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Democrats adrift?

Public Interest - September 22, 2004

SEVERAL slow-moving but massive changes in American society over the past generation have reconfigured the fault-lines of American politics. Two of these changes--the impact of family structure and religion--are well known. In the 2000 election, Al Gore carried unmarried men by 2 percentage points over George W. Bush, while losing to him by 20 points among married men. He carried unmarried women by a stunning 31 points, while managing no better than a statistical tie among married women. Gore carried the 14 percent of voters who never go to church by 29 points over George W. Bush, while losing to Bush by 27 points among the 14 percent of voters who attend religious services more than once a week.

The consequences of two less-discussed changes, however, are not sufficiently appreciated: the historic decision of the Democratic party to become the party of civil rights, women's rights, and environmental protection; and fundamental shifts in the economy that have reconfigured the American class structure. As a result of these shifts in political plate tectonics, today's Democratic party is, and will remain, very different from the party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. If a new "progressive majority" is to be built, it must be on terms other than those that sustained the Democratic party from the New Deal to the Great Society. To see why, I begin with an analysis of two key political insurgencies since Johnson's decision to withdraw from the 1968 presidential contest.

A tale of two insurgencies

In 1968, Hubert Humphrey received less than 43 percent of the popular vote, down 18 percentage points from Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide victory over Barry Goldwater. The 1968 winner, Richard Nixon, improved on Goldwater's showing by only four percentage points. The vast majority of Democratic defectors voted for George Wallace, who received 13.5 percent of the total. Within four years, the Republican party had brought the Wallace voters into the fold. As a result, Republican candidates won four of the five presidential contests held in the 1970s and 1980s, with margins of victory averaging more than 14 percentage points. The lone Democratic winner during these two decades prevailed by only two percentage points.

The era of Republican dominance came to an end in 1992, when George H. W. Bush, who had received nearly 54 percent of the popular vote in 1988, garnered only 38 percent four years later. The winner, Bill Clinton, actually won 3 fewer percentage points than had Michael Dukakis in 1988. In the largest third-party insurgency since 1912, Ross Perot received an astonishing 19 percent of the vote.

On taking office in 1993, President Clinton faced a political challenge similar to that of Richard Nixon in 1969. Cementing the bulk of the Perot voters within the Democratic party would create a new era of reliable national Democratic majorities. This did not happen. Despite Clinton's success in eliminating the federal budget deficit--the economic issue Perot had most emphasized--two-thirds of Perot voters ultimately drifted back to the Republican party, erasing Clinton's five-point margin of victory over the first President Bush and creating a virtual tie in 2000.

Why did Democrats fail where Republicans had succeeded? The answer says much about the contours and dynamics of contemporary American politics. When Perot ran for president a second time in 1996, he received only 8 percent of the vote. His hardcore supporters were predominantly white, male, lower income, and less educated, and they hailed from small-town and rural America. Up to the 1960s, many would have considered themselves conservative Democrats. But by the late 1990s that designation had become all but oxymoronic, as had "liberal Republican." By the 2000 election, only 5 percent of the electorate considered themselves conservative Democrats, and only 2 percent liberal Republicans. As a result, George W. Bush picked up the lion's share of the hardcore Perot voters, turning Clinton's 49-41 popular vote edge over Bob Dole into a 49-49 tie. The exit polls in Table 1 tell the tale. In each of these demographic categories, George W. Bush's 2000 total was roughly the sum of the Dole and Perot votes in 1996.

The tenor of Al Gore's campaign renders these results all the more striking. To the dismay of his New Democrat supporters, Gore elected to wage the contest on the basis of a classic populist theme, "the people versus the powerful." The point was to focus the attention of downscale white voters on class and corporate privilege while de-emphasizing divisive cultural issues. This strategy was a dismal failure. As veteran voting analyst Ruy Teixeira has observed, Gore lost white working-class voters by 17 points; among white working-class men, his margin of defeat was 34 points.

Gore did especially poorly among white Protestants, receiving only 34 percent of their vote, versus Bush's 63 percent. As Rutgers University political scientist Gerald Pomper has noted, secular voters were more likely to support Gore than were frequent churchgoers, by a margin of 25 points. In short, in the 2000 election, cultural identity trumped economics and class.

Flight of the white males

The idea that race is a key component of cultural identity is an old story in American politics. Over the past generation, gender has also come to be understood in cultural terms. Compare the two closest elections of the past three decades. In 1976, Jimmy Carter received 50 percent of the popular vote to Gerald Ford's 48 percent. There was no gender gap whatsoever: Carter's margin (50-48) was the same among men and women. In 2000, by contrast, Al Gore prevailed among women by 11 percentage points (54-43) while losing men to George Bush by the same margin (53-42). Gore fought Bush to a draw among white women while losing white men by 24 percentage points.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that every major development of the past generation worked to push white men away from the Democratic party. For some, the civil rights revolution was the trigger; for others, it was the rise of feminism and its institutionalization in the party's official structure. The rhetoric employed by high-profile extremists in these movements, who denounced white men as "racist" and "patriarchal oppressors," exacerbated these effects. Conflict within the Democratic party sparked by the events of 1968 led to rules changes that diminished the power of labor unions, for decades centers of white male political influence and social standing.

As Washington Post political reporter Thomas Edsall has pointed out, the union movement itself has undergone fundamental changes during this period. After surging from 13 percent to 37 percent of the private-sector workforce between 1930 and 1960, the union share of that workforce has collapsed to just 8 percent today, the lowest level in a century. At the same time, the balance of power within the union movement has shifted toward the public sector: Organized government workers have risen from only 17 percent of the union movement in 1976 to nearly half today. And men have declined from 83 percent of union members to under 60 percent today. The result of this transformation is that working-class men in the private sector--the heart and soul of the electorate that narrowly made John F. Kennedy president--are now far more likely to be outside the influence of organized labor, and are likely to be exposed to a wider range of political and cultural forces that shape their outlook and their votes.

Developments in foreign and defense policy also played a role in pushing white men away from the Democratic party. Democrats became the epicenter of opposition to the Vietnam war, a stance that eventually metastasized into a broader critique of the Cold War defense establishment, assertive internationalism, and even America itself. These developments offended many white men who were traditional patriots and favored a strong national defense. Gun control, which many white men saw as the translation of defense dovishness into domestic policy, helped cement Democrats' image as the party of weakness.

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