Whatever Happened to the Republican "Lock" on the Electoral College?

AbstractDuring the 1980s some political analysts began to wonder if the Democratic Party would be able to regain the White House in the foreseeable future. The apparent invulnerability in the the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountain States made it appear that that party entered each election with an insurmountable lead in votes in the Electoral College. In the 1990s, however, the Democratic Party regained its competitiveness in presidential races. Democratic victories were helped by the emergence of regional Democratic strongholds, which include the Northeast, the Pacific Coast, and, to a lesser degree, the Great Lakes. The ideological polarization of the two major parties had indeed made the Democratic Party unpopular in the strongholds, but it has also weakened the Republicans and strengthened the Democrats in regions of the country where the Republicans were once dominant.Keywords: moralistic, strongholds, electoral lock, political cultureWhatever Happened to the Lock on the Electoral College?IntroductionJust prior to the 1980 election, Democratic strategist and former presidential aide Horace Busby predicted that Ronald Reagan would defeat incumbent president Jimmy Carter. His prediction was based upon the configuration of the Electoral College, which he called a Republican Institution (Destler 1996, 491). According to Busby, the state-by-state winner- take-all method of awarding votes in the Electoral College assured that the Party had a lock on it. This he believed explained why the Democrats could remain the majority party in the House of Representatives but could not win presidential races. As Busby had predicted, the Republicans won an electoral landslide in 1980. Ronald Reagan won by a bigger landslide in 1984, and in 1988 the Party won another overwhelming Electoral College victory. In the 1980s it appeared that the states in the the Rocky Mountains, and the Great Plains were out of the grasp of the Democratic Party, and would give the Republicans a nearly insurmountable lead in every election; these states provided 207 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency. The once Democratic Solid South had become a Solid South, while states in the Rockies and the Great Plains had not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, and neither had the states of Indiana or Oklahoma, which gave the Republicans an additional 20 votes in the Electoral College. Meanwhile, after the 1984 election it appeared that the Democrats had no regional strongholds. The only state that the Democrats carried in 1984 was Minnesota, and that was because the Democratic presidential candidate, former Vice President Walter Mondale, was a native son and a former U.S. senator from that state. With the Party having several regions that were strongholds, and the Democratic Party having none, one can see why Busby and other analysts speculated that the Party had a lock on the Electoral College.This perception that presidential candidates were invulnerable in the Electoral College ended in 1992 when Democrat Bill Clinton ousted incumbent George H.W. Bush and received 370 of the 538 electoral votes. However, some might assert that Clinton's victory in 1992 and his re-election in 1996 were made possible by the presence in the race of Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, who ran a well funded campaign that appealed to many who would otherwise have voted Republican. In neither 1992 nor 1996 did Clinton receive the majority of the popular vote, so there is the possibility that he might not have been victorious in a two-person race. In the next presidential election, held in the year 2000, there was no strong third-party candidate, and that election provided the appearance that the Republicans did indeed have a strong advantage in the Electoral College. George W. …