ABSTRACT
At its peak during the Ronald Reagan years, The McLaughlin Group featured host John McLaughlin, who would regularly ask panelists at the end of his program-using his staccato-style, rapid-fire delivery-to make their political predictions for the coming week. Once uttered, the pundits’ prognostications disappeared into the ether of the cathode ray tubes that most televisions featured in those days. Making predictions about politics-especially those concerning the future of any political party-is extremely hazardous. In 1980, political scientist Everett Carll Ladd wrote in the pages of Fortune magazine that Jimmy Carter would “probably win,” noting that Ronald Reagan’s “candidacy is in trouble, in spite of Carter’s manifest weaknesses, because he has not persuaded the electorate that he would do a better job than Carter.”1 Nearly a dozen years later, on the eve of Bill Clinton’s surprising 1992 victory, author Peter Brown published a book titled Minority Party: Why Democrats Face Defeat in 1992 and Beyond. In it, Brown claimed that the Democrats were a new and permanent presidential minority. Having lost three straight elections by landslide margins, Brown argued that the Democrats could no longer assemble an electoral college majority. He was hardly alone in his thinking, as even many Democrats held similar views. Former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt, who would later become interior secretary in the Clinton administration, believed Democrats had not learned their lessons from the stinging defeats inflicted upon them by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush: “As we cross into the next century, we are looking potentially, in the absence of some serious change, at an unbroken string of Republican presidencies. A lock on the presidency.”2
