For conservatives, the 1997 elections could hardly have turned out better. Conservative Republicans won a sweeping victory in Virginia, hardline mayor Rudolph Giuliani was handsomely reelected in Democratic New York City, and Republican right-to-lifer Vito Fossella carried the New York 13th Congressional District in a special election with a larger percentage than pro-choice Susan Molinari took in a special election in 1990. Meanwhile, Republican liberal Christine Todd Whitman, endlessly touted by the press as a national candidate, barely won reelection as governor of New Jersey. Overall, the results look very much like those of 1993 and 1994, when Republicans won handily — and not a bit like those of the presidential election Bill Clinton won with 49 percent in 1996. All of which bodes well for Republicans in 1998 but sheds less light on how they can prosper in 2000.
It is notable that most of the 1997 contests were fought on Democratic turf. The Northeast Metroliner Corridor, from New England south to the District of Columbia, is the only region of the country where Republicans lost ground in congressional elections between 1992 and 1996. Last week’s New York City, New York 13th, and New Jersey elections show how Republicans can survive and even thrive in this one-sixth of the country that strongly backed Clinton (59-31 percent) and Democratic House candidates (58-41 percent) in 1996. The Virginia results show how Republicans can win in the other five-sixths of the country, which gave Clinton a plurality (47-43 percent) and Republican House candidates a bare majority (51-47 percent) in 1996.
When it comes to the battle of ideas, one result stands out: Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s long-anticipated victory in New York City. Thirty-two years ago, the election of John Lindsay as mayor of New York ushered in an era of what Fred Siegel has called socialism for the economy and a free market in morals. Government would spend large sums on welfare and bureaucracy to help the poor, and government would stop regulating behavior previously thought of as deviant.
Three decades later, the verdict on those policies is in. New Yorkers had four years of Lindsay-ite government under David Dinkins, followed by four years of conservative government under Giuliani. The national press likes to paint Giuliani as a liberal because of his stands on abortion and gay rights, but he governed the city as a conservative, shrinking the welfare rolls, cutting taxes, and slashing crime in half. After the closest thing there is in politics to a controlled experiment, New Yorkers opted for Giuliani by a thumping 57-41 percent. Both times Lindsay was elected, he carried Manhattan overwhelmingly but lost the rest of the city to more conservative opponents. Last week, Giuliani carried even Manhattan, the heartland of American liberal governance. After all these years, Manhattan voters admitted, in effect, that they were wrong in the Lindsay era and that the outer boroughs and the rest of America, which they had loved to despise as reactionary and racist, were right.
Some liberals are trying to obscure this result by saying that Giuliani’s challenger was a lousy candidate. But Democrat Ruth Messinger is intelligent and experienced and talked gamely about still-festering problems like education. Liberalism’s problem was not the Messinger but the message. Now New Yorkers and the national press are touting Giuliani as a national candidate. He is not likely to get far because of his positions on some national issues. But by curbing crime, and proving wrong all the criminologists who said that this couldn’t be done in an unjust racist society, he has changed more than New York. Across the country, mayors are scurrying to copy his police commissioners’ tactics. Giuliani, if he does nothing else in his entire career, will have improved American life more than most politicians ever do.
Make no mistake: Giuliani’s victory was the vindication of a set of ideas. So was the victory of 32-year-old Republican Vito Fossella in the New York 13th District (Staten Island plus Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn). Democratic apologists may say that Fossella won only because the Republican National Committee threw some $ 800,000 into the 13th. But more than $ 1 million was spent in behalf of Democratic candidate Eric Vitaliano, who represented a competitive Staten Island district in the state assembly for 15 years, fought the odiferous Fresh Kills landfill, and sponsored the partial- birth abortion ban. Bill Clinton campaigned for Vitaliano, and organized labor mounted an extensive effort in a district where one-third of votersare union members. Vitaliano isintelligent, articulate, friendly,hard working: It is difficult to imagine a better Democratic candidate for this district. But he had one major problem: As a member of the lockstep Democratic majority in the New York Assembly, he had voted for tax increases. Republicans hammered this home, and Fossella won 62-38 percent, a smashing victory in a district Clinton carried 51-40 percent in 1996. In the Northeast Metroliner Corridor, the biggest issue for Republicans has long been taxes. It still is.
