THE COMING DEMOCRATIC DOMINANCE.
Majority Rules
by John B. Judis & Ruy Teixeira
Post date: 07.25.02
Issue date: 08.05.02
Long before George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election, his chief
political adviser, Karl Rove, was predicting to reporters that a Bush
victory would produce a historic political realignment. This new Republican
majority would resemble the one William McKinley built roughly one century
ago. "I look at this time as 1896, the time where we saw the rise of William
McKinley and his vice president, Teddy Roosevelt," Rove declared. "That was
the last time we had a shift in political paradigm." Just as McKinley
exploited America's shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy to build
his majority, Bush would exploit America's "transformational" shift from an
industrial to a postindustrial economy to build his. Bush would be the
candidate and the president of the "new economy."
In Rove's mind, September 11 has reinforced the parallel: Bush's war on
terrorism is the political equivalent of McKinley's Spanish-American War. As
U.S. News & World Report columnist Michael Barone wrote in February, Rove
"looks back to William McKinley, who was elected with 51 percent of the vote
in 1896 but whose successful war and domestic policies built that up to a
solid majority for years ahead." And the current financial scandals are
merely a bump along that inevitable road. The scandals, Rove told NBC's Tim
Russert on July 13, are a "business problem ... not a political scandal" and
will not affect the underlying movement toward a new Republican majority.
Rove is half right. He's correct that we are in a transformational political
era that displays marked similarities to 1896. And he is correct that this
era will produce a majority party that dominates American politics for years
to come. It just won't be the GOP. To the contrary, ever since the collapse
of the Reagan conservative majority, which enjoyed its final triumph in
November 1994, American politics has been turning slowly, but inexorably,
toward a new Democratic majority. It was evident in Al Gore's popular-vote
victory in 2000 (made more significant by the overhang of the Bill Clinton
scandals and Gore's ineptitude as a campaigner) and in Bush's and the
Republicans' sinking fortunes in the first two-thirds of 2001. It was
obscured by the patriotic rush of support for Bush after September 11, which
to some extent carried over to the Republican Party as a whole. But it has
resurfaced in recent months as Americans have turned their attention back to
the economy and domestic policy and away from the war on terrorism. Far from
being a temporary distraction from a long-term shift toward the GOP, popular
anger at the business scandals and the plummeting Dow heralds the resumption
of a long-term shift toward the Democrats.
If this emerging Democratic majority has eluded many observers, perhaps it
is because it differs substantially from the New Deal Democratic coalition
that dominated American politics from 1932 to 1968. Today the Democrats are
increasingly a party of professionals, women, and minorities rather than of
blue-collar workers. They are based in postindustrial metropolitan areas
rather than in the small-town South and the Rust Belt North. And they are a
party of the progressive center rather than the Great Society left or the
laissez-faire right. The new Democratic Party's true historical antecedent
is, ironically, that same progressive Republican Party of the early
twentieth century that Rove identifies with the Bush Republicans. It, and
not Bush's GOP, will oversee America's postindustrial transition because it,
and not Bush's GOP, embodies the demographic and cultural changes that this
new America will bring.
THE ROVE-BARONE THESIS
It is difficult to assess Rove's theory of Republican realignment because,
although he refers to it often, he has never publicly spelled it out in
detail. For that, one must turn to U.S. News's Barone, who in the 2002
edition of The Almanac of American Politics uses Rove's categories and his
assumptions to argue that an America evenly divided between Bush and Gore in
2000 is gradually but unavoidably becoming what he calls the "Bush nation."
Bush and Gore voters, Barone writes, represent "two nations of different
faiths. One is observant, tradition-minded, moralistic. The other is
unobservant, liberation-minded, relativist." Barone also depicts Bush and
Gore supporters as divided in their view of the free market: Bush voters
want "more choice" in economics, Gore voters "more government." The GOP's
ace in the hole, argues Barone, is that Bush's voters are growing far more
quickly than Gore's. According to Barone, Republicans enjoy an advantage in
"the fastest-growing parts of the United States." The United States, he
writes, is "moving, slowly, toward the Bush nation."
