The Lost Majority: Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs—and Who Will Take It, is Sean Trende’s first book, but it’s an important one. When I was taking political science courses many years ago we were taught that there were long periods—generally about 32 years apart—in which one of the two major political parties had a natural national majority in elections. The majority party didn’t win every election, to be sure, but it won most of them and controlled government for a long generation. Allied to this theory was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s theory of political cycles, with crucial defining elections at similar intervals—in 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932 and 1968.
Trende builds on the work of political scientists like David Mayhew (under whom he studied at Yale) to demolish these theories. As Mayhew has written, it’s impossible to come up with rigorous criteria that establish these elections, and only these elections, as bringing into being a natural majority for one party.
Trende goes further, by arguing that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition was actually short-lived, evaporating by the 1938 off-year elections which led to anti-New Deal bipartisan majorities for the next 20 years. Also, the Reagan majority coalition that supposedly came into being in the 1980s came to an end in the 1990s with Bill Clinton’s election and reelection. Instead we got something like equipoise. Presidential and congressional voting, long at variance, converged by 1996 and we had five biennial elections in the two parties were almost precisely equal in size, followed by three which resulted in historic majorities—for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008 and the Republicans in 2010.
So while political scientists have focused on supposed Roosevelt and Reagan majorities, Trende argues that more enduring alignments, producing close competition between the parties, began with the Eisenhower elections in the 1950s and the Clinton elections in the 1990s. Natural-majority political scientists saw Eisenhower and Clinton as exceptions to the rule, detours from the main line of partisan behavior. Trende argues persuasively that the coalitions they produced tended to endure longer than those of Roosevelt or Reagan.
More generally, he argues that in a competitive two-party political marketplace, both parties have an incentive to win and to adjust to changed circumstances in order to do so. Sometimes it takes a while for a party to make the necessary adjustments (the Democrats in the 1980s) but eventually they do so. Those pursuing a national natural majority lasting a long generation, he argues, are pursuing an impossible goal. The corollary, it seems to me, is that parties should concentrate on winning elections in a way that enables them to make enduring public policy.