Some will say that Christie Whitman’s narrow escape in New Jersey (she won 47-46 percent) shows the tax issue had no bite. In her first term as governor, Whitman kept her promise to cut income-tax rates 30 percent, yet she barely won reelection. But Whitman didn’t promise to cut taxes further in a second term. Indeed, in debates she presented almost no agenda, arguing instead that she was more competent than her inexperienced challenger, the mayor of Woodbridge, at administering state government. That was undoubtedly true and helped her win the endorsements of most New Jersey newspapers.
But editorial writers cast few votes, and New Jersey, like the whole Northeast Metroliner Corridor, has moved left: It voted 54-36 percent for Clinton in 1996. Democratic candidate Jim McGreevey hammered home the fact that New Jersey has the highest property taxes and auto-insurance rates in the nation. Whitman, unlike Giuliani, never convincingly challenged liberal premises. She did offer an auto-insurance plan that would allow policyholders to pay lower premiums in exchange for renouncing pain-and-suffering damages. But when the plan lost in a legislature controlled by her own party, she conducted no public campaign for it, and she failed to highlight the connection between New Jersey’s high insurance rates and the leading role New Jersey courts have taken over 40 years in broadening tort liability and weakening insurance companies’ defenses against trial-lawyer-driven lawsuits. Nor did she present a plan to cut property taxes or take on local officials who shamelessly pad payrolls at their constituents’ expense. Whitman’s near- defeat belies the liberals’ alibi that the 1997 elections were just the reelection of incumbents in feelgood times. This incumbent nearly lost, because she didn’t set out conservative solutions to problems voters faced.
Two other points need to be made about New Jersey. One concerns abortion. The press did Whitman no favor when it lionized her for vetoing a partial- birth abortion ban; the veto was popular in feminist-dominated newsrooms, but a large majority of voters opposed it. (Similarly, the Washington Post’s highlighting of Virginia Republican Jim Gilmore’s sympathy for a spousal- notification law was undoubtedly intended to hurt him, but the Post’s own poll found that a plurality of voters favored it.) In New Jersey, 5 percent of the vote went to Libertarian Murray Sabrin, who said the government should ban abortion as part of its minimalist duty to protect life, liberty, and property.
Finally, the New Jersey race illustrates the point that a strong showing by an extremist candidate in a primary hurts his party in the general election. The press is always on the lookout for this among Republicans, but in New Jersey it was the Democrats who suffered. McGreevey, a little-known mayor and state senator, had help from labor and black organizers to win the Democratic primary 39-37 percent over congressman Rob Andrews, a moderate who has never voted to raise taxes. Whitman spent much of her campaign attacking McGreevey for supporting Jim Florio’s 1990 tax increase. She couldn’t have done that against Andrews, who probably would have beaten her by a wide margin. The Democratic Leadership Council recently touted a Penn & Schoen poll showing that Democratic primary electorates are more moderate than they used to be. But they’re still liberal enough to nominate a labor-left McGreevey over a DLC-moderate Andrews. That cost the Democrats the governorship of New Jersey in 1997 and could cost them some races in 1998.
Outside the Northeast Metroliner Corridor, the most important contests were those in Virginia. In early October the conventional wisdom was that the governor’s race was a dead heat between Republican Jim Gilmore and Democrat Don Beyer; that Republican John Hager, a former tobacco-company executive, was a sure loser for lieutenant governor; and that Mark Earley, the Republican nominee for attorney general, was a religious-Right nut who would have trouble winning. On election day, Gilmore won 56-43 percent, Hager won 50-45 percent, and Earley led the Republican sweep 57-43 percent.
