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Kerry's doom lay in backing a lost cause

BY LYNN VAVRECK

Why was the reelection of President George Bush predictable? A look back at 50 years of presidential campaigns makes it clear — Kerry leveraged the wrong issue.

Elections happen in different contexts, and candidates must know how to leverage the right circumstances — that’s what separates the winners from the losers. Kerry, in the midst of national exuberance over Howard Dean, identified Iraq and terrorism as this election’s important framework. In truth, those issues could never deliver the election for Kerry because public opinion on them was split — half the voters agreed with the president on Iraq and the other half did not.

To beat incumbents in decent economies, challengers have to campaign on issues on which public opinion is lopsided in their favor — and on which their opponents are committed to unpopular positions. Bush was committed to his policies on Iraq. The problem for Kerry was that the policies were unpopular with only half the country.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter ran for president as a Washington outsider. He defeated Gerald Ford, a consummate Washington insider who had pardoned Richard Nixon. Similarly, John F. Kennedy recognized his opponent’s culpability in what was called “The Missile Gap” — the allegation that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in weapons development. Nixon, who was part of the administration that presided over this “slump” in weapons productivity, had no evidence to counter Kennedy’s claim.

What Carter and Kennedy exploited was a dimension of electoral politics on which their opponents faced constraints. Although Ford and Nixon were members of incumbent administrations and the nation’s economy grew over the course of their stewardships, their challengers defeated them.

What we hear in the press about why candidates lose elections mostly centers around strategies or style. Why did Michael Dukakis lose the 1988 election after a 17-point lead coming out of his convention? It must be because the incumbent, Bush Sr., out-campaigned him, say the experts. Why did Bill Clinton win the 1992 election at a time when Bush Sr. was popular and the economy was recovering? Pundits said that Clinton’s “War Room” strategists out-maneuvered the Bush campaign on a daily basis, or that Bush himself was somehow a “bad” campaigner.

The concept of a good campaign or a good campaigner has certain ephemeral qualities. Most notably, the idea ignores the fact that a candidate can be a good campaigner in one year (Bush 1988) and a lousy one in another (Bush 1992). If campaign success were merely a function of a candidate’s ability to strategize about how to beat the opponent and execute that strategy effectively, we would not see such differences in the successes of candidates like Bush, Carter and Nixon.

John Edwards seemed to know what Kerry should have. From the beginning, Edwards talked about domestic issues — “two Americas,” basic needs, social problems. Kerry’s biggest surge in the polls came after he named Edwards to the ticket and adopted some of the “two Americas” rhetoric. In the end, Kerry stood a better chance of winning the election with a broad, thematic campaign, not about homeland security, but about homeland prosperity. It turns out that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time for Kerry to leverage.

Vavreck is assistant professor of political science.