With so many pundits making absurd claims about a third party in the US, it’s refreshing to see Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias taking a more sophisticated approach to the analysis of politics.

Drum writes in response to a New Republic article by an ABC News correspondent who notes the parallels between 1994 and 2006, but points out that liberals lack a figure comparable to Newt Gingrich. As Drum points out, though, Gingrich himself was not the key factor:

Yes, Gingrich was a pit bull, but the biggest thing he had going for him was simpler: he was on the tail end of a 30-year shift of white, mostly Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Pressure had been building along that particular tectonic plate for a long time, and in 1994 Gingrich was able to turn it into an electoral earthquake. Instead of gaining a few seats per election, he gained them all at a single time.

Without that underlying dynamic, the 1994 landslide would have been a fizzle, gaining a dozen seats, not 54. So while Democrats might very well need a Newt Gingrich of their own, what they really need if they want to win back control of Congress is a tectonic shift they can take advantage of — and so far I just haven’t seen any big, pent-up frustration on the part of center-right voters that might turn large numbers of them into center-left voters instead.

People have tended to overemphasize the need to mirror the specifics of 1994 in terms of leadership, “nationalizing” the election, running on a specific agenda, etc. But as Drum suggests, leaders riding a huge demographic/political shift tend to look brilliant. It’s the same reason we overanalyze the tactics of various winning presidential campaigns that largely won because of the state of the economy. For instance, Reagan’s 1984 campaign and Clinton’s 1996 campaign were lauded for their successful tactics, but it’s hard to imagine how either could have lost given the circumstances. Under those conditions, nearly any strategy will look prescient.

Yglesias makes a similarly important point about this passage from an E.J. Dionne column:

Canadians, devoted as always to subtlety and prudence, refused to give Harper a majority. Diane Ablonczy, a Conservative parliamentarian from Alberta, offered a perceptive take on the voters’ verdict. She said they “want to test-drive the Conservative Party” before allowing it to govern without help. In stable democracies, voters can take test-drives.

In the elections for the Palestinian Authority, the voters also rose up against the incumbents. But in the process, they gave a majority to Hamas, a party that has embraced terrorism and would obliterate Israel.

As Yglesias writes, however, “voters” don’t decide who gets a majority directly. The preferences that voters express are filtered through electoral and legislative institutions, resulting in a final outcome:

[I]t’s important to be careful in attribute collective intentions to voters in legislative elections. Both Hamas in Palestine and the Conservative Party in Canada won pluralities, rather than majorities, of the total votes cast. Indeed, the Conservatives’ margin over the Liberals in Canada was bigger than Hamas’ margin over Fatah in Palestine. But Hamas wound up with a majority of seats and the Conservatives didn’t because Canada and Palestine use different electoral systems (Canada uses first past the post voting in single-member constituencies like the US and UK, Palestine has a mixed system whose details I don’t understand) and the third party dynamics in the two countries are different.

In short, electoral outcomes are mostly the result of state of the economy, long-term partisan trends, and electoral/legislative institutions, not personalities and tactics. If only more pundits appreciated this point…

Postscript — For more on these points:
–The Macro Polity by Erickson, MacKuen and Stimson measures the influence of the state of the economy and macropartisanship on electoral trends in the US
–Issue Evolution by Carmines and Stimson explores how the issue of race transformed the two major parties in the US — a shift that culminated in the 1994 election
–Making Votes Count by Gary Cox analyzes how electoral laws shape party strategy and voter behavior