This. 
Many many many lazy voters, they thought they could vote once for obama then walk away. And just because i’m registered dem doesn’t mean I will vote dem, in many places where the voters are skewed heavily towards one party the other party candidate is often centrist and also an option. When people say obomney to attack romney these days they aren’t that far from the truth. Guaranteed seat can make a party corrupt as well.
Actually, they’ll vote for him twice. (I liked the comedian as Senior Black Correspondent on The Daily Show- “I voted for him because he’s black. Is he still black?” It helps to start with an 10% head start and a bunch of voters who have a strong reason to vote for you. )
The problem is exactly that - O’Bomney (Happy St. Patrick’s Day!) needs to capture that 15% or so in the center. Being strongly left or right won’t. It’s a race to the middle, while not leaving too many behind on your wing.
This is a big factor. In areas with “machine-style” politics, there’s really only one game in town. In big cities, this is usually the Democrats. Consequently, you get people who regiser as Democrats, but don’t tend to vote that way.
In some states, people aren’t officially members of parties at all. Here in Montana, for instance, voter registration is completely nonpartisan, and the only distinction made at all is that when you vote in primaries, you have to ask them for one party’s or the other’s ballot.
If this were 1912, I’d agree with you. But this is 2012. Political machines are mostly a thing of the past, since civil service laws cut the number of patronage jobs to a trickle.
There are many central cities that are one-party and most of them are Democratic, true. But that’s almost entirely a function of demographics. Minorities are huge percentages of central cities and huge percentages of minorities vote consistently Democratic. No machines are necessary to explain this.
I’d need to see numbers before I believed that any significant percentage of registered Democrats in central cities don’t vote Democratic, though.
Without wading into which party voters “identify with” which is highly fluid, if you actually look back to the old era before any of us were born, the era of machine politics, Democrats have always held a registration advantage. This is why more often than not they have controlled the House of Representatives, but all bets have always been off when it comes to the White House, and history tends to reflect that. Also, observers from other countries: you can register as a Democrat or a Republican in most States. This registration is just your “party registration.” It isn’t really “membership” in anything. There are no dues and there are no meetings to attend, there’s no real organization at all.
If you want to be party of a more traditional “political party” you can join the GOP or Democratic “party organization” which isn’t the same thing as “persons registered as a given party.” Registration is almost meaningless aside from being sort of like a badge you wear, it doesn’t imply any deliberate involvement with the party organization at the State or National level nor does it involve any financial support of the party.
Not so, if you’re talking about the era of machine politics. Republicans controlled the House more often than Democrats from the Civil War until Roosevelt’s election, in 20 of 32 elections as this chart shows. It’s only been in the era of non-machine politics since that Democrats have predominated.
I was mistaken, I thought the Democrats were far more consistent pre-Roosevelt. Going from the 31st to the 57th Congress I count 12 Democrat majorities and 14 Republican majorities. I generally consider Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency the beginning of the end of machine politics though, not Franklin Roosevelt’s (which I assume you are going to with your 20/32 number.)
I guess I had a mistaken notion as to what a “political machine” was. I thought it was simply a situation where one party has a near-total lock on local politics.
Guess what–Wikipedia is wrong. There aren’t 72 million people registered as Democrats, or 55 million registered as Republicans. There couldn’t be, because only 28 states allow registration by party, and even in those states many people register as independents.
Wikipedia cites this article by Al Neuharth, who didn’t know what he was talking about.
The most recent breakdown of registered voters by party and state that I can find is from 2006. Again, this is only for the 28 states that allow registration by party. It shows 39.3 million people registered as Democrats and 30.6 million as Republicans.
According to this later USA Today story, which doesn’t give a breakdown by state, by 2010 the figures had moved to 42 million D’s and 30 million R’s.
So still a big Democratic edge, but a far cry from 72 million to 55 million.
Why even a 12-million-person edge when most elections are close? Partly this is a function of which states allow registration by party and which don’t. California and New York (big and blue) do, Texas and Georgia (big and red) don’t. Partly it’s a legacy of the old Solid South, when all the action was in the Democratic primary so everybody registered as a Democrat. Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma as of 2006 had large D-registered pluralities but Democrats win few elections in those states. Partly it’s a legacy of machine politics in a few Northern states. And it doesn’t mean a whole lot.
The difference between factions contending in a one-party system relying on a homogenous base and a machine is the presence of a Boss.
The Boss was a single individual who made sure that all power flowed through his hands. (His, because I’m pretty sure there was never a female boss in any major city.) The Boss was often, but not always, the Mayor, but dominated City Hall and all its departments. Yes, the Boss chose which individuals were to run for as many other elected positions as possible, which meant control of the City Council, but that was just the tip. He controlled the police and the judgeships and the dog catcher and the D.A. He controlled the municipal water works, the power company, the bus company, the subways. He choose who ran for the state legislature and Congress. He directed the graft, making sure that favored people and companies got the contracts to build all the city-run properties in an age when cities were creating gigantic infrastructure daily. He directed which set of casinos, brothels, and speakeasies were not to be bothered. He gave out jobs to the poor or food and coal or money for voting. People had a direct and personal connection to the machine.
Of course this led to gigantic abuses, even when the Boss was content with power and not money. Every once in a while reformers would rise up on a wave of city-wide revulsion and take over the Mayor’s office. But once in they found that making any real change meant putting in a machine of their own as extensive as the Machine’s. They couldn’t do that overnight and their principles wouldn’t allow them to in the first place. So they always looked ineffective and the Machine slid back in. It would take the small accumulated changes in culture, politics, demographics, and class decades to finally eliminate the machines.
That’s why I say that they continued generally well into Roosevelt’s time. Tammany in New York elected mayors as late as Jimmy Walker in the late 1920s. (Well, O’Dwyer and Wagner later but they were a shadow then.) James Curley was Boss in Boston until the 1950s - re-elected while in jail! (Edwin O’Connor’s classic political novel, The Last Hurrah, is about him.) Edward Daley, the last of the Bosses, held on in Chicago till the 1970s. Philadelphia was unusual for being a big city with a Republican machine, probably because after the Civil War so many Pennsylvanian politicians got national power. Boies Penrose was Boss for 20 years, even after he was a Senator. That machine lasted until 1933.
FDR wasn’t adverse to patronage and James Farley controlled that for his first two terms. He used federal patronage to undo Tammany, which was his enemy. But the shift to federal entitlement and employment programs were a big part of the removal of the city machines’ power. The white flight to the suburbs after the war ripped out the heart of their bases. So I’d contend that Teddy is the wrong Roosevelt. Even to call that period the “beginning of the end” seems too early.
Are there any true machines today? I’d argue no, though obviously many cities do have small factions with control over politics. But these are nothing like the total city control of a Machine. Structurally, I don’t think it can happen in the modern environment.