Party politics are getting scrambled this election year, both in Washington and across the country. Here, the new Top Two primary allows for the possibility that a pair of candidates from the same party—rather than one from each—could face off in the same race come November. It also permits candidates to self-describe, or even obscure, their party affiliation. Thus, Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi chose to appear on the August primary ballot as a member of the “GOP”—not an actual party, of course, but a Republican nickname.
Democrats allege that Rossi is trying to deceive voters and is ashamed to run under his party’s true banner because, in what is predicted to be a bad year for Republicans, ticket-splitting swing voters—the so-called Dinocrats of ’04—might be put off by the Republican label. An Elway poll in June suggested the trick might work: 25 percent of respondents—most of them the hotly courted independents—didn’t know what “GOP” meant, and an incredible 7 percent thought it referred to Democrats. The dodge suggests the perceived toxicity of any connection to the party of George W. Bush, who is less popular than Richard Nixon at the nadir of Watergate.
Another sign of scrambling: At the state Democratic convention in Spokane in June, the most inspiring speaker was an obscure onetime Republican from out of state. Yes, Gov. Chris Gregoire, Sen. Patty Murray, Sen. Maria Cantwell and Rep. Jim McDermott all spoke to the delegates, but the guy who brought down the house was the lieutenant governor of Kansas, Mark Parkinson, who describes his place in the political-status hierarchy as somewhere south of an amoeba.
Parkinson told the story of how he made the transition from being a Republican state legislator and longtime chairman of the Kansas state Republican party to being a Democrat and running mate of Kansas Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a rising star. Accused of opportunism, Parkinson described how he was raised in a tradition embodied by the old Republican party of Kansas, which grew out of John Brown abolitionism and matured into a prairie progressivism embodied by former Gov. Alf Landon and his daughter Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum. Today, the party is out of touch with the concerns of real Kansans, Parkinson says: more concerned with banning evolution in the classroom than seeing that kids get a great basic education. Like many party apostates, he argues that his party left him.
Parkinson gave his speech with self-deprecating humor, and Democrats opened their big tent to him. I was a Barack Obama delegate at the convention, and it struck me that, with a couple of years in Congress or a term as governor, Parkinson would be a rising national star, too: the kind of moderate, middle-American Democrat who could lure the country back to more progressive, yet mainstream, politics. In this country, it can be a short hop from amoeba to top contender.
That’s part of the appeal of Obama’s presidential campaign. It’s interesting to note that two traditional Democratic messages failed this year. Hillary Clinton offered benefits to every constituency. She practiced what has been referred to as the “H.R. Department” style of Democratic politics. It seemed both pandering and uninspiring. And John Edwards couldn’t ignite a populist prairie fire despite a recession and a mortgage crisis. Perhaps his $400 haircuts were to blame.
Obama’s more centrist, JFK-style appeal for a civil, less self-interested politics has worked better thus far and has made it possible for him to appeal to people like Parkinson. Obama has attracted support from other former liberal Republicans, including Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Seattle’s William Ruckelshaus, a former Nixon appointee, plus former electeds like John Anderson, Lowell Weicker (both onetime Capitol Hill Republicans-turned-independents), and Lincoln Chafee, the former Republican senator from Rhode Island.
John McCain is working to get backing from a similar group: moderate Republicans and a few Democrats, most notably “independent Democrat” Connecticut senator and former Al Gore running mate Joe Lieberman. In Washington state, McCain has been successful in getting the state’s old “Dan Evans” Republicans to back him, including former Gov. Evans himself, former Sen. Slade Gorton and former Secretary of State Ralph Munro. These are not Republicans of the Kansas creationist type, but they represent a nearly bygone era of this state’s GOP. They stick with McCain because they like his character and independence, but they stand increasingly at odds with a state electorate that doesn’t even remember the liberal Evans era.
One reason is that the state Republican party has shifted to the right. Another is that McCain’s supposed moderation is still way out of sync with mainstream opinion in Washington on a woman’s right to choose, the war in Iraq, health-care reform, even Boeing defense contracts. One can’t help but wonder why none of these “Evans” men has yet to have a Parkinson conversion experience. It suggests they’re all further to the right than legend would have us believe.
And trends show them to be increasingly out of step. National polls reveal that party identification is growing for Democrats and independents and shrinking for Republicans. That’s especially true among young people. In 1992, according to a Pew Center study, 18-to-29-year-olds were split between the two parties (46% D, 47% R). By 2008, the split was 58% D and 33% R. In that age bracket, a Rasmussen poll of Washington voters in June showed Obama leading McCain by 74% to 14%.
Polls can change, but they also indicate that long-term preference trends are shaped by the context of politics in the era in which one comes of voting age. The most conservative contingent, according to Pew, has been the late baby boomers and Gen Xers. Those voters’ first taste of politics was during Jimmy Carter’s malaise and Reagan’s “morning in America,” and they trended Republican in the ’90s. Now, even they have swung to the Democrats. Given the legacy of Bush II, it’s no wonder the Democrats are surging among the young and the memory of Republican progressivism has faded. A few, like Evans and company, cling to old notions of what the Republican party could be, but the future points to more Mark Parkinsons. L&P
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