During this election season, liberals have often drawn an analogy to the 1980 election. They drew it at first to explain Barack Obama’s poll numbers, which were weaker than one might have expected given the Republicans’ unpopularity. The 1980 race was tight for much of the year, too, they explained. The public thought that Pres. Jimmy Carter and liberalism had failed, but did not yet trust Ronald Reagan and conservatism. Then Reagan reassured it, and the election ended up not being close.

Obama, in this analogy, is “the liberal Reagan,” which is to say the anti-Reagan. The notion is that the long era of conservative dominance is ending, and Obama might bring down the curtain, inaugurating a new era as Reagan did. Former president Bill Clinton alluded to this possibility in his speech to the Democratic convention in Denver. He did not mention Reagan directly. Instead he said that John McCain “embraces the extreme philosophy that has defined his party for more than 25 years.” With unified Republican control of the federal government for most of the Bush administration, the extremists, he said, finally had a chance to implement their philosophy. Having seen its disastrous results, the public now has a chance to repudiate that extremism — presumably, once and for all.

Other liberals make Richard Nixon the center of their analysis. Nixon began the Republican reign, according to this view, by pioneering the strategy of manufacturing and then mobilizing conservative cultural resentments to serve his party’s plutocratic ends. “How did Nixonland end?” asked the left-wing author Rick Perlstein in a book released earlier this year. “It has not ended yet.” Liberals hope it is ending now. We have a mass upper class that does not share the conservative social views of the hardhats of yore, and many of the people who do still share those views are now letting their economic concerns drive their votes. The result, again, is the end of a conservative era.

Before conservatives quail at that thought, or liberals rally, they should consider whether it is actually true that we have lived through conservative dominance of American politics. An era cannot end if it never began.

It is true that from 1968 through 2004, Republicans won seven of ten presidential elections. But Democrats have controlled the Senate for 22 of the last 40 years and the House for 28 of them.

No political party ever gets its way entirely, of course, but the alleged conservatism of the last 40 years looks pretty weak when compared with the first two-thirds of the last century. Republicans really did dominate American politics from 1896 to 1932, and Democrats really did dominate it from 1932 to 1968. During those periods the minority party occasionally won elections — Woodrow Wilson served two terms as president during the first era, Dwight Eisenhower during the second — but its victories did not threaten the other party’s majority status or its ideological assumptions.

But in 1968 the New Deal majority ended without being replaced. From then until now, no party was able to maintain simultaneous control of the House, Senate, and White House for longer than four years running. Control has been divided about 70 percent of the time.

Conservative ideological dominance looks no more impressive than Republican political hegemony. That there have been conservative achievements is undeniable. The top marginal tax rate has dropped by more than half since the 1960s. Welfare has been reformed. Tough sentencing policies have been put in place and prisons built. The American military edge has expanded. Inflation, though it has crept up recently, is nowhere near as high as it once was.

But the last 40 years also saw the birth of the environmental movement and a proliferation of regulations inspired by it; the implementation of affirmative-action policies throughout government, the academy, and business; a marked liberalization of attitudes toward homosexuality; a dramatic liberalization of abortion law; the enactment of strict new regulations on smoking and car safety; the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act; and a large increase in the percentage of Americans whose health insurance is paid for by the federal government. On neither economic nor social issues, then, have conservatives been unambiguously triumphant.

In some of these cases, policies ended up to the left of public opinion because the less democratic institutions in American life — the courts, the permanent bureaucracies, the media — exerted a strong influence. These institutions had some influence, as well, on elections. (Think how much weaker the liberal coalition would be at election time if courts did not relieve it of the need to defend the least popular elements of its agenda.)

But public opinion is doubtless the most important reason neither party has managed to recreate the type of dominance that existed in the past. The Democrats, in their post-1968 incarnation, struck middle-class voters as hostile to their values on issues of race and crime, sex and family, religion and patriotism, work and welfare. Republicans, meanwhile, often seemed indifferent or worse to their economic aspirations. Even in the 1980s, when Republicans presided over a boom, their lack of enthusiasm for entitlement programs limited their appeal on economic issues. (Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam develop this point at some length in their recent book Grand New Party.)

