August 5, 2006
Pluralities vs. Majorities Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:30 PM EST Josh Zeitz writes about Joe Lieberman’s likely defeat on Tuesday, and the prospect of a three-sided race in November. He compares the upcoming contest to the 1980 New York Senate race, where in the wake of a primary defeat, Jacob Javits, a liberal Republican, split the Democratic vote and helped elect what was then considered a very conservative Republican, Al D’Amato, who won with 45 percent of the vote. Josh Zeitz does not expect that this split on the Left will again play out with a Republican victory in Connecticut this November, and I think he is right. What happened with Javits, which in my circles at the time seemed unnatural, was not in fact all that rare. Something very similar happened in New York State in 1970: Charles Goodell, a liberal Republican, split the liberal vote with Democrat Richard Ottinger, and thereby handed the Senate seat to Conservative Party nominee James L. Buckley, who won with 38.7 percent of the vote. Although some people think Buckley might even have won a second term, had Bella Abzug won the Democratic primary, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who narrowly beat Abzug in the primary, routed Buckley. So twice in recent times, a state that had elected Democrats or liberal Republicans who generally voted with Democrats, elected a Rightist Republican after a third-party nomination let the majority split its vote. At the time, if you were a Democrat—I was, and am—these results seemed outrageous and perverse, but not illegitimate. We did have the notion that the electoral system was supposed to deliver victory to candidates possessed of absolute majorities, not mere pluralities, thus yielding power to stable parties that possessed the strength and legitimacy to make decisive changes. In our cheerful American self-regard, we thought this was what made two party systems obviously preferable to proportional representation, which had produced immobility in the then ill-regarded French Third Republic, or vast number of Italian parliaments, or the Israeli Knesset. But when this didn’t happen in two consecutive New York Senate races, no one thought the legitimacy of the system was in doubt. In 1980 we blamed what we considered Javits’s self-destructive vanity for what we took to be a repellant outcome. In any case, one thing that may have taken legitimacy off the table was that neither Senate race changed the balance of political power in the country at large. In retrospect, this outcome—where pluralities created by splits in the opposition have achieved significant victories—has happened a fair amount in recent electoral history, and the comparisons are interesting. Margaret Thatcher won her first general election in 1979, when her Tories took 43.9 percent of the vote, her second with 42.4 percent in 1983, her last with 42.2 percent in 1987. She was a revolutionary figure in postwar British politics, and she never won a majority. I began living off and on in Britain in 1981, initially almost entirely among people who detested Thatcher, and in retrospect something interesting was happening: While many people thought Thatcher’s sweeping use of her power destructive and in some respects precedent-shattering, almost no one thought her almost revolutionary use of her political power fundamentally illegitimate, despite her lack of support by anything like a majority of the electorate. England had not two but three parties, with a winner-take-all system, and this sort of result was seen as within the rules. Even though Thatcher’s very sweeping use of mere pluralities was widely enraging and transformative, the legitimacy of British politics was in no way imperiled. So the parallel to 1970s American politics is not exact. We hadn’t yet run that experiment. In 1970 Salvador Allende was elected President of Chile with of 36.3 percent of the popular vote. The opposition had split. Allende was reelected in early 1973, significantly increasing his plurality to 43 percent of the vote, and lost power in a brutal military coup in September of that year. Allende’s use of plurality power was seen, by many of his enemies, as grotesquely illegitimate. I have heard this outcome used to attack electoral systems that allow great power to plurality holders, but it seems likely that some of Allende’s enemies might well have reacted the same way to comparable use of an electoral majority. It is tempting to speculate about linkages between electoral mechanics, fluke results, and the perceived legitimacy of outcomes, so the sources of perceived illegitimacy may not be so easily pinned down. Okay, back to the United States. Bush’s 2000 victory was seen, in some quarters, as illegitimate. Why? Not, I think, because Bush lost the popular vote—people understood that to be within the rules—nor because Ralph Nader’s third-party run reproduced the D’Amato and Buckley outcomes—but because a bare majority of the Supreme Court, a majority composed entirely of justices appointed by Republican Presidents, voted to stop the Florida Supreme Court from interpreting its own constitution. Still, this last perception has done relatively little harm to Bush’s perceived legitimacy. Sure, many people detest Bush, and our politics feel relatively bitter, but no one fears the Chilean outcome. And when you think about it, the bitterness of our politics does not seem to be the product of the judicial origins of Bush’s 2000 victory. Bill Clinton won in 1992 with 43.01 percent of the vote, was reelected with 49.2 percent in 1996, and was seen as a somehow illegitimate President by an audible number of Republicans, but not, I think, because of his plurality victories. Most Democrats saw Clinton’s impeachment as an abuse of Republican legislative power, and that perception probably contributed something to a sense that Bush’s 2000 victory was tainted. But on balance, the perceived legitimacy of American political outcomes, like the perceived legitimacy of British outcomes, remains impressive. And when legitimacy takes a knock, as it did from the Clinton-haters, it is not clear that electoral mechanics and flukey outcomes are responsible for our troubles.
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