Originally posted by H. Godwineson
He and his campaigne staff may have adopted a policy of distancing themselves from Clinton in June of 2000, but it was STILL too late.
He and his campaign staff adopted the policy of distancing themselves from Clinton in June of
1999, not 2000. You can't get any earlier than that when it comes to presidential campaigns.
I'm also well aware of Gore's history as a Vice President, but what you've done here is apply your own experiences with Gore to the general public, and that almost always proves erroneous. The fact is that gun control is simply not a hot button issue in presidential campaigns for most Americans; we know this from years of polling data.
In addition, the logic of your argument doesn't hold up. You argue on the one hand that the Democrats suffered in 1994 congressional elections because of policies that angered the South and West, and that Gore likewise paid for this in 2000. Yet you conveniently ignore the 1996 presidential election and the 1998 congressional elections. Did voters in the South and West forget to seethe during those years, but they remembered to do so again when Gore was running? Clinton captured plenty of states in the South and West in 1996 despite the anger you purport over gun control. In 1998, Democrats did far better than historically expected for mid-term elections. Did gun enthusiasts suffer from temporary amnesia during that election?
It's also important to recognize that the 1990s saw the conclusion of a long regional partisan realignment in the South. Traditionally conservative regions that had always voted Democrat dating to the Civil War finally began voting Republican as a reflection of new ideological realities. Their representatives weren't necessarily any more or less conservative than before, it's just that they were now Republicans instead of Democrats.
As an aside and an addendum to what I'd written to Kieran earlier, there's been some interesting work done in political science on the 2000 election. The best I've seen is by Bartels and Zaller (2001) who argue that prevailing models of presidential elections still predict electoral outcomes with great success... including the 2000 election... if we keep in mind a few facts easily overlooked or misconstrued. First, voters
retrospectively evaluate the economy for incumbent presidents, but they
prospectively evaluate it for all other candidates, including the VP. Thus while Clinton benefitted in 1996 from the economy and Bush Sr. suffered because of it in 1992, Gore gained little from the boom times of the 1990s. Regardless of Clinton's legacy and Gore's attempts to distance himself or paint himself closer to Clinton, his candidacy was hurt by the fact that by November 2000, economic forecasts pointed to a declining economy.
Bartels and Zaller also argue that our predictions depend on how we operationalize the "state of the economy." Usually political scientists measure this with GDP, but they argue persuasively that the more personal measure of Real Disposable Income (RDI) should be used instead. While GDP grew robustly in 2000, RDI increased at a much slower pace. If we take into account the dual facts that (1) Gore did not benefit for Clinton's economic legacy because of prospective economic evaluations by voters, and (2) the economic prospects based on RDI were grim, then the race was
always much closer than conventional wisdom suggests. It might never have been Gore's to lose in the first place, but rather a very real competition between roughly equal candidates.
-- Todd/Leviathn
