LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : David Butler : Watching the Election With an Expert Who Knows From Truman

WASHINGTON —  David Butler is the grand old man of Anglo-American election-watching. A student of campaigns since 1945, he is an election-night fixture on the BBC, and has commented often on U.S. television. Butler is most famous for analyzing elections in terms of “swing”--the notion of block shifts in voting patterns. The concept is now so commonplace it’s amazing to think a person invented it. Butler has applied this idea to elections around the world, including Australia and India, where he has visited frequently.

In addition to his many other books, Butler published three this year, “The British General Election of 1992,” a compendium he has co-authored every election year since 1951, “Electioneering,” which surveys modern political campaigns across the world, and a study of U.S. congressional redistricting. He is a fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, where he recently retired after teaching comparative government for 40 years.

While watching the presidential race this year, Butler is teaching at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and visiting the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, as an adjunct scholar. His wife, Marilyn Butler, holds the prestigious King Edward VII Professorship of English at Cambridge University and is a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. They have three sons--all political journalists.

He spoke over a drink late one evening a week before the election, in the living room of the house he rents in Washington. In a purple shirt, ascot and tweed coat, Butler looked the part of the English country squire, though his conversational manner is that of a slightly absent-minded Oxford don, leading a tutorial in politics.

Question: Is there any chance of a British scenario rescuing George Bush?

Answer: I’m humble about election results. They can kick you in the teeth so easily. I was in America in 1948, and present in the Dewey headquarters on the night when Truman won. And I was fairly bloodied, broadcasting as a late swing put Ted Heath, quite unexpectedly, into Downing Street in 1970. And last April, when it unexpectedly kept John Major in office--the unexpected can happen. But I must confess that I’ve been, like most commentators, amazed in the last two months at the stability of the polls showing a 15% lead for Clinton. There has been, of course, a movement which may prove to be a trend, or just a blip.

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Q: Did you expect the race to tighten?

A: I expected it to tighten, I suppose. People do tend, in predicting elections, to hedge toward the middle. There is, in British terms, what I call the 20-seat syndrome. If you say less than a 20-seat margin, you suggest it might go the other way. Nobody has the courage to predict a 60-40 division in a presidential vote--yet it has happened five times since the war.

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Q. How is this election like Britain’s?

A: The parallels are quite striking. In each case, you have a party that has been in power for a dozen years seeking a renewed mandate in a time of deep recession. We had it in Britain, and the incumbents won. The Republicans have, in fact, employed Maurice Saatchi of Saatchi & Saatchi, who worked for the Tories, to do work for them, and some of their advertisements echo the English slogans and advertisements. On the other side, Neil Kinnock would end all his speeches, “It’s time to change.” That is, obviously, a slogan that is used all the time by Clinton, Gore and others. And you’ve got a third party in Britain, and now, unusually, here. But the main similarity, I think, does lie in negative campaigning, which goes back 100 years but has been developed much more positively after the Willie Horton thing. The British election did see more negative campaigning than before. The Conservatives said, “If you vote Labor, you vote for more taxes,” over and over again. People got annoyed with the knocking copy (negative campaigning), but it seems to have gotten through to the mass public.

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Q: So what’s the difference between the two elections?

A: The biggest difference is that the fall of Margaret Thatcher cleaned the slate, whereas Bush has not been able to clean the slate. John Major, when the election came, had only been in office for 18 months. He really did, somehow, produce a kind of Teflon effect. Give him a chance was the argument. I can’t help thinking that if there had been a change in the leadership of the Republican Party five months ago, they would be in much better shape now.

The second thing is that the Conservatives had lowered taxes quite appreciably in their time, particularly at the top end. . . . Eighty percent of the people would have been better off under Labor’s tax plans. Nonetheless, the things that were said were sufficiently scary that little old ladies who were way below the level by which they could possibly have been hurt by Labor’s tax proposals felt they couldn’t vote Labor because of the tax.

Bush, on the other hand, shot himself in the foot with “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Either he should never have said it, or he should have stuck to it. It immensely weakens the force of anything Republicans do on taxes.

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Q: What has struck you about this election?

A: One is two words that aren’t used in the election. One is “Democrat” and the other is “Republican.” You see billboards, and they’re selling the candidate, but people are not tying themselves much up with the Bush label, let alone the Republican label. This is one of the areas of total difference between Britain and the United States. In Britain, we think in terms of party. . . . We aren’t voting for Kinnock or Major, we are voting for a Conservative or Labor government.

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Q: Do you consider this an extraordinary year?

A: The obvious thing that has broken all rules is the Perot intervention. Nobody would have expected him to have shot up ahead of the other two parties in polls briefly in the middle of the summer. Then when he withdrew, nobody expected him to come back. He has also had a fairly substantial effect on the dialogue of the election. I think his presence has actually helped slightly diminish the knocking copy, particularly on the Republican side. He has said we don’t want this old sort of politics. This is the regular appeal of centrist parties, trying to say they are sensible and constructive.

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Q: What previous U.S. election does this remind you of?

