a Republican House and Senate, but Clinton faced such a Congress for six of his eight years in office. …