Democrats adrift?(The Political Parties in Flux (II))

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.