Campaigning by the numbers: politic demographics mean trouble for Democrats, but don't necessarily add up to Republican victories.

### REDDY, PATRICK

If Bob Dole loses the November election, it will be his own fault. Ample conditions exist for a Republican victory. In the last thirty years, the Democrats have gone from a broad-based national party to a coalition of racial minorities (Jesse Jackson voters) and white liberals (Dukakis voters). That's not a national majority. To borrow from the movies, Democrats went from being the party of Clark Gable, James Cagney, Henry Fonda, and Frank Sinatra to being the party of Woody Allen, Jane Fonda, and Spike Lee. (Full disclosure statement: I am a California Democrat who opposed Prop. 187.)

In contrast, the modern Republican Party has greatly expanded its traditional base. The GOP in the last thirty years has held onto its Northern Protestant base, while adding Frank RizzoEddie Vrydoliak Democrats in Northern cities, Strom ThurmondGeorge Wallace Southern Democrats, and Roosevelt Truman Democrats in California. This mix has been potent and enduring. It will probably take a major crisis under the Republicans' stewardship to destroy it completely.

Think of American politics today as a balance-of-power contest involving seven tribes: blacks, New Minorities (Asians and Hispanics), white liberals, working-class or "populist" whites, Northern rural voters, suburbanites, and conservatives. How do these various subgroups move and combine to produce majorities? The Democrats' base comprises blacks, liberals, and most New Minorities. The Republicans carry Northern rural voters, most white suburbanites, and conservatives. Populist whites provide the swing vote.

As the chart on the next page shows, the key to the Democrats' national strength used to be their ability to carry this group in every region. And, back in the New Deal era, there were just too many working-class Democrats for the Republicans to overcome with their base in the suburban and small-town middle classes. After the Depression ended with World War II, the voting strength of this group began to wane. In what Daniel Bell called the "post-industrial society," the economy shifted from producing goods to providing services. The new economy is dominated by educated, highly skilled workers. Today, almost 60 per cent of the workforce is classified as professional or white-collar, compared to 30 per cent blue-collar. Union membership has collapsed from 36 per cent of the labor force in 1945 to about 15 per cent today, a 60 per cent decline in fifty years. Labor's decline has really hurt Democrats in the industrial states, as labor had been the main pillar of the New Deal coalition. (Witness the weakness of the labor-backed Mondale campaign in 1984.)

Americans have also been geographically mobile, moving in a southwesterly direction since 1940. In 1932, the Northeast and Midwest peaked at 64 per cent of the electoral votes. In 1992, the South and West accounted for 51 per cent of the electoral votes, their first majority ever. It is no accident that every President elected after 1960 has come from the South or West. Moreover, Republican nominees of the past thirty years have run best in the areas that are growing the fastest. That is a guaranteed formula for success.

We can trace these trends by studying our postwar electoral history. In 1952 the Republicans led by Dwight Eisenhower stormed back to the White House with a combination of social issues and foreign policy: "Communism, Corruption, and Korea" was their slogan. Eisenhower won by cutting into the Democratic base of white populists. His biggest gains came among Southerners and Western populists: ranchers, miners, loggers, and urban workers.

John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson led the Democrats back in 1960 with a ticket carefully constructed to recapture two groups that had begun drifting toward the GOP: white ethnics and Southerners. But since then, it has been almost all downhill for the Donkey.

As with so many things in our society, American politics really changed in the 1960s. The civil-rights revolution broke up the old Democratic coalition: in the 1930s, FDR won 85 per cent(!) of the Southern white "populist" vote; in 1960, Kennedy won over half. Eight years later, Humphrey held only about a third. Meanwhile, social issues (like abortion) started to drive Northern urban ethnics out of the Democratic Party. They went almost 3 to 1 for JFK; less than half of them have voted Democratic since the Sixties. This trend helped push the industrial states into the GOP column. So, significantly, did the postwar suburbanization of America, which ensured that Republicans today can, for example, carry Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and California without getting a single vote in Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, or San Francisco. Half the national electorate today lives in the suburbs, compared to less than a third in the cities. In 1994, the suburbs cast their first-ever majority of the national vote. Small wonder that the GOP took control of Congress for the first time in forty years.

After Humphrey's defeat in 1968, liberals attempted to revive the Democratic coalition by uniting white workers with minorities and liberals. The idea was to hold the white working class with economic issues and use social liberalism to attract young people and minority voting blocs. Thus, the birth of "identity" politics: courting women as feminists; Asians, blacks, Indians, and Hispanics as their own Third World tribes; young voters as environmentalists or anti-war activists; gays as another minority group; and so on. It didn't work, as these tactics provoked a bitter backlash. The end result of this New Politics liberalism was the loss of the white working-class vote for Democratic candidates: McGovern's 37 per cent among white populists was the worst ever performance for a Democrat.

But it wasn't just McGovern. In the period 1932 - 64, Democrats averaged over 60 per cent of the national white working-class vote. From 1968 on, it has been only 43 per cent (as it happens, exactly their average of the total national vote). Democratic nominees always used to run better in white populist precincts than nationally. But since 1968, the opposite has often been true. Until their recent downturn, Republicans were closer than at any time since the 1920s to being the "party of the people."