But Barone's--and by extension, perhaps, Rove's-- reading of the nation's
changing demography is dead wrong. His argument about the GOP's advantage in
the "fastest-growing parts" rests on a simple confusion between the rate of
growth and the size of growth. Yes, Bush did better than Gore in the 50
counties that grew the fastest during the '90s, averaging 62 percent of the
vote, compared with 33 percent for Gore. But these pro-Bush counties are
relatively small--averaging just 109,000 inhabitants--so their high growth
rates translate into only modest increases in actual Bush voters. By
contrast, in the 50 counties with the largest overall population
growth--metropolitan counties averaging 1.46 million inhabitants--Gore won
by a decisive 54 percent to 42 percent.
What Barone's numbers really reveal is that Bush and the Republicans enjoy
an advantage in rural areas and in the "collar" counties on the edge of
metropolitan areas being formed primarily by white emigres from rural areas.
If history were running in reverse, and if the United States were becoming a
primarily rural nation, the GOP would enjoy a distinct demographic
advantage. But rural America is shrinking--its share of the country's
population has declined 17 percent over the last 40 years--while densely
populated metropolitan America is growing and, with it, Democratic
prospects.
A closer look at Barone and Rove's other categories reveals similar flaws.
Take Barone's "observant, tradition-minded, moralistic" believers--a group
Rove has cited in pep talks with Republican operatives as the basis for an
expanding GOP majority. According to exit polls, Bush beat Gore among voters
who say they attend church more than once weekly by 63 percent to 36 percent
and among voters who say they attend church weekly by 57 percent to 40
percent. If these groups were growing as a percentage of the electorate, so
would Bush's and the Republicans' political fortunes. But they're not; the
number of Americans who rarely or never attend church is growing far faster.
According to the National Opinion Research Center biennial survey, the
number of Americans who said they never attended church or attended less
than once per year rose from 18 percent in 1972 to 30 percent in 1998. In
2000 the National Election Study found that nonattenders--who overwhelmingly
vote Democratic--represented 27 percent of the electorate. By contrast,
voters who identify themselves as members of the religious right fell from
17 percent of the electorate in 1996 to 14 percent in 2000. And according to
Notre Dame political scientist David Leege, the proportion of observant
Catholics--another Rove-targeted group--also dropped during the '90s.
Barone and Rove's contention that Republicans better represent the public on
economics also lacks basis in fact. Popular support for deregulation and
privatization (what Barone calls "more choice") peaked between 1978 and 1984
in the wake of Jimmy Carter-era stagflation, but it has been in retreat ever
since. Newt Gingrich learned that the hard way in 1995 when he mistook the
public's discomfort with Clinton's overly ambitious health plan for public
opposition to regulation and social programs like Medicare. If anything, the
public now wants more spending on social programs and more regulation of
business. Bush and Rove have admitted as much by co-opting Democratic
rhetoric on key domestic issues--from prescription drugs to environmental
enforcement to corporate reform--rather than arguing, as Ronald Reagan did
in the early '80s and Gingrich did in the mid-'90s, against greater
government regulation. From geography to demography to ideology, the
structural forces in American politics--the ones that endure the
idiosyncrasies of any given election--are trending the Democrats' way.
THE EMERGING DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY
The most straightforward evidence that the American electorate is trending
Democratic is actual election results. Since losing Congress in November
1994, the Democrats have gained seats in three successive congressional
elections; Democrat Bill Clinton easily won reelection in 1996; and Al Gore
won the popular vote against George W. Bush in 2000. Perhaps equally telling
were the scattered elections held in November 2001. Bush's popularity had
soared in the aftermath of September 11, and Republican candidates across
the country tied their candidacies to his popularity and to public concern
over security. Despite this, Democrats won almost every important election.
These included the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia (historically
bellwethers of national trends) and mayoral contests in Dayton, Ohio; Los
Angeles; and Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina--each of which saw Democrats
replacing Republican incumbents. The election in Dayton means every major
city in Ohio--often considered a bastion of Republicanism--is under
Democratic control. In the longtime GOP stronghold of Nassau County, Long
Island, Democrats won both the county executive race and a majority on the
county legislature--their first since 1917. The only significant Republican
victory came in New York City, where the GOP nominated Michael Bloomberg--a
liberal Democrat who had rented the Republican label because he didn't think
he could win the Democratic primary.