If the conservatism of the recent past has been exaggerated, so is the leftward shift we are now undergoing. Look at the proportion of Americans who consider themselves “conservative” rather than “liberal”: These numbers have been pretty stable for years, with conservatives significantly outnumbering liberals. Gallup asks whether government is “doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses” or “should do more to solve our country’s problems.” The month Reagan took his oath of office a second time, the country split 57–38 percent for the conservatives. In September 2008, it split 53–41 for the conservatives.

CBS and the New York Times ask whether people would prefer a bigger government with more services or a smaller government with fewer. In January 1989, right in the middle of the alleged conservative ascendancy, supporters of bigger government formed a 48–41 percent plurality. This spring the sides were tied at 43 apiece. By a 61–25 percent margin, Americans told Gallup in 2006 that “big government” was a greater “threat to the country” than “big business.”

Large majorities of the public tell pollsters that they favor national health insurance, at least when its drawbacks are not mentioned. But that has been true for decades. “This notion that people want more activist or compassionate government than they used to want — I see very little evidence for it,” says Karlyn Bowman, a straight-shooting public-opinion analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.

In 2006 the Pew Forum released a survey purporting to show, among other things, that people had turned more liberal on social issues over the last 20 years. The proportion of Americans who believed that gays should be able to teach in grade school, for example, had doubled to 54 percent. The proportion who believed that women should have an equal role in the workplace and politics had doubled, too. On these questions both self-described liberals and self-described conservatives were more liberal than their counterparts of two decades ago.

Neither of those questions, however, ever had great political salience. The Republican party never took an explicit stand against gay teachers or women in the workplace. (In 1978, Reagan opposed a California referendum that would have banned gay teachers.) Look at social issues with high political salience, and the liberalizing trend largely disappears. Since September 1995, Gallup has asked Americans whether they think abortion should always, usually, rarely, or never be legal. The May 2008 numbers show a gain of six points for the two pro-life options and a drop of five for the two pro-choice ones.

Public opinion on gun control has moved rightward, too. In 1990, Gallup found that 78 percent of the public wanted stricter laws. An October 2007 poll finds that only 51 percent do.

Unquestionably the public is much more supportive of same-sex marriage than it used to be. Support used to be so low that polling questions on it were not regularly asked. Since the issue achieved national prominence in late 2003, when the top court of Massachusetts made it a statewide policy, however, public opinion has basically been frozen, with a majority opposing it. Asked whether same-sex couples should be able to marry, be able to form civil unions, or have no legal recognition, only 30 percent of adults favored marriage rights in a June poll for CBS. (The poll found 40 percent support among Americans under 30.)

The public has clearly moved away from the Republican party in recent years: Fewer Americans identify as Republican than did during the 2002 or 2004 elections. But even this much-discussed “party ID” number has shifted less than you might think. The 2002–05 period was a Republican peak. The Democratic advantage right now is around where it was during the 1980s. Bowman notes that Republicans may have slumped not because the public’s ideology has changed but because its view of their performance has. Since the polling evidence does not indicate any marked leftward shift in public views on policy questions, that theory is probably right.

Some liberals have lately touted the possibility that corporate executives, as a class, are moving left. This group has generally been hostile to ideological politics of any sort, and favorably disposed toward corporate welfare, but generally allied with conservatives. The desire of businesses to offload their health-care costs onto the government may make them friendly to Democratic health-care proposals — and indeed several business groups have made friendlier noises about Obama’s plan than about McCain’s. Some of this apparent realignment, however, merely reflects a surge in Democratic fortunes that may prove temporary. Business wants to back, and cut a deal with, the winner. Much of the business community went into the health-care fight of 1993–94 supportive of the Clinton administration. “It’s only the big myth that business is a natural ally of free markets that makes people shocked when business calls for [government] protection,” says Tim Carney, author of The Big Ripoff, a book about business-government collusion.

Whether it is a hope or a fear, the expectation that we are moving from a conservative to a liberal era of political dominance is overblown. Obama’s election would be a serious setback for the Right. Whether McCain or Obama wins, conservatives will have some glaring weaknesses to address —but they will also have considerable room to maneuver.