Governments don't win a fourth term, they get lucky and face lousy opposition.
I haven't written much about politics lately. There ain't an election on, at least not in any country I'm particularly interested in, and I do have more interest in elections than the times in between. Now, I could have written about the NZ election and tried to make it seem interesting to foreigners. But try as I might, after five years away I couldn't make it seem that interesting to myself.
For at least as long as I can remember—that would be as far back as 1992, the last century, in fact—there's been talk that the Democrats are in trouble, blah, blah, have no policy, are only sustained by Clinton, blah, blah ... Some of this is not so much disinterested commentary, as it is very interested partisan opinion. So it sure made me sit up a little when I read E.J. Dionne this week. The title the sub-editors have given it, Democrats in Disarray, is perhaps a little stronger than his argument, but no matter. Dionne is not someone who follows the Washington political reporting herd.
And then I read Mark Schmitt's blog today, another person who's not reflexively critical saying the Democrats have a way to go before they'll be competitive in next year's elections.
It all made an interesting compare and contrast to Max Hastings' Guardina op-ed which said that the [British] Conservative leadership contest is "a battle for the honour of losing the next election." The Democrats are not as dysfunctional as the Conservatives, but there's only one more election between the Democrats and that fate.
These are all predictions, not actual results, and the Democrats may yet find a way to regain control of one house in 2006. If you can't actually win elections, they should try to avoid becoming what the British Conservative party is now, or what the Canadian Conservative party was for a good decade in the 1990s, or the Australian and New Zealand Labo[u]r Parties were between 1949 and 1972, or the British Labour Party in the 1980s, or lest we forget, the Republican party between about 1954 and 1994, and the Democratic party in the early twentieth century. Parties that can't win elections or majorities despite ample opportunities.
You can explain some of these cases by reference to peculiar social or political cleavages of the time (Australian Labor in the 1950s, Canadian Conservatives in the 1990s) that parties got caught on the wrong side of. But don't let that get in the way of a good generalization from history.
It is said that oppositions/minority parties don't win elections, governments lose them. What was once snappy insight is now cliche. The story of most elections can be arranged to suit the phrase, even though it would be a highly useful stylized fact if it were only true 2/3 of the time.
The cliche that "oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them" is a necessary, but not sufficient condition. It really does suppose an effective opposition party, one that isn't just waiting for the government to fall in, and has some sort of programmatic and philisophical statements that voters can identify with it, distinct from being the "other party." I don't think the Democrats are at that pathological level of being unable to win winnable elections, but I do think we'll see if they are in just over eleven months.
I think it should be a cliche that any majority party that succeeds in going beyond three terms in control is aided by a defective opposition.* It's difficult for me to think of a case where any government or majority party was not showing strains or tiredness by the time it reached year 9 to 12 of its tenure in office.
Obviously it plays out differently in different cases, but if oppositions can't win when majorities are going for a fourth term, they can remain out of office for a long, long time. For a start, the election was normally winnable, and there's enough people that feel they weren't responsible that parties can turn on themselves. Moreover, after about a decade in opposition, parties start to lose the experience of people who have been in a majority who retire, and gradually you get an opposition party that has spent most of its time in the minority. The collective knowledge of how the party can win, and what to do once you're there, really starts to wither.
This can beget an even longer term decline. When and if the party does take office, they are full of inexperienced people and are more than usually prone to over-reaching and just governing badly. Exhibit A here are the Australasian Labo[u]r parties from 1972-1975, but there are others, the SPD won office in Germany in the 1970s after a long time in opposition, and weren't the most competent administration you've ever seen. There is also the danger of the inward turn, and sometimes I think the Democrats may be on their way to that. Politicians like to win, and if they can't beat the opposition, they'll place a more than usual importance on winning unimportant internal contests. Bad cycle for a party to get caught up in.
2006 is that critical election for the Democrats. If they can't win this, then why should they win others. Given the gross gerrymandering in the House, their best hope is to take back the Senate. And even then, they should forget about gerrymandering, they should campaign as if it doesn't matter, and maybe it won't.
_______
* Obviously (obviously) after 12 years in control, the Republicans are going for their 7th term in charge, not their fourth. But, the American House terms are in some ways artificially short. It makes more sense to think of the electoral cycle as four years, on a par with many other countries. This is not so contrived as the Presidential term is four years, and the interaction with the executive is an important factor in legislative politics and elections.