From "United We Stand" to "Divided We Are"

Inroads, Summer 2004 by Bergstrom, Hans

Support for free trade has been compromised by the rising trend among global corporations to outsource manufacturing. Since Bush took office, some 2.5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. "No president since Herbert Hoover has lost as many jobs as George W Bush," the Democrats proclaim, forgetting to mention that the recession started and the high tech bubble burst during Clinton's second term. "Job export" to China and India is held responsible, as is the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has made it easier to move jobs to cheaper production sites in Mexico. As a result, the call for protectionism has found strong resonance in, for example, textile districts in the Carolinas and manufacturing towns in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Some of the most heavily affected states will have pivotal positions in the upcoming presidential election.

Party activists in the driver's seat

There is, as well, a fourth reason for the high emotions and political polarization: the development of the political system itself. The two major political parties have become far more homogenous; Democrats have lost their conservative base in the South, while Republicans have lost many of the well-educated, socially progressive voters, opposed to the influence of the Christian right, that they used to have in states like New York and Illinois.

In Congress, centrist forces are gradually disappearing. Through agreements based on mutual self-interest in several states ("we'll shelter your districts if we can have ours"), district boundaries have been gerrymandered so that very few districts remain competitive in the general election. Some 99 per cent of members of the House of Representatives can count on reelection. In this situation, power moves to party activists - if you get your party's support, your seat is secure. As a result, incentives for candidates to follow the will of the party base are strengthened. Thus, it has become increasingly dangerous for a Democrat to support school vouchers, or for a Republican to support any kind of tax increase.

For similar reasons, fewer Electoral College votes are up for grabs in presidential elections: Republicans "own" the South, Democrats the coasts. The 2000 presidential election was one of the closest in U.S. history, but only 12 states were decided by fewer than five percentage points. Because of the demographic shift to the south and southwest, electoral geography works in favour of the Republican candidate. Just by holding on to the states he won in the 2000 election, Bush can increase his margin in the Electoral College from five votes (271 to 266) to 19 (278 to 259) in 2004.1

Increasingly, the dominant theory among party strategists, including Bush adviser Karl Rove, is that it is more important to increase voter turnout by mobilizing and energizing your own base than to persuade swing voters. Democrats owe their win in the popular vote in 2000 to an unprecedented mobilization of minority and union voters. Both parties are increasingly afraid to do anything that threatens their base (like increasing taxes - whatever the deficit - for Republicans, or reforming social security - no matter how vital for the future - for Democrats).