Post Election Q & A
with Thad Kousser

By Heather Holliday
November 8, 2004

After many intense months of negative political advertisements, heated sound bytes and contentious bipartisanship, the nation is now wrestling with the meaning of last week's election results. Questions on many minds include: Now that the President has gained both the popular and electoral vote, will it affect his leadership style? In his second term, will Mr. Bush prioritize international relations? And, is the country divided beyond repair? Thad Kousser, assistant professor of political science, sat down with Heather Holliday to help sort out some of these issues.

Q. How divided is the nation?

Kousser: The nation has often been divided. We have had lots of close elections. As a nation we were just divided on the Vietnam War as we are about the Iraqi war. But the divisions cut across party lines. What's new about the divisions that we have in America now is that they perfectly correspond to party lines. More than 90 percent of Republicans voted for the president and fewer than 10 percent of Democrats did. A huge majority of Republicans back the war, a very small number of Democrats did.

Class used to help predict how people vote, now whether you go to church and whether you own a gun or not - that predicts whether people will vote pro-Bush or anti-Bush. I don't think as a nation we are any more divided. It's just that our divisions happen to line up with geography and party more now than they have in the past.

Q. President Bush says that he wants to unite the nation. Considering how divided the nation is, what would he need to do to achieve that?

What builds unity are foreign policy crises. George Bush had the highest approval rating among Democrats among any modern Republican president right after Sept. 11. So in one sense, if we have more wars or more terrorist attacks, we'll see more unity in this country.

Another tactic to take would be to pursue moderate policies. He'll have another opportunity to appoint a Cabinet. He started out in the direction of trying to include many Democrats on his first Cabinet, but that didn't happen so much. And in his first administration, he generally pursued some fairly conservative policies. Now he has the option again of stocking his Cabinet with prominent Democrats and pursuing some more moderate policies. The question is does he want to reward the base whose turnout helped him win this election or does he want to help set up his successor?

Q. Who were the voters that made decisions based on moral issues?

This is what everyone is talking about. Moral issues weren't even on the radar screen a week out and suddenly it is the No. 1 issue above terrorism and above the war. The question is were these swing voters and this changed their mind or tipped them from being undecided to George Bush? Or was it that these voters weren't predicted to turn out, so it changed the composition of whom the voters were? Is this just a sign that lots of evangelicals showed up, or was this a sign that something that happened in the last week that changed peoples' minds? Or was it that when people got into the polls they started thinking about morality more than jobs? There was either a composition effect or people changing their mind effect.

Q. Was there a national trend in whom was elected to the Senate?

A couple thousand votes differently in Ohio and we'd have a million theories about why Bush blew it and whether Republicans are ever going to be able to reach across the divide. [The presidential race] was a really close election. However, in the Senate races, it's a little bit harder to say, 'Oh it was just this coincidence that a toss up that in these five races happened to go towards the Republicans.' That seems to show a little bit more of a trend. It was not only in the South, but also in places like Alaska and in a variety of political contexts, Republicans were able to pull out races. There was a swing for a lot of clear Republican victories.

Q. How will the strengthening of a Republican Congress affect the president's agenda?

Having a cooperative Senate is going to make a difference in how far Bush can push policy in his preferred direction.

One question is whether the Democrats will be able to [continue to filibuster]. Are they going to be able to hold 40 votes together to stop lots of bills from happening? Or are they going to pull back and say, 'Let's have accountability, let's give Bush what he wants and let him and his party live with what comes the next election?' Also, the rules may change. The Republicans in the Senate may push for a revision of the rules that doesn't allow the minority to filibuster the judicial nominee. The filibuster rule is fluid; it has been changed many times in U.S. history, so it may be changed again to get the judicial nominees through.

Q. Does the President Bush's victory signal a mandate for his political agenda?

Americans view the results of elections as legitimate. So when Bill Clinton won, even though he had less than 50 percent of the vote because of Ross Perot's candidacy, that didn't change whether most people thought that he was really elected. Even most Americans viewed the 2000 election results as final, once Al Gore conceded. Even though George Bush hadn't won the popular vote, that never stopped him from being elected, taking office and pushing an agenda that was, by all measures, a very conservative agenda. So, it didn't constrain the policy actions or the way that the legitimacy of the election was viewed in 2000. So, I don't think he gets a big boost by having a mandate, by having a popular vote victory of greater than 50 percent margin this time.