A: When I was here in the spring of 1980, I remember being at a meeting of heavyweight political scientists who were deploring the fact that they, as citizens, were being forced to choose between Carter and Reagan--who they all regarded as both inadequate and inappropriate. I think they may have been unjust to Carter as a President and even unjust to Reagan as a President as it happens, but there was that sort of cry of despair, which indeed led to the Anderson candidacy. Perot is a stronger figure than Anderson, representing a larger, more demagogic sort of appeal, but I am reminded of that.

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Q: There’s been a lot of talk about 1948. Should we make that analogy?

A: I’m sure that if Mr. Bush would win this election, people would equate it with Truman going around, attacking the do-nothing 80th Congress, attacking gridlock from the inside. I think Bush is a less sympathetic figure than Truman in the way he puts over this argument, but I’m sure that analogy is there. I think it’s absurd, of course, to suggest that either Clinton or Bush is remotely like Harry Truman. They aren’t.

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Q: Why do they like to think of themselves as like Harry Truman?

A: I think Clinton likes to associate himself with a successful former Democratic president who was not involved in the Vietnam War. The reason why Bush does is that Harry Truman came from behind and won. Though, of course, Bush didn’t vote for Harry Truman.

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Q: You’re the inventor of this concept of swing, which is what saved Truman in 1948 and which Bush is hoping will save him now. Can you explain what it means?

A: Swing simply is the movement from one party to the other, the percentage of movement. In Britain, where we do behave remarkably uniformly as one nation, if one constituency moves 3% from Conservative to Labor, you will tend to find the whole country moves that sort of amount.

People say America is so diverse that you can’t do this. Yet, in fact, swing is used. When the exit polls are done in America, you say the Republicans are running 3% behind where they were running in this bellwether precinct four years ago, and on that basis, this is the outcome.

This time it seems likely that there will be a substantial swing. I suppose the reason why most commentators, even ones who are skeptical about opinion polls, have been predicting a Clinton victory is that they all say we’ve met a lot of people who voted for Bush, who aren’t going to vote for him. . . .

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Q: If you had to guess the results on the basis of one state, what would it be?

A: I’m very hesitant about this. Obviously, one is tempted to go to the states that were almost on the result last time. Michigan and Colorado would be two good states to look at.

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Q: So it’s no longer true that as Maine goes, so goes the nation?

A: No. The future doesn’t always resemble the past. Let me tell you a story. In 1960, I got a job for election night, sitting beside Eric Sevareid on CBS. I went to the New York Public Library once I knew that I was going to do this, and looked at the papers for the last five presidential elections. I found that the Democrats, when a million votes were in, were always ahead of their final percentage, but never more than 1% ahead.

So when a million votes were in, and all the commentators were hesitating, I said to Sevareid, “Don’t pussyfoot any longer. Call the election for Kennedy.” And he did, way ahead of anyone else. Then, an hour later, it wasn’t 54.8, it was 53.8. An hour later it was 52.8. And it went on down until it ended up at 50.1. I was perfectly right in my basic logic, but what I’d forgotten was the Catholic Kennedy from Massachusetts, the Protestant Nixon from California. The early returns from the Eastern states were misleading.

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Q: This year has also been compared to 1912. Does that analogy have any merit?

A: I think it’s got relatively little. 1912 was a straight split within the Republican Party, which had been, since the Civil War, the dominant party in America. Teddy Roosevelt, the rebel, got more votes than Taft the incumbent. I don’t think even the wildest optimists in the Perot camp seriously believe that they are going to come second, let alone first in this election. Teddy Roosevelt, after all, was a former President. And he did carry with him large chunks of the Republican organization across the country. Perot’s is a totally amateur organization.

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Q: How do you think the debates changed the campaign?

A: Firstly, I think they excited the American people. I believe the turnout is going to be decidedly up this year, and I think debates have contributed to that. . . .

It didn’t, I imagine, have a big impact on the public image of Bush or Clinton. I think a great deal of the impact was to confirm people in their prejudices, which we saw in the attempts to monitor it.

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Q: There has been some criticism of the way the race is covered through polling. What do you think?

A: I don’t believe that in a free society you can stop opinion polling. But even if you could, I don’t think I favor that. . . . In many ways, I feel glad the polls went wrong in Britain, because it will, at least, make people more skeptical. I certainly don’t want to be in a world where the polls two months ahead of the election tell you the election is all over. They don’t. There’s a constant outburst of free will among voters, and I rejoice at that.

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Q: Do your friends at Oxford know it is considered a hotbed of social engineering?

A: I have found it rather odd to be an Oxford don in America, and to find that being educated at Oxford is a seditious, dangerous thing--something which can be counted to Mr. Clinton’s discredit. It seems odd for that charge to come from Mr. Bush, of all people.

I have been privileged to have known a fairly large number of Rhodes scholars over the last 40 years. They are some of the best students one has, the most interesting people. . . . I don’t think it will hurt you if you do, by chance, get a Rhodes Scholar President.