If the polls are right, and Hillary Clinton wins on Nov. 8, Democrats will have won more votes in six of the past seven presidential elections. This successful run is among the most significant periods of dominance by an American political party in U.S. history. Perhaps the only run that has topped this was Thomas Jefferson's Democrat-Republican Party, which won six consecutive elections beginning in 1800, or FDR and Harry Truman's run in the mid-20th century. But nothing else really compares.
Acknowledging the historic success of the modern
Democrats matters, for it unlocks a deeper and perhaps inconvenient
truth about our politics often obscured in the daily chatter – there is a
vast difference between the two American political parties today. A Bloomberg poll released Tuesday does a good job capturing these differences:
- 48 percent see the Democratic Party favorably, 47 percent unfavorably. 35 percent see the GOP favorably, 61 percent unfavorably.
- 45 percent of Americans identify as Democrats, just 38 percent as Republican.
In a recent U.S. News column,
I offered an explanation for why the Democrats have been so successful.
Since the end of the Cold War, when the world did indeed begin to go
through profound change, each party has had control of the White House
twice. Both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama will have left
America better than they found it, leaving behind lower unemployment
rates and annual deficits, rising incomes and soaring stock markets.
Over their presidencies you can point to many other policy successes too
– improvements in our health care system, welfare reform, the expansion
of the earned income tax credit, establishment of the modern global
trading system, Obama's all-of-the-above energy strategy and his
progress on tackling climate change, the ending of al-Qaida, and a
series of decisions that helped the global internet develop and
flourish.

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