By itself, of course, the string of recent Democratic successes does not
prove a Democratic majority is emerging. But demographic trends suggest
something deeper is at hand. Over the past decade not only have Democrats
won back some white, working-class voters who deserted them during the '70s
and '80s, but they have forged a new coalition that includes three groups:
women (especially working, single, and highly educated women), minorities,
and professionals--all of whom are growing as a portion of the electorate.
These groups overlap in composition, but each entered the party in different
stages over the last 40 years for different reasons.
Given the GOP's well-known "gender gap," it's easy to forget that not long
ago American women voted disproportionately Republican. In 1960, for
instance, women supported Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy 53 percent to
46 percent. But starting with Barry Goldwater's nomination in 1964, and
accelerating after Reagan's nomination in 1980, the GOP's growing social
conservatism began driving away women voters. That led, by the '90s, to
women regularly supporting Democrats by absolute majorities. In 2000, women
backed Gore 54 percent to 43 percent.
This change in women's voting reflects the convergence of an economic trend
and a social movement. For at least 50 years working women have supported
the Democratic Party at much higher rates than have homemakers. But until
recently, most women were homemakers. As more and more women have entered
the workforce, however--from 37.7 percent of adult women in 1960 to 57.5
percent in 1990--women have begun voting more Democratic. Their entrance
into the workforce has been accelerated by the rise of modern feminism,
which has produced a spate of contested political issues, from abortion to
child care to Title IX. Before 1980, Republicans and Democrats were largely
indistinguishable on these issues. But in that election, the first in which
gender issues like abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment played a major
role, a gap opened that has not closed since--as working women began to
suspect that Republican social policy was undergirded by the belief that
society would be better off if women returned home.
Making matters worse for the GOP, the subcategories of women who trend most
strongly Democratic are also the ones growing the fastest. Single, working
women--who have grown from 19 percent of the adult, female population in
1970 to 29 percent today--backed Gore 67 percent to 29 percent.
College-educated women--who have grown from just 8 percent of the
25-and-older, female population in 1970 to 24 percent today--backed Gore
over Bush by 57 percent to 39 percent. By contrast, those groups of women
who still vote Republican--for instance, white homemakers who live outside
metropolitan areas--comprise a steadily diminishing proportion of American
women and of the American electorate.
Then there is the "minority vote"--a catchall for a range of groups with
varying political histories. African Americans have been voting heavily
Democratic since the New Deal and voting overwhelmingly Democratic since the
1964 Civil Rights Act; barring a radical change in Republican social
attitudes and economic priorities, they will continue to do so. Among
Hispanics, only Cuban-Americans vote Republican, and they make up just 4
percent of the overall Hispanic population. Most Hispanics are either
Mexican-American (59 percent) or Puerto Rican (10 percent), and both groups
have voted strongly Democratic since the '30s. Although President Bush has,
on Rove's advice, loudly courted Hispanic voters, they don't seem
particularly receptive. In 2000, for instance, Bush pursued California's
Hispanics extensively while Gore neglected the state; but Bush still
received only 28 percent of the Golden State's Hispanic vote. Bush did
better in his home state of Texas, winning 43 percent of its Hispanic vote.
But even there, the broader political trend suggests Hispanics are making
the Democratic party their political home. In this year's races for the
Texas statehouse and state legislature, Hispanics ran in just four
Republican primaries--and lost all of them. By contrast, Hispanic candidates
ran in 39 Democratic primary contests and won 35, including the
gubernatorial primary.
Until the '90s, Republicans could at least count on Asian American voters.
While Japanese immigrants voted for the Democrats as the party of civil
rights and Filipinos backed Democrats as the party of the working class, the
largest Asian group, Chinese-Americans, favored Republicans as the party of
anti-communism and of small business. But over the past decade even
Chinese-Americans have also moved to the Democratic Party--thanks to the end
of the cold war, the party's move to the center, the GOP's opposition to
immigration, and its nativist attacks on Asian donors during the 1996
fund-raising scandals. According to the National Asian American Political
Survey, Asian Americans favored Gore over Bush by more than two to one.
