Twenty years ago, as the 2002 mid-term elections, the first since the 9/11 attacks, ground to the usual hard-hitting close, Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly observed that the parties were still almost evenly divided and that “the battle between the two great parties for a sustainable post-New Deal primacy” was far from settled. And in such a volatile political climate with both the Republican and Democratic Parties having roughly equal bases, he wrote that, “In Parity, the Odd Man Is In.”
The late Kelly, who tragically died covering the Iraq War in 2003, predicted that American politics would get even nastier due to its closeness and hyper-competitiveness: “We will be seeing a lot more of all those things that nice people find so distasteful in politics. (As a not obsessively nice person, hurrah.)”
While I did not share Kelly’s enthusiasm for the Bush-Cheney Administration, there can be no doubt that he hit the nail on the head in this highly prescient column. (Kelly also scored with a 1999 column entitled “Beatty and Buchanan: That’s Entertainment!” ridiculing the idea of a Warren Beatty presidential campaign: “We feel a sore need for electoral amusement….Warren, give us the logical conclusion of our politics. Give us the movies.”)
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Kelly identified three trends that would come to the fore in the new “Age of Parity.”
1) “Seriously unattractive candidates: If you are somebody who strikes many people as appalling, or at least uninspiring, and yet you would like to rule the world – congratulations. Parity politics means that now anybody really can grow up to be president.… In an ordinary time, a politician who is persistently unattractive to a large percentage of voters – Hillary Clinton, for example – cannot reasonably hope to prevail in statewide or national general elections. But parity perversely rewards such a candidate. Call it the Gore-Bush Rule of Parity: A passionately divided core electorate means that any major party nominee will get 48% of the vote, no matter how weak that candidate is in one way or another. (Well, almost any. There remains a floor the voters won’t go below; call it the Torricelli Exception.) To win, the nominee need move only a relative handful of votes; the rest are givens. Thus, the benefits of mass appeal and electioneering competence are minimized, and so are the penalties of unattractiveness and incompetence. Dweebs, feebs, stiffs and plates of lox, awake! Your time has come!”
The “Torricelli Exception:” Kelly referred to former New Jersey Sen. Bob Torricelli, who was forced out on corruption charges and resigned from the Democratic ticket after the deadline for doing so. (The New Jersey Supreme Court allowed Democrats to substitute Frank Lautenberg on the ballot and he held the seat for another decade).
Kelly was absolutely correct that more controversial candidates would run: 2004 brought us the problematic candidacies of Al Sharpton (who had a reputation for scandal and racial divisiveness), former Sens. Carol Braun (who lost after one term due to ethical controversies), and Dennis Kucinich (who was nearly recalled as the young mayor of Cleveland in the 1970s and likes to talk about seeing UFOs). 2008 continued the parade as on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton started out as the Democratic frontrunner, Joe Biden ran despite being forced out of the 1988 race on plagiarism charges, Kucinich ran again, John Edwards ran despite the fact that he had impregnated his mistress, and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel ran despite losing his Senate re-election bid in 1980. Even Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert got in on the Democratic act, briefly running in his home state of South Carolina. (As Kelly might have predicted, the various controversies of the Clinton Era helped doom Hillary Clinton’s bid). The only strange candidate in the GOP field was Alan Keyes, an outspoken black conservative who repeatedly ran for the US Senate in different states & GOP presidential nomination and lost everywhere.
As if to prove Kelly’s point, Hillary ended up as Secretary of State, carried the national popular vote as the Democratic nominee in 2016 and Biden now has the most powerful job in America.
The rise of bizarre candidates continued in the first mid-term election of the Obama Era: In 2010, Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell in Delaware was forced to run an ad denying that she was a witch, while Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle said that she might pursue “Second Amendment remedies” if she lost. (Fortunately, after Senator Harry Reid defeated Ms. Angle, no gunfire was reported). In California, both gubernatorial candidates called each other political “whores” for selling out to special interests, while in New York, an actual boss of prostitutes shared the debate stage with the major party candidates for governor, asserting that, “The career politicians in Albany are the biggest whores in this state. I might be the only person sitting on this stage with the right experience to deal with them!” Another candidate for Governor in New York kept shouting, “The rent is too damn high.” And in Ohio, a Republican House candidate was found dressing up as a Nazi soldier.
