[Mb-civic] The emerging Democratic minority - Economist

Sat Jan 8 16:27:29 PST 2005

Lexington

The emerging Democratic minority
Jan 6th 2005
>From The Economist print edition

Time to squash a bit of political revisionism

TWO months after the bitterest defeat in living memory, things are looking
up for the Democrats. Or at least they are looking up in the rarefied world
of political commentary. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, who published ³The
Emerging Democratic Majority² shortly before the Republicans' triumph in the
2002 mid-term elections, argue that ³George Bush won re-election by a
smaller margin than Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon or Dwight
Eisenhower‹and against a deeply flawed Democratic opponent.² Scott Turow
points out that the Republicans owed their gains in the House entirely to
redistricting in Texas. On NPR and the BBC, a crushing defeat for American
liberalism is metamorphosing into a damn close-run thing.

Warnings about Republican fragility are also coming from less predictable
quarters. Christine Todd Whitman, Mr Bush's first environmental chief,
thinks he missed an opportunity to broaden his support in the most populous
parts of the country. Ken Mehlman, the Republican Party's new chairman,
warns that the majority is ³not overwhelming² and won't produce ³automatic
victories². Jonathan Rauch, a libertarian commentator, compares Mr Bush's
Republicans to Margaret Thatcher's Tories: overreach could be followed by
years in the wilderness.

The Bush White House certainly has its problems. Mr Bush's job-approval
rating is stuck at 49%, the lowest for any re-elected president. Most
American voters now think that invading Iraq was a mistake. The Republican
Congress is afflicted with a strange mixture of hubris and fractiousness.
Yet the candidates vying to lead the Democratic Party should definitely not
deny the magnitude of Mr Bush's victory last November‹let alone declare it a
mere detour from the road to a Democratic majority.

Think for a moment of all the traditional excuses that Democrats make for
losing elections: that the party was torn apart by internal rivalries; that
the electorate focused on trivia; that the economy was doing unnaturally
well; that the Republicans had far more money; and, perhaps most important
of all, that voter turnout was disgracefully low. None of these applied in
2004.

The Democrats united early and enthusiastically behind John Kerry. The
election turned on big issues: terrorism, Iraq and tax cuts (and Mr Kerry
dealt with them admirably in the debates). The economy was iffy at best. Mr
Bush's $40m advantage over Mr Kerry in fund-raising was more than offset by
the spending power of shadow groups. Democratic-leaning ³527s² spent $292m
compared with $113m for their Republican rivals, and trade unions spent
$192m compared with a mere $17m by business groups. The level of voter
turnout was the highest for decades. And yet the Republicans swept the
board.

Mr Bush not only won 51% of the popular vote‹something no Democrat has
managed since 1964. His party succeeded in improving its hold on both the
House and the Senate while also maintaining its majority among governors and
its advantage among state legislators. Yes, gerrymandering in Texas helped
in the House, but given that 90% of incumbents are re-elected it may take
years to erode the Republicans' 30-seat margin. As for the Senate, the
Democrats are going to have to defend more vulnerable seats in 2006.

Democratic apologists argue that Mr Bush failed to engineer a political
realignment as big as Reagan's in the 1980s (when the white working class
abandoned the Democrats). But Mr Bush does not need to repeat such a
tectonic shift in order to create a Republican majority. He merely needs to
consolidate his Republican base while further eating into Democratic
constituencies such as minorities and women. Joanna Sixpack has abandoned
the Democrats in the same way that Joe did 20 years ago. Mr Kerry trailed Mr
Bush among non-college-educated white women by 23 points. Overall, the
Democrats' lead among women has shrunk from 16 points in 1996 to three in
2004.

Similarly, the Republicans look closer to being a big-tent party than their
rivals. They have deepened their hold on the conservative South; but they
can also boast the governorships of some of the country's most liberal
states, such as New York and California. And they seem to be better at
making converts than Democrats are. A survey at the two parties' conventions
found that only 14% of Democratic delegates had switched sides, compared
with 28% of Republican delegates.

An excuse or a symptom?

Democratic apologists say Mr Kerry was a deeply flawed candidate. But who
would have done better? Screamin' Howard Dean? Or snorin' Dick Gephardt? Of
course, Mr Kerry was no Bill Clinton, but Mr Bush was no Ronald Reagan: such
naturals appear only once in a generation. Mr Kerry, like Al Gore, was a
symptom of the Democrats' problems, not the cause of them.

Mr Rauch is right to warn of overreach. The history of second-term
presidencies is hardly auspicious, and there is a clear danger of social
conservatives alienating more middle-of-the-road voters: look at the way
that fratricide and extremism are eroding the Republicans' grip on Colorado.
But the comparison with Lady Thatcher actually underlines the structural
strengths of the Republican revolution. Conservative Party membership halved
between the mid-1970s and the late-1980s. By contrast, in 2004 Mr Bush
deployed the biggest army of party volunteers in Republican history. And
while Lady Thatcher could never rely on a vibrant conservative movement
(unless you regard a couple of think-tanks as a movement), American
conservatism has been going from strength to strength since the 1950s.

None of this means that the Republicans have a lock on power: the American
people have always been nervous about handing all branches of government to
a single party. But whoever becomes the Democratic Party chairman next month
should not imagine he is leading the majority.