Echoes of 1800? The 2004 Bush-Kerry Race and the Return of Partisan Politics

By John Kenneth White

It was a tough, competitive election. As was the case four years earlier, this race was characterized by vitriolic rhetoric that further polarized an already alienated and exhausted public. One opponent dubbed the incumbent president's tenure as "one continued tempest of malignant passions." The president's defenders responded that "everything must give way to the great object of excluding" the challenger from the White House. On election night, the contest was decided by a handful of votes in a single state. The winner… Thomas Jefferson.

There are many parallels between the George W. Bush-John F. Kerry race of 2004 and the partisan fervor that roiled the John Adams-Thomas Jefferson contest of 1800. For starters, the Adams-Jefferson fight was a continuation of a bitter rivalry that began in 1796. Adams, the Federalist candidate, and Jefferson, the Democrat, fought to a 71-68 near-tie in the electoral college—much as George W. Bush and Al Gore did in 2000. In each case, the electoral college split reflected a profound geographical division. Adams's strength lay in his native New England (the blue states of their day), while Jefferson's was in the South (the red). What cinched the 1796 election for Adams was his New York State win—the 1796 version of Florida.

And as was the case following Bush's election in 2000, the passions that inflamed Adams's victory in 1796 had not cooled. Between 1796 and 1800, the two parties conducted the first of many "permanent campaigns." Jefferson secured the backing of New York's Democratic U.S. senator Aaron Burr. This marriage of convenience was cemented by their mutual opposition to the Federalist-backed Alien and Sedition Acts—controversial laws whose criticisms are echoed in today's debates about the Patriot Act. The Sedition Act made it a misdemeanor to publish false or malicious information, and provided that anyone convicted of conspiring to hinder the operations of the federal government be subjected to heavy fines and possible imprisonment. The Alien Acts made it easier to deport political adversaries who were not citizens.

Jefferson came to believe that Adams was endangering the civil liberties the American Revolution had been fought to acquire. Adams's partisans responded that the elevation of a culturally alien Jefferson would lead the country into a civil and cultural war. As the Gazette of the United States warned in a headline: "GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT; OR… JEFFERSON AND NO GOD!!!"

Given such inflammatory rhetoric, it is not surprising that the reprise of the Adams-Jefferson contest was both close and controversial. In three states (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire), the popular vote was discarded and the electors appointed by Federalist-controlled state legislatures. In Rhode Island, the popular vote was instituted for the first time, while Virginia shifted its electoral vote count to a winner-take-all system in order to maximize support for Jefferson. But as was the case in 1796, the election hinged on a single state: New York. And unlike 1796, Jefferson and Burr came away with New York's twelve votes, thanks to Burr's canvass. While the Democrats' plan to have Jefferson and Burr combine to defeat Adams and his running-mate, Charles Coatesworth Pinckney, succeeded, it resulted in an electoral college tie between Jefferson and Burr. Eventually, the House of Representatives chose Jefferson after several inconclusive ballots and one all-night session. But Jefferson's victory did not ease the partisan divide. Reflecting on his defeat, Adams told fellow Federalist Elbridge Gerry "how might is the spirit of party."

In many ways, the 2004 Bush-Kerry race was characterized by the same degree of intense partisanship. In 1800, the seeds for the 1804 Hamilton-Burr duel, in which Burr killed Alexander Hamilton, were sown. This past year, Georgia Democratic U.S. senator Zell Miller passionately defended George W. Bush in his keynote speech at the Republican National Convention, accusing John F. Kerry of leaving the military armed with "spitballs." When challenged by MSNBC television commentator Christopher Matthews on the September 1 telecast of Hardball, Miller became incensed and said he wished "we lived in the day when you could challenge a person to a duel." Democrats were equally zealous. In a Zogby International poll conducted September 8-9 prior to the Iowa caucuses, 50 percent of likely participants said they disliked George W. Bush as a person.

These deep partisan divisions produced a series of gaps. According to the 2004 exit poll, as shown in Figure 1, sharp group differences in the vote for president became apparent in a marriage gap, a God gap, a gender gap, a racial gap, an education gap, a gun gap, a sexual orientation gap, and a regional gap.

But like in the Adams-Jefferson contests, the most important gap in the Bush-Kerry race was the partisan one. Among Republicans, Bush beat Kerry by an astounding eighty-seven points. Even among Democrats—historically notorious for their intraparty fracases—Kerry had a seventy-eight-point lead.

Indeed, the elevated degree of partisanship in 2004 was unlike previous contests. Perhaps the most outstanding prior example was 1988, the year George H. W. Bush won the presidency. In that election, Bush received 53 percent of the vote—a figure that almost rivals the 51 percent of the popular vote given to his son sixteen years later. But the scope of George H. W. Bush's 1988 win was considerably different. The forty-first president received 426 electoral votes and won forty states, while his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis, won 111 electoral votes and ten states, along with the District of Columbia. Nearly one in five Democrats defected from Dukakis to back the elder Bush. This was a broad, national, and largely nonpartisan victory. But something happened between 1988 and 2004 to produce the current level of intense partisanship. And that something was in the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.