Q. What are the top domestic agendas for the White House in the next four years?

We are going to see a very large imprint from the second Bush administration on the federal judiciary and probably on the Supreme Court. We are also going to see a push to make permanent the tax cuts -- the trillion dollars of temporary tax cuts that were passed in the first Bush administration. We will probably see a push to have some portion of Social Security invested in the private market, which may cost a lot of money and further increase the deficit. So, that is one balancing act that this administration has to worry about.

Q. What are the top agendas in foreign policy for the White House in the next four years?

You couldn't predict George Bush's foreign policy four years ago. This is someone who you would have said up until Sept. 10, 2001 was going to be more of an isolationist and not a nation builder. And it's been completely the opposite of that. So I just don't know what we can expect on foreign policy. In the debates Bush said that the nuclear threats of Iran and South Korea are ones that are going to be dealt with through negotiation, which is very different than Iraq. So it remains to be seen whether that will be as unpredictive as his pledges not to nation build were in the debates four years ago.

Q. Will Mr. Bush make a push to improve international relations?

George Bush thinks it's important to improve America's position in the world and America's influence. And he's clearly made the case that that doesn't mean having everybody like you in the world, that you can be just as powerful being feared, as being liked. Part of the rationale behind the Iraq war was to show that America can establish democracy, to show that America can come in and overthrow a dictator and establish a democracy as a way to make other authoritarian states - especially ones that may be harboring terrorists - more compliant. We'll see more continuation of this policy to demonstrate American strength in foreign policy, rather than to have America loved by the world.

Q. Some reports say that there may be up to four vacancies on the Supreme Court. What will the President's reelection mean for any possible vacancies in the Court?

There are lots of 5-4 cases now that could switch. We could see significant switches in a lot of areas - in civil rights, voting rights and abortion rights. Any time that you have an evenly balanced Supreme Court, any tipping of the scales, can mean significant policy changes.

Q. What's next for Democrats?

Democrats have been optimistic about a lot of the demographic changes. If you see more and more immigrants, those are groups that Democrats are going to try to capture. However, one of the big stories is that Latinos voted Republican in higher numbers than we've seen in any recent election. George Bush got 45 percent of the Latino vote. So the success that Republicans have had with Latinos - that's going to be an area that Democrats are going to focus on.

Another big concern with Democrats is the South. It's been two straight elections that Democrats have been shut out of the South. Do the Democrats want to go to an explicit Southern strategy of trying to find the next Bill Clinton? Or do the Democrats abandon the South and try to increase their support on the Northwest and on the coast?

Democrats also have a strategic decision to make in the Senate, where they are now talking about the new leadership. Do the Democrats want to use that one branch of government where they still have a hold to stop much of the Republican agenda? Or do they want to let the Republican proposals pass and see if the American voters accept or reject those in the next election?

Q. How would you explain the high national voter turnout?

One explanation is that everybody realized that this is a big, high stakes election. However, the real trend was that there was a big boost in turnout in battleground states. It looks like turnout might even be down in some states like California and New York. So, that favors the explanation that the party did a great job of getting the vote out in battleground states, rather than that everybody in the country looked around and realized that this is a high stakes election. It looks like turnout was really driven by party mobilization efforts.

Could it be said that California voted against the national trends?

California continues to be an island to itself and have its own politics. Obviously, we voted like California has in recent elections. There was no reason to expect that California would follow the trend of the red states.

The story in California is the non-story of Arnold Schwarzenegger's effect in the California electorate in changing its party alliance. A year ago, there were lots of people saying, 'This is a sea change, a huge change in the way that California is going. Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to put the state in play for George Bush in 2004. Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to help get rid of Barbara Boxer. Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to help the Republicans recapture the state assembly in the senate.' None of that materialized. So Arnold Schwarzenegger at the top of the ticket and at the bottom of the ticket - the statewide races and in the legislative races - didn't have any coattails. Even though he remains very popular, his popularity is isolated to himself. It doesn't carry over to other Republican candidates.

Did this election teach us anything about conventional election wisdom?

People were saying that larger turnout automatically helps Democrats. What we saw in this election is that Republicans did just as well with some of these marginal voters and in getting people to the polls because of their mobilization efforts. And a higher turnout didn't necessarily benefit Democrats. People were also saying that undecided voters break towards the challenger rather than the incumbent. That doesn't appear to be the case. People who hadn't made up their mind until the last week split about evenly between the president and the challenger. That seems to be another bit of conventional wisdom that needs to be retired.