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I. THE POWERS OF A KING?
There is an idea current in the land today that presidential power has grown to the point where it is a threat to democracy. The New York Times editorial page writers and leading Democrats regularly accuse President George W. Bush of acting like a king or seeking kingly powers.1 In the academic community, Professor Bruce Ackerman has written powerfully about what he sees as the danger that presidential power poses to democracy itself.2 In this Symposium Issue, Professors Bill Marshall3 and Jenny Martinez4 argue that the presidency has become too powerful. Marshall goes so far as to argue for reducing presidential power by separately electing the Attorney General.
In this Commentary, we suggest that when political power is examined more broadly, Presidents and their parties generally have less power in the United States than commentators recognize. We believe the President today is less of a king than a lightning rod. Indeed, the constitutional and practical weakness of the presidency is, if not a threat to American democracy, at least a worrisome limitation on it.
The reason for this is that midterm and off-year elections show a strong backlash against members of the President's party. Political scientists have put forward two theories to explain midterm elections, both of which underestimate this backlash. The first theory of surge and decline holds that presidential midterm losses are explained mostly by the absence in those years of presidential coattails.5 The second theory of midterm elections is that they are mostly a referendum on how well the President and the economy are doing.6 These approaches tend to look too narrowly at federal elections when much of the reaction to winning the White House occurs in the states.
Our backlash theory holds that midterm elections almost always punish the President's party so that it actually loses as much or more power in state and federal elections as the party gained by winning the White House. In essence, this pattern is one step forward in presidential election years and several steps back over the succeeding three years. In midterm elections, it is not merely that, without the President at the top of the ticket, his party loses some of its gains from the presidential election years...