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White Males Vote - election 2000

Insight on the News - October 30, 2000

The vote of white working-class males may be up for grabs in this year's election, and both the Democratic and Republican candidates will have to work hard to earn the critical support of a group that feels left out.

Look carefully. The presidential election is entering its final stages -- and the soccer mom is nowhere to be seen. Four years ago, both Democrats and Republicans publicly and avidly pursued suburban women voters, tailoring their messages and their policies to that elusive voting bloc, which ended up voting by a narrow margin for Bill Clinton.

This year, the interest group du jour is markedly different. In the month following the Democratic National Convention, Democratic nominee Al Gore used a steadily evolving populist message to break GOP nominee George W. Bush's hold on a constituency that has been vital to Republican presidential victories during the last two decades -- white working-class and moderate-income male voters.

George Cullom, a man with 31 years of experience in the construction industry, may not know it, but he's part of a trend. The 51-year-old from Northern Virginia is a skilled worker, installing automatic fire protection, who lives in the Washington suburbs with his family. He's very aware of the upcoming election, but he has yet to commit to any candidate. "It's going to be one of a kind" Cullom tells Insight. "It's a whole lot to consider.

Like many white male workers, Cullom voted for Bill Clinton but has "changed my mind" Even so, Bush's rhetoric has left him uneasy. "I'll have to look at him twice" says Cullom. He heard Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan on a radio interview and thinks the former commentator "makes a lot of sense" but can't picture him winning the election or forming an administration.

It may seem like a jumbled outlook on the election, but it's one shared by many. And these are people who are not strangers to the political process. "We're not talking about people who are dirt poor" Ruy Teixeira, coauthor with Joel Rogers of America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, tells Insight. "We're talking about people, almost all of them with a high-school diploma, whose incomes are more fairly characterized as moderate than as poor." In other words, they're what pollster John Zogby calls "the vital group of men earning between $20,000 and $50,000" They work, pay taxes and vote. However, they largely have been left out of the prosperity of the cyber-driven "New Economy."

"Bush continues to do well enough in the vital group of men earning $20,000 to $50,000" says Zogby. The cautionary note is obvious. Bush still trails Gore in this group, but only slightly. Zogby says that there is, in addition to "undecided" voters, a group of around 12 to 15 percent of poll respondents who admit to being quite willing to shift their loyalties. The two leading groups in this malleable voting bloc are married white women and working-and lower-middle-class white men.

As sometimes happens, a recently published book coincides with this political trend. America's Forgotten Majority by Teixeira and Rogers-- two left-leaning partisans of activist government -- has been garnering respectful reviews even in conservative circles. White workers without college degrees, according to Teixeira and Rogers, are a large, often overlooked subset of the electorate. Possession of a college degree is the "Great Divide" of contemporary American life, they argue. And those who don't have the admittedly devalued sheepskin have been exempt to a large degree from the prosperity of the New Economy.

In the authors' view, the white working class never embraced the antigovernment animus of ideological conservatives. Rather, their conservatism was of a pragmatic nature -- they didn't like government because it appeared to be doing little for them. This, Teixeira and Rogers believe, gives an opening to any politician shrewd enough to address concerns about the "New Inequality,"

This marks a change. Thirty years ago, Richard Nixon embraced "hard-hat" support, born out of opposition to the counterculture of the time. Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan appealed to anticommunism, social conservatism and pride in country to create the "Reagan Democrat." But today's blue-collar male is not your grandfather's worker. And ambitious politicians have to adjust.

"Forget the upscale SUV-driving `soccer moms' that represented the Holy Grail for Bill Clinton's 1996 campaign" Ronald Brownstein wrote in the Los Angeles Times. "Both candidates this year, but especially Vice President Al Gore, are looking more toward minivan families living paycheck to paycheck." However, not all Democrats think that a return to the party's one-time base of working-class voters without a college education is necessarily a good idea.

"Some key architects of President Clinton's two victories worry that Gore may be squandering one of Clinton's most important political achievements -- broadening the Democrats' appeal to families who are gaining ground economically" Brownstein wrote. Gore seemingly sided with liberal critics of Clinton; he apparently decided, as many observers have, that the decisive vote in November will be less-affluent white voters.

This was apparent in the first debate on Oct. 3 in Boston. Gore's repeated references to the alleged wastefulness of Bush's proposed tax cuts had been a very successful strategy in the weeks following the convention. "It's because Gore has been coming on strong on the tax issue" says pollster Zogby. "Bush hasn't been able yet to craft an effective tax message."

This hitting on the issue of tax cuts vs. paying off the national debt was especially effective among men, says Zogby. Indeed, a major part of the vice president's remarkable surge in the polls in the month following the Democratic convention was due to shifts among this crucial constituency to the Democratic ticket. These unsung male voters, often overlooked in the media-driven emphasis on minority and women voters, were instrumental in the GOP presidential dominance of the 1980s as well as the Republican takeover on Capitol Hill in 1994.

In the weeks following the Democratic convention, much media attention focused on Gore's success in securing the Democratic base, particularly left-leaning labor and environmental groups whose members may have flirted with the Green Party candidacy of Ralph Nader, and black voters who had been unenthusiastic about the choice facing them in November.

But almost under the radar, the big electoral shift in the waning days of summer came among white working-class voters, particularly men. A Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that Gore's strongest gains from the last week of July through Sept. 6 were among white men making $20,000 to $50,000. Among these voters, Gore gained nine percentage points, more than the six points he gained among all voters. Among white women with incomes of $20,000 to $50,000, the vice president gained only three points.

In a race that has been marked by a clear gender gap -- with men favoring Bush and women supporting Gore -- these numbers were especially significant. Also important was the return of non-college-educated voters to their traditional Democratic home. The highly respected Zogby poll showed that among men and women with high-school educations only, significant gains were made by Gore during this time. In early August before the Los Angeles convention, Bush led among these voters, 53 to 34 percent. By Sept. 6, this had changed to a 48 to 39 percent lead for Gore. Among college dropouts, Bush led 53 to 28 percent after the GOP convention; by Sept. 6, that had morphed into a 45 to 41 percent Gore advantage.

Obviously, volatility is second nature for this electoral season. This was demonstrated in the last weeks of September, when Bush rebounded in the polls following his appearance on Oprah Winfrey's TV talk show and some Gore blunders. Bush's revived prospects partially were due to a real, if not overwhelming, comeback among white males who are employed members of the current prosperity, even if they don't share in the stock-driven largesse of the New Economy.

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