All in all, Democrats can now count on about 75 percent of the minority vote
in national elections. And like other Democratic-leaning groups, minorities
are growing rapidly. Nationally, minorities made up about one-tenth of the
electorate in 1972; by 2000 they were almost one-fifth. By 2010, if present
trends continue, that could rise to one-quarter. If you don't think that
strikes fear in Republican hearts, just look at California, where a rapidly
growing Hispanic and Asian population has helped decimate the state GOP.
THE PROFESSIONAL EDGE
The most surprising component of the emerging Democratic majority is
professionals. Professionals are highly skilled, white-collar workers,
typically with a college education, who produce ideas and services. They
include academics, architects, engineers, scientists, computer analysts,
lawyers, physicians, registered nurses, teachers, social workers,
therapists, fashion designers, interior decorators, graphic artists,
writers, editors, and actors. In the 1950s they made up about 7 percent of
the workforce. But as the United States has moved away from a blue-collar,
industrial economy toward a postindustrial one that produces ideas and
services, the professional class has expanded. Today it constitutes more
than 15 percent of the workforce.
As the professional class has grown, its politics have shifted. Typically
self-employed or working for small firms, professionals once saw themselves
as proof of the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism. They disdained unions
and opposed the New Deal and "big government." In the 1960 presidential
election, professionals supported Nixon over Kennedy 61 percent to 38
percent. Since then, however, their views have changed dramatically. In the
last four presidential elections, professionals have supported the
Democratic candidate by an average of 52 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile,
counties disproportionately populated by professionals--such as New Jersey's
Bergen County, the Philadelphia suburb of Montgomery County, and
California's Santa Clara County--have gone from Republican to Democratic.
Why do professionals switch party affiliation, while corporate managers and
executives--who share a similar economic profile--remain faithfully
Republican? One answer lies in their relationship to the private market.
While corporate managers are trained to gauge their success through profit
and loss, professionals are trained to see theirs as primarily, or at least
equally, linked to the quality of the service or idea they produce. Writers
want their books or articles to win literary prizes; teachers want their
pupils to learn; doctors and nurses want their patients to be cured. But as
the ranks of professionals have grown, they have increasingly become subject
to control from large institutions--media conglomerates, insurance
companies, etc.--that have imposed what they see as alien profit-and-loss
standards onto their work. As a result, many professionals have come to draw
a sharp distinction between their priorities and those of the market. Once
advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, they have grown increasingly amenable
to government regulation of business. Thus, in 1999 the American Medical
Association--which for decades fought government intervention in the medical
field--backed the Democratic version of the patients' bill of rights.
Similarly, professionals are the occupational group most supportive of
campaign finance reform and environmental and consumer protections. They've
even begun joining unions--about 20 percent of them to date.
If all occupational groups, professionals were also the most affected by the
political movements that took root on college campuses during the '60s. As a
result, they are far more culturally liberal than their occupational
forefathers--sympathetic to feminism, minority rights, and gay rights and
hostile to the religious right. These are the people Barone derisively
refers to as "liberation-minded"; they value tolerance as an end in itself.
In the 2000 election 55 percent backed affirmative action as a response to
discrimination, and 62 percent--more than any other occupational
group--supported allowing homosexuals to serve in the military.
Initially, professionals voted Democratic out of opposition to conservative
Republicanism rather than any affinity with the Democratic Party of labor
and big-city machines. Raised in the shadow of Vietnam and Watergate, they
were more suspicious of government than was the Democrats' traditional
blue-collar base. They favored government regulation but also government
reform, including controls on spending. They wanted government to alleviate
poverty but not to provide make-work jobs. They were sharply critical of
unchecked corporate power but, unlike many labor unionists, didn't see
themselves as an interest group arrayed against business, seeking its share
of power or wealth. Instead, they saw themselves representing the public
interest against the special interests of both business and labor. Children
of the cold war and the United Nations, they were more internationalist than
hard-hat Democrats and more supportive of free trade and immigration. More
than any contemporary social group, they resemble the progressive
Republicans of the early twentieth century who defined themselves against
laissez-faire conservatives on one side and against socialists and populists
on the other.