Nationally, the Democrats' share of the white vote has dropped from 46 per cent to 38 per cent, while their share of the black vote has increased by 24 points, the Hispanic vote has largely stayed the same. Although the black and Hispanic share of the electorate has doubled over the past forty years from 7 to 15 per cent, these trends still amount to a net loss of about six million votes for the Democrats. In 1992, Clinton basically won with minorities, white liberals, and a smattering of blue-collar support in the Frostbelt. The 1992 ticket of two Southern Baptists still lost Dixie to Bush, marking the first time in history that a winning Democratic ticket lost the South. (To give President Clinton his due, he did carry some of the West -- the first time a Democrat had done so since 1964 -- and did especially well in California.)

Not all the trends of the 1960s were bad news for the Democrats: they did make gains among blacks and liberal Republicans. In fact, the gentrified urban neighborhoods that were once strongholds of moderate-to-liberal Republicans harbor the only group of white voters that has moved away from the GOP. The problem for Democrats is that former liberal Republicans represent a relatively small number of people. Democrats lost twice as many votes in the late 1960s from defecting conservative Democrats as they gained from liberal Republicans and independents: George Wallace, a breakaway reactionary Democrat, polled twice as many votes in 1968 as John Anderson, a breakaway liberal Republican, did in 1980. The top Wallace supporters from 1968 -- Southern whites, ranchers, members of the military, miners, loggers, and white ethnics -- have usually been the first groups to run away from liberal candidates such as McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis. No Democrat can win a two-way race without these voters. And by the 1980s, most demographic trends -- suburbanization, the decline of organized labor, rising incomes for white Democrats -- had given Republicans an almost natural edge in national elections. Demographics and social trends will help the GOP this year and beyond.

The trends outlined in the chart may be Bob Dole's best asset (they seem like his only asset lately). It would be a mistake for the Dole camp to coast on those trends, but its task shouldn't be that hard. The GOP swept every white populist group in 1994. The country has a conservative majority: by 2 to 1, voters say they would prefer a smaller government providing fewer services, and self-identified liberals are at a record low of 15 per cent. Together, suburbanites and white Southerners constitute about 60 per cent of the electorate. The recent voting patterns of these two groups will make it very difficult for President Clinton to win a two-man race. The math is simple: If Bob Dole wins a bloc vote of at least 65 per cent from Southern whites and carries suburbia in the North and West with about 60 per cent, he will start off with almost 40 per cent of the total vote. By winning just the normal Republican majority among rural voters in the Midwest and the West, he can top 50 per cent of the popular vote. Dole can attract Southerners with social conservatism and suburbanites with economic conservatism. The only "x factors" are Ross Perot and Mr. Dole's age, but if Dole has any spunk left in him, he should still be able to pull it off.

All Mr. Dole has to do is spell out to moderate and conservative voters exactly how his Presidency will improve their lives. He should let voters know that he will cut spending, balance the budget (while maintaining a safety net for the elderly), appoint conservative judges, pursue a stronger foreign policy, and promote traditional values. And frankly, if the senator can't articulate that message, he deserves to lose.

But should Mr. Clinton win in November, it will be only a temporary setback for conservatives. He will immediately become a lame duck and, on almost all precedents, his party will lose so badly in 1998, the off-year election in a second presidential term, that the GOP will be likely to have veto-proof majorities in Congress. Then, Newt Gingrich and his allies really will be running the country.

COMPARISON BETWEEN
NEW DEAL AND NEW POLITICS ERAS:
DEMOCRATIC % OF TOTAL VOTE

           Averages, Averages,
          1932 - 60 1968 - 92 Changes
 Northeast    50%       47%  - 3
 Midwest      49%       43%  - 6
 South        62%       40%  - 22
 West         52%       42%  - 10
 U.S. Total   52%       43%  - 9

 National
 Whites       50%       38%  - 12
 Blacks       66%       90% +24
 Hispanics    78%       72%  - 6

 NortheastMidwest
 Blacks       68%       92% +24

 White Populists
 Ethnics      63%       49%  - 14
 Working Class 55%      51%  - 4

 White Liberals
 Jews         75%       68%  - 7
 Limousine
  Liberals    56%       61% +5
 Hispanics    80%       78%  - 2
 White
  Suburbanites 38%      34%  - 4
 Rural Whites  42%      37%  - 5

 South
 Blacks       62%       91% +29
 Whites       62%       30%  - 32

 Populist Whites
 Rural        70%       30%  - 40
 Urban Working
  class      65%       39%  - 26
 Middle Class 58%       30%  - 28
 Wealthy      44%       24%  - 20

 New Minorities
 Cubans       NA        24% NA
 Mexican-
  Americans   77%       77% 0

 West
 Blacks       75%       88% +13%

 New Minorities
 Asian-
  Americans   50%       49%  - 1
 Mexican-
  Americans   78%       71%  - 7

 Populist Whites
 Mormons      49%       25%  - 24
 Ranching-Area
  Residents   60%       33%  - 27
 Urban Working
  Class       59%       46%  - 13

 Middle Class Whites
 Suburbanites 50%       38%  - 12
 New Metro
  Residents   52%       39%  - 13
 Conservatives 41%      29%  - 12
 White
  Liberals    53%       53% 0