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

Inroads, Summer 2004 by Bergstrom, Hans

The same is true for the Democrats with respect to security. During the primaries, attacks on the President's Iraq policies were quite harsh. But how will that play on election day if Bush can claim that his way of fighting terrorists and rogue states has sheltered Americans from new attacks since 9/11? During 2003, the Democrats lost support among younger women with children - one of their strongholds - because of increased fear among these women.3 The famous "Soccer Moms" were becoming "Security Moms."

Nonetheless, the parties enter the preelection period unusually united. George W Bush has no competitor for the Republican nomination and all the Democratic candidates quickly and without bitterness rallied behind John Kerry. It remains to be seen if the parties' extraordinary internal cohesion has been achieved at some future cost. It is an integral part of the electoral process in every democracy that the logic of each time phase - winning the party, winning the general electorate, handling the executive, winning the legislature - tends to create problems in the following phase. This clash between the arenas of different time phases is particularly strong in the American political system because of the independent character of each arena.

3. Free trade and the "investor class"

How strong is traditional "Industrial America" compared to "New Economy" America? The message from Democrats this year is tilted heavily against trade and toward the preservation of manufacturing jobs. But manufacturing today represents only 18 per cent of the economy, and the traditional industrial sectors far less than that. Is the antitrade message taking hold all over the country, or will Democratic gains in the rust belt be outweighed by losses in modern-economy states like California and New York? For the first time since Reagan, Republicans hope to be competitive in California.

Another possibly crucial aspect is that six out of 10 Americans now own stocks, and nearly all have an interest, through pension funds, in the stock market. For a growing number of Americans, personal savings have become more important in their thinking about future life projects and retirement than social security, from which they expect little. How will these "investor voters" -many of them middle-class Democrats or independents - react to a Democratic candidate who talks in terms of class warfare and threatens to take back tax rewards for savings, especially when the President has made improved conditions for personal savings and dividends one of his signature policies? As mentioned, the middle class certainly has been squeezed by college and health insurance costs - but they have also seen a strong surge in the value of their stocks and their homes, as well as reduced mortgage costs resulting from extremely low interest rates.

It remains an open, but crucial, question whether these structural economic changes are large enough to influence the effectiveness of the Democrats' very traditional platform.