Though the movement of professionals toward the Democrats was evident as
early as the 1972 Nixon-McGovern election, it was not until 1988 that a
majority of professionals backed a Democratic presidential nominee: former
Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Unlike Walter Mondale, a party man
with deep roots in the labor movement, Dukakis looked like them--a suburban
reformer who said the 1988 election wasn't "about ideology, it's about
competence." Since then, professional support has become vital to Democratic
success. Professionals may only make up 15 percent of the workforce, but
they vote at higher rates than any other occupational group. Nationally,
they account for about 21 percent of voters; in many Northeastern and Far
Western states, they form probably one-quarter of the electorate.
And professionals have contributed more than just their votes to the
Democratic Party; they have contributed their political ethos. This
ethos--socially liberal, fiscally moderate, critical of the market without
being anticapitalist, and yet comfortable with the emerging new
economy--first appeared in the early '80s among so-called Atari Democrats
like Gary Hart and Paul Tsongas. But in the '90s it became the dominant
political sensibility of the Democratic Party. Clinton staffed his campaign
and administration with professionals like Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner,
Bruce Reed, Bill Galston, and Laura Tyson, who had come of age in the '60s
and '70s and embraced this sensibility. Indeed, Clinton's presidency,
particularly after his mid-course correction in 1995, better reflected the
political sensibility of professionals than of traditional-base Democratic
groups. Clinton stiffed the minority groups that opposed welfare reform and
clamored for large-scale jobs programs. He espoused free trade despite union
complaints. But African American and labor leaders, chastened by defeat in
the '80s and in 1994, deferred to Clinton's ideological leadership and by
extension to that of the professionals. If the Reagan coalition had been
built primarily around the priorities of the Sunbelt nouveaux riches and the
religious right, the new Democratic coalition was rooted in the views of
college-educated professionals.
THE IDEOPOLIS
Just as the McKinley majority was closely tied to the onset of
industrialization, the emerging Democratic majority is closely linked to the
spreading postindustrial economy. Democrats are strongest in areas where the
production of ideas and services has either redefined or replaced
assembly-line manufacturing, particularly the Northeast, the upper Midwest
through Minnesota, and the Pacific Coast--including the Sunbelt prize of
California--but also including parts of Southern states like Florida,
Virginia, and North Carolina. Republicans, meanwhile, are strongest in
states like Mississippi, Wyoming, and South Carolina (as well as in former
Democratic enclaves like Kentucky), where the transition to postindustrial
society has lagged.
The Democratic vote is anchored in postindustrial metropolises, or
"ideopolises." Because postindustrial society is not organized around a
rigid separation between city and suburb, these ideopolises comprise entire
metropolitan areas, not merely central cities. Some ideopolises contain
significant manufacturing facilities--as in Silicon Valley or Colorado's
Boulder area--but it is the kind of manufacturing (whether of
pharmaceuticals or semiconductors) that relies on the application of complex
ideas to physical objects. This has become true even of automobile
production in eastern Michigan. While much of the actual production of cars
and trucks has moved south to middle Tennessee, Alabama, and Oklahoma, much
of the research, development, and engineering of automobiles (which now make
extensive use of computer technology) is conducted in Michigan by
college-trained professionals. This is one reason Democrats now win
elections in once-Republican suburbs like Oakland County outside Detroit.
Some of these ideopolises specialize in what Joel Kotkin and Ross C. DeVol
call "soft technology"--entertainment, media, fashion, design, and
advertising--and in providing databases, legal counsel, and other business
services. New York City and Los Angeles are both premier postindustrial
metropolises that specialize in soft technology. Most of these
postindustrial metro areas also include a major university or several major
universities, which funnel ideas and, more importantly, people into hard- or
soft-technology industries. Boston's Route 128 feeds off Harvard and MIT;
Silicon Valley is closely linked to Stanford and the University of
California, Berkeley; Dane County's biomedical research is tied to the
University of Wisconsin at Madison. And all of them have a flourishing
service sector--computer learning centers, ethnic and vegetarian
restaurants, children's museums, bookstore/coffee shops, and health clubs.
