Expert gives talk on election trends, future of politics

Eric Schnurer doesn't want to make too much of the last election. The public policy expert told a small crowd of government students Friday that pundits have been too quick to ascribe a major victory to either party after the elections two weeks ago. Schnurer said, however, that the last election is significant in that it represents a larger move toward regionalized politics, a situation in which no national trends can be identified because each state has its own issues and patterns. "We're going through a great transition, the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Depression," explained Schnurer, who is the president of Public Works, a Pennsylvania public policy analysis and consulting firm. Schnurer -- who worked on 12 of this year's gubernatorial races -- gave a lecture on the 1998 electoral outcome at the Fels Center of Government on Friday as part of a weekly informal lecture series attended by graduate students from the school. He told over 15 people gathered that the overall results of the November 3 elections showed that the face of the voting population is in the middle of a big change. "You can't look for national, regional or even state trends. The country is getting very segmented. Idaho is becoming a state of college-educated people and a bunch of Ted Kaczynskis," he said. So how to explain the results of the recent elections? Schnurer cited the recent trend toward moderation in American politics exhibited by the ousting of extreme politicians -- as well as a backlash against the Monica Lewinsky scandal and an increased black voter turn out -- as reasons for the Democratic success. But while the theory of moderation may serve to explain the election outcomes in some states, it doesn't work everywhere, Schnurer explained. In California, for example, Barbara Boxer, who he described as an extreme liberal, retained her seat in the Senate. Furthermore, although the Democrats won five Congressional seats, Republicans carried more of the vote percentage-wise, meaning that Democrats lost big in certain states and won close battles in others. All of this led Schnurer to think that things are not clear cut enough to identify a cohesive trend. In fact, if there is a clear way to look at the election, Schnurer argued that "what happened in this election is that absolutely nothing happened." He explained that "we're midway through a political realignment that began in the 1960s and will end in 2010," when the "echo boomers" enter middle age. Also, the cohesive voting blocks of the past are crumbling, making the labels "Republican" and "Democrat" irrelevant, Schnurer noted. "We're evolving back into a political quiltwork," Schnurer said. "There's all sorts of authoritarian structures, there's a blurring of distinctions between public and private sector and a myriad of divergent interests." The end result of this realignment, Schnurer explained, will be a "pseudo-Libertarian, pseudo-social-caring mind set" which is indicative of the values of "Generation X." Anuj Gupta, a first-year graduate student at Fels, felt that Schnurer's "quiltwork" theory was valid, but maintained that the election was focused primarily on "the Lewinsky scandal."