Why Republicans Are So Darn Happy

In any event, Republicans are happy, and that, of course, is a very American thing to be, or at least to strive to be. We Americans have a complex relationship with happiness. Yes, it's in our founding document, but it is perennially elusive, just out of our grasp -- a sad fact that Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, when he noted that the United States was populated by "so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance."

We suffer from what the historian Darrin McMahon calls "the unhappiness of not being happy." It is a uniquely American malady. For us, happiness is not a blessing but an expectation.

And we expect it from our politicians. The more optimistic candidate won nine of the 10 elections from 1948 to 1984, according to Martin Seligman, the pooh-bah of the positive-psychology movement. More recent elections have been spottier, but the pattern holds: All things being equal, voters choose the more optimistic candidate.

This may explain why Republicans have dominated presidential elections in the past 40 or so years. They, of course, have as their happy standard-bearer Ronald Reagan, who smilingly urged us to ask ourselves if we were better off (read: happier) than we'd been four years earlier. On the Democrats' side, John F. Kennedy knew how to play the happiness card, but most of his would-be followers haven't. Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry (Jimmy Carter, too, even though he managed to win an election): Happiness does not come to mind when you think of these people. Only Bill Clinton, with his "bridge to the 21st century" and his "Third Way" (part Democratic technocrat, part Republican mirth), managed to break through the happiness barrier.

So while you might think that the 2008 presidential election hinges on Iraq or the economy or change vs. experience, it doesn't. The real issue -- the meta issue -- is, as usual, happiness. Which candidate can best convince voters that if elected, he or she will increase their happiness? Which candidate actually seems the happiest, or at least the most optimistic?

Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have tried to answer that question scientifically, analyzing speeches and other statements by the candidates and assigning each an optimism score. He found that, among Democratic candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton, not Barack Obama, is the most optimistic. On the Republican side, John McCain and Mitt Romney are equally optimistic, though of course that didn't save the former Massachusetts governor.

Being optimistic helps candidates in two ways. Optimists are able to persevere in times of adversity, so perhaps optimistic candidates are elected because they're able to weather setbacks during the grueling primary season. But there is also, of course, something about an optimistic candidate that voters find irresistible. Psychologists have found that we tend to like more positive people -- no surprise there -- so that might explain why we vote for the more optimistic candidate.

These days, putting on a happy face doesn't always come naturally for Democrats, but it wasn't always that way. On April 27, 1968, Hubert Humphrey announced his presidential candidacy. It was a troubled time for Americans, coming just three weeks after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and in the midst of antiwar protests. Yet Humphrey, known as the Happy Warrior, chose to strike an uber-optimistic tone: "Here we are, the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose, the politics of joy, and that's the way it's going to be, all the way, too, from here on out."

Unfortunately, it didn't exactly turn out that way. Within six weeks, Robert F. Kennedy was dead and the nation was seething. For Humphrey, the politics of joy never translated into the joy of victory.

Nowadays, politicians are hesitant to explicitly utter the H-word, choosing instead to dance around the subject. It's only a matter of time, though, before Republicans begin to crow about their happiness. "They can say, 'Look, I'm not being a stuffy, old-fashioned conservative,' " says Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute. "There is real science that shows that if you go to church, if you don't get divorced, you'll be happier. That's tempting to any politician."

There is, though, an exception to the Happy Republicans trend. More Democrats than Republicans say they're excited about the current election, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News survey conducted in November, and Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that the election season leaves them frustrated and bored. Might Democrats be on the verge of transforming themselves into the party of happiness? If so, that would be the ultimate flip-flop.

erweiner@gmail.com

Eric Weiner is the author of "The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World."