And 2012 was a comedian’s delight on the Republican side: Texas Governor Rick Perry served up a veritable buffet of jokes for Jay Leno and David Letterman when he suffered several long lapses of memory in various debates, businessman Herman Cain was forced to withdraw amid charges of sexual harassment, Michelle Bachman was confused about New England geography thinking that the battles of Lexington & Concord were in New Hampshire, the relative unknowns Tim Pawlenty, Gary Johnson & Jon Huntsman got very little traction and Newt Gingrich & Rick Santorum – who had previously been tossed out of office amid reputations for radicalism and abrasiveness – were their usual fiery selves.
In 2016, Ted Cruz ran notwithstanding the fact that he was born in Canada, Scott Walker bombed, as did Jeb Bush who won only three delegates despite having almost 100% name recognition among Republicans. Among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton was taken to the limit by Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Brooklyn and Vermont. They all ended up losing to the Donald.
And Kelly’s theory would have predicted the rise of Donald Trump who broke all records for being the most unorthodox candidate ever: he’s the only President who never served in either government or the military before getting elected, while getting in one political brawl after another. And who knows, Trump may go for a “three-peat” in the 2024 primaries?
But even if Trump doesn’t win again, there can be no doubt that we’ll be seeing ever more unusual candidates due to the fact that the Internet makes it much easier for fringe candidates to raise money and get attention.
2) “More really seriously unattractive candidates.” “Parity also encourages and rewards the politically ambitious whose appeal is so radically limited that a major party nomination is out of the question. Fringe candidates are the new kingmakers and king-breakers. Of the past three presidential contests, arguably two were decided by the vote-leeching effects of borderline candidates who could never win the office for themselves: Ross Perot made Bill Clinton president with 43 percent of the vote, and Ralph Nader put George W. Bush in with 48 percent. The third-party messiahs know their new power and naturally will exercise it – and this will shape and distort the politics of the major parties. And voters will recall fondly the days when Pat Buchanan seemed sort of far out there.”
This prediction came true in 2016: Green Party candidate Jill Stein diverted enough progressive votes away from Hillary Clinton to allow Donald Trump to carry Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by the narrowest of margins. The guess here is that independent candidates will continue to have a major impact in the 2020s and 2030s.
3)“More desperate actions in desperate times:” Bob Torricelli’s I-can’t-win-so-I-quit abandonment of the Senate race in New Jersey, James Jeffords’ no-one-likes-me-so-I’m-going-to-take-the-Senate-from-them abandonment of the Republican Party – these are harbingers. With everything up for grabs every election cycle, and every race critical, nobody can be expected to draw the line at anything. Expect more vote thievery, more contested elections, more stunts of the Torricelli-Jeffords genre, more dirty tricks, more outrageous lies and slurs, more of everything that the League of Women Voters would rather see less of.”
Kelly was right again here as campaigns seem to get ever nastier: in 2010, an ad called California Republican Senate candidate Tom Campbell a “demon sheep.” In 2012, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Mike Turzai, was bragging that his new voter I.D. law would help defeat President Obama by suppressing the inner city Democratic vote. The “Tea Party” protests of 2009 and 2010 were famous for the intensity of their crowds. After 2020, Donald Trump and his supporters made it an article of faith among grassroots conservatives that Biden’s election was illegitimate. President Biden recently gave a speech suggesting that millions of Trump voters were “semi-fascists.” And the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizen’s United case to allow unlimited corporate campaign spending in the name of free speech meant that campaigns now start earlier and voters will be bombarded with radio & TV ads plus emails from “independent” Super-PACs for month after month.
Kelly concluded that the Age of Parity and Odd Candidates In “should be fun, in a grim sort of way.”
He was certainly right about that too: The elections of the last two decades definitely didn’t lack for entertainment value. The nation’s severe economic problems aren’t likely to disappear anytime soon, thus giving birth to another “Age of Anxiety.” And when the voters are angry, we tend to see a lot of unconventional candidates. While future elections may rank high for amusement and drama, whether they will improve the governance of the world’s oldest democracy, well …
Patrick Reddy is the co-author of “California After Arnold” and the forthcoming “21st Century America.”