What intervened was October — the month for Republicans. Before October, political dialogue tends to be dominated by the “free media,” newspapers and television stations, about 90 percent of whose reporters, editors, and producers are Democrats. For the most part without any conscious intention, they naturally frame the dialogue in terms favorable to Democrats. But in October, the “paid media” take over — television advertisements, radio spots, and direct mail. Both parties start to get their messages out unmediated by the press, and the Republicans begin to do better. And not necessarily because they spend more money: In the Virginia gubernatorial race, the spending was about even until Republican Gilmore pulled ahead and Democrat Beyer, contrary to expectations, declined to dip into his family fortune, crucial in electing and reelecting him lieutenant governor.
Gilmore’s message was clear, consistent, and well articulated: “no car tax” and “4,000 new teachers.” Virginia imposes a property tax running up to $ 1, 000 on ordinary vehicles, and in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington – – which Beyer hoped to carry on issues like abortion and tobacco — the tax comes due in October. In May, Gilmore proposed to phase out the tax on cars worth up to $ 20,000. Beyer attacked this as reckless, then came up with his own plan to rebate several hundred dollars of tax to people with incomes under $ 75,000. Unfortunately for him, that is about the median income in northern Virginia: Potential Democratic majorities here as across the country include many voters with liberal views on cultural issues but with incomes that disqualify them for Clintonian means-tested tax breaks.
Gilmore’s strategy, which he executed near-flawlessly, is one Republicans everywhere can follow: Target an unpopular tax, come up with a plan that is readily understandable, ignore the inevitable attacks of editorial writers and government apparatchiks, and press your advantage home in October when you can talk directly to voters. This should not be unfamiliar: Ronald Reagan did something like it in 1980, George Bush in 1988, and Republican House candidates in 1994. Gilmore offered as well his plan to hire 4,000 teachers, which helped to neutralize Beyer’s promise to raise the salaries of teachers’- union members. Meanwhile, Beyer’s ads linking Gilmore with Pat Robertson and attacking him on abortion gained Beyer nothing: Outside the Northeast Metroliner Corridor, many voters approve of the religious Right and are queasy about abortion. Beyer seemed not to understand that phrases pleasing to feminist groups and in newsrooms grate on many ordinary voters.
The lessons from 1997 are fairly simple. Republicans win if they promise to cut taxes. They lose or come uncomfortably close to losing if they don’t. Despite Bill Clinton’s popularity, and despite well-financed campaigns and good candidates, Democrats have trouble winning.
In addition, Republican candidates can ally themselves with state and local leaders whose records give them coattails: Gilmore and Fossella both benefited from association with popular Republican governors, George Allen and George Pataki; and Fossella benefited from links to Mayor Giuliani and Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari. This should remain true in 1998. Nearly 75 percent of Americans have Republican governors, most of whom have positive job ratings. (Republican candidates stand to benefit from association with governors Paul Cellucci of Massachusetts, George Pataki of New York, Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, George Voinovich of Ohio, John Engler of Michigan, Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, and Arne Carlson of Minnesota. All of them, incidentally, are either ethnics or Catholics: The post-Reagan Republican party has moved beyond the country club.) These strong local Republicans seem to count for more than the unpopular Newt Gingrich, against whom Vitaliano directed most of his campaign ads.
Clearly, the 1997 results augur well for Republicans in 1998, but they tell the parties less about how to win in 2000. Though Bill Clinton’s presidency has been a disaster for the Democratic party in Congress and in statehouses and many city halls, Al Gore or another Democrat could still run against a putatively extreme Republican Congress. A candidate’s personal character and priorities are more important in a presidential race than in a gubernatorial race, and a broader range of issues comes into play. Republicans will probably learn the obvious lesson from Gilmore’s victory: Tax cuts work. But it’s not clear whether they will learn the less obvious lesson from Whitman’s near-defeat: Failure to challenge liