Losing it explains how an election loss can be good for the losing party:
In the narrative of the modern American conservative movement, few election years loom larger than 1964. After a generation of Democratic hegemony tempered only by eight years of a disappointingly moderate Dwight D. Eisenhower, the right wing of the Republican Party finally managed to get one of its own, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, nominated for the presidency on a platform of military aggressiveness, economic libertarianism, and moral outrage.An impassioned army of activists, thinkers, fund-raisers, and candidates flocked to Goldwater’s standard. The party’s center of power began to shift from the Northeast to the West and the South. Four years later Nixon was in the White House. Sixteen years later Reagan, Goldwater’s ideological heir, swept to victory. And 30 years later, the Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, their teddy-bear Robespierre, took control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954. Today, of course, conservatives control the Republican Party, and the Republican Party controls all three branches of the federal government and the majority of statehouses.
The funny thing is, Goldwater lost — and badly — in 1964. In one of the most lopsided presidential contests in American history, Johnson won 486 electoral votes to Goldwater’s 52.
The Brits recently experienced a similar “poisoned electoral victory”:
The 1992 election, by nearly all accounts, was one the Conservative Party deserved to lose. Prime Minister John Major was deeply unpopular, and it was only because Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party challenger, was even less impressive that the Tories squeaked by with a surprise victory. Their reward was a humiliating five years plagued by sexual and financial scandals and a deep recession resulting from an earlier decision to put Britain on the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. It was ample fodder for Tony Blair and New Labour, who swept Major’s party from office in a 1997 landslide and look to stay in power for some time to come.