To borrow David Brooks's phrase, this is where Bobos (i.e., "bourgeois
bohemians") live.
In the most advanced ideopolises, like the San Francisco Bay or the Chicago
metro areas, the work and culture of the ideopolis pervades the entire
metropolitan area and its occupants. Many of the same people, the same
businesses, and the same coffee shops or bookstores can be found in the
central city and in the suburbs. The racial conflict that used to define
such areas politically, with heavily minority cities voting Democratic and
overwhelmingly white suburbs voting Republican partly in response, is
fading. Indeed, the more fully a metropolitan area has entered the
postindustrial economy, the more the suburbs and the city vote alike. In the
2000 election Gore didn't campaign in Colorado but still carried the
Denver-Boulder area 56 percent to 35 percent. He won Portland's Multnomah
County 64 percent to 28 percent. Seattle's King County went 60 percent to 34
percent for Gore; and Gore carried Cook County, whose suburbs used to be
Republican, 69 percent to 29 percent. And while such ideopolises generally
boast a large quotient of new Democratic groups--professionals, minorities,
working women--their political ethos is not restricted to these groups. In
King County, white, working-class voters backed Gore 50 percent to 42
percent; in Multnomah County, it was by 71 percent to 24 percent. (By
comparison, working-class whites nationwide supported Bush by 57 percent to
40 percent.)
If you look at the 263 "ideopolis counties"-- counties that are part of
metro areas with high concentrations of high-tech economic activity or that
contain a front-rank research university--most of them voted for Republican
presidential candidates in 1980 and 1984. But in 2000 Gore garnered 54
percent of the vote in these areas, compared with 41 percent for Bush. By
contrast, Democrats have continued to lose rural areas (it was Bush's
dominance in rural sections of swing states like Missouri that propelled him
to victory there) and low-tech metropolitan areas such as Greenville, South
Carolina, and Muncie, Indiana. In all, Gore lost non-ideopolis counties 53
percent to 44 percent. Indeed, if you compare 1980--the beginning of the
Reagan era--to today, it is clear that virtually the entire political shift
toward the Democrats has taken place in ideopolis counties.
These counties, moreover, represent some of the fastestgrowing parts of the
country. Together, ideopolis counties currently account for 44 percent of
the vote nationally. But between 1990 and 2000, the average ideopolis county
grew by over 22 percent, compared with 10 percent for the average
non-ideopolis county. And ideopolis counties start from a far larger
population base--an average of 475,000 inhabitants, compared with just
54,000 for the typical non-ideopolis county. It is these areas--their
demography, their culture, and their politics--that Barone and Rove discount
at their peril.
None of these trends are inevitable, of course. If the Democrats move too
quickly to embrace the culture of the new Bohemia--say, by pressing civil
unions or gun prohibition--they could lose much of their still-vital, white,
working-class support. Or if they fall back into the bad pre-Clinton habit
of wooing interest-group constituents with bloated spending programs, some
professionals might start moving back toward the GOP. And if Ralph Nader and
the Greens begin regularly pulling in more than 5 percent of the vote in
ideopolis counties, Republicans could continue winning elections even as a
center-left majority emerges. But as long as the Democrats maintain a
fiscally moderate, socially liberal, reformist, and egalitarian outlook,
they will enjoy a structural edge in national and most state elections. The
Bush administration can scour the coal pits of West Virginia or the boarded
up steel mills of Youngstown for converts, but America's future lies in
places like Silicon Valley and North Carolina's Research Triangle. The party
that most clearly embodies the culture and beliefs of these areas will
dominate political discourse in postindustrial America at the dawn of the
new century, just as the McKinley Republicans dominated nascent industrial
America at the dawn of the last. Today only one party does--and Karl Rove
isn't in it.
This article is adapted from the forthcoming book, The Emerging Democratic
Majority (Scribner).
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