Voter Discontent

Then, successively, the GOP lost the White House in 1992, and the Democrats lost both houses of Congress in 1994. Thus, during 1995-1996, the party control of the branches was reversed from what it had been for most of a generation. The natives-- that is, the voters--were restless. In 1992 they rejected George Bush, who little more than a year before had enjoyed approval ratings as high as 91 percent; in 1994, they effectively repudiated Bill Clinton, whom they had elected two years earlier. Also in 1992 they had given the largest margin to any third-party presidential candidate in 80 years.

Voter discontent evidently lay at the root of many of these sharp electoral reversals. In 1992, voters turned sharply against Bush because he seemed indifferent to or unaware of

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he variant interests of "Wall Street" and "Main Street," while the Democratic coalition united even more disparate elements ranging from Northeastern liberals to Southern conservatives. From the 1970s on, however, parties grew institutionally weaker and ticket-splitting more prevalent, as indicated by the failure of two Republican presidential landslides, in 1972 and 1984, as well as the near-landslide of 1988, to shake Democratic control of Congress. The requirements and nature of fund-raising have been identified as factors in this weakening of the parties (Dahl, 1994, p. 3). Individual candidates became electoral entrepreneurs, dependent on their own fund-raising machines (as well as their own media images) rather than the parties. As a consequence, party discipline broke down. So long as incumbents could maintain the support of their own local networks, they could defy party leaderships with impunity. This was particularly marked among Democrats; throughout the 1980s, conservative Southern Democrats, the so-called boll weevils, were effectively part of the Republican coalition on most substantive issues (e.g., the crucial Reagan-era budget votes), in defiance of the national party. The breakdown of the parties
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Approximate Word count = 2269
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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