Campaigning by the numbers: politic demographics mean trouble for Democrats, but don't necessarily add up to Republican victories

National Review, August 12, 1996 by Patrick Reddy

### REDDY, PATRICK

If Bob Dole loses the November election, it will be his own fault. Ample conditions exist for a Republican victory. In the last thirty years, the Democrats have gone from a broad-based national party to a coalition of racial minorities (Jesse Jackson voters) and white liberals (Dukakis voters). That's not a national majority. To borrow from the movies, Democrats went from being the party of Clark Gable, James Cagney, Henry Fonda, and Frank Sinatra to being the party of Woody Allen, Jane Fonda, and Spike Lee. (Full disclosure statement: I am a California Democrat who opposed Prop. 187.)

In contrast, the modern Republican Party has greatly expanded its traditional base. The GOP in the last thirty years has held onto its Northern Protestant base, while adding Frank RizzoEddie Vrydoliak Democrats in Northern cities, Strom ThurmondGeorge Wallace Southern Democrats, and Roosevelt Truman Democrats in California. This mix has been potent and enduring. It will probably take a major crisis under the Republicans' stewardship to destroy it completely.

Think of American politics today as a balance-of-power contest involving seven tribes: blacks, New Minorities (Asians and Hispanics), white liberals, working-class or "populist" whites, Northern rural voters, suburbanites, and conservatives. How do these various subgroups move and combine to produce majorities? The Democrats' base comprises blacks, liberals, and most New Minorities. The Republicans carry Northern rural voters, most white suburbanites, and conservatives. Populist whites provide the swing vote.

As the chart on the next page shows, the key to the Democrats' national strength used to be their ability to carry this group in every region. And, back in the New Deal era, there were just too many working-class Democrats for the Republicans to overcome with their base in the suburban and small-town middle classes. After the Depression ended with World War II, the voting strength of this group began to wane. In what Daniel Bell called the "post-industrial society," the economy shifted from producing goods to providing services. The new economy is dominated by educated, highly skilled workers. Today, almost 60 per cent of the workforce is classified as professional or white-collar, compared to 30 per cent blue-collar. Union membership has collapsed from 36 per cent of the labor force in 1945 to about 15 per cent today, a 60 per cent decline in fifty years. Labor's decline has really hurt Democrats in the industrial states, as labor had been the main pillar of the New Deal coalition. (Witness the weakness of the labor-backed Mondale campaign in 1984.)

Americans have also been geographically mobile, moving in a southwesterly direction since 1940. In 1932, the Northeast and Midwest peaked at 64 per cent of the electoral votes. In 1992, the South and West accounted for 51 per cent of the electoral votes, their first majority ever. It is no accident that every President elected after 1960 has come from the South or West. Moreover, Republican nominees of the past thirty years have run best in the areas that are growing the fastest. That is a guaranteed formula for success.

We can trace these trends by studying our postwar electoral history. In 1952 the Republicans led by Dwight Eisenhower stormed back to the White House with a combination of social issues and foreign policy: "Communism, Corruption, and Korea" was their slogan. Eisenhower won by cutting into the Democratic base of white populists. His biggest gains came among Southerners and Western populists: ranchers, miners, loggers, and urban workers.

John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson led the Democrats back in 1960 with a ticket carefully constructed to recapture two groups that had begun drifting toward the GOP: white ethnics and Southerners. But since then, it has been almost all downhill for the Donkey.

As with so many things in our society, American politics really changed in the 1960s. The civil-rights revolution broke up the old Democratic coalition: in the 1930s, FDR won 85 per cent(!) of the Southern white "populist" vote; in 1960, Kennedy won over half. Eight years later, Humphrey held only about a third. Meanwhile, social issues (like abortion) started to drive Northern urban ethnics out of the Democratic Party. They went almost 3 to 1 for JFK; less than half of them have voted Democratic since the Sixties. This trend helped push the industrial states into the GOP column. So, significantly, did the postwar suburbanization of America, which ensured that Republicans today can, for example, carry Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and California without getting a single vote in Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, or San Francisco. Half the national electorate today lives in the suburbs, compared to less than a third in the cities. In 1994, the suburbs cast their first-ever majority of the national vote. Small wonder that the GOP took control of Congress for the first time in forty years.

After Humphrey's defeat in 1968, liberals attempted to revive the Democratic coalition by uniting white workers with minorities and liberals. The idea was to hold the white working class with economic issues and use social liberalism to attract young people and minority voting blocs. Thus, the birth of "identity" politics: courting women as feminists; Asians, blacks, Indians, and Hispanics as their own Third World tribes; young voters as environmentalists or anti-war activists; gays as another minority group; and so on. It didn't work, as these tactics provoked a bitter backlash. The end result of this New Politics liberalism was the loss of the white working-class vote for Democratic candidates: McGovern's 37 per cent among white populists was the worst ever performance for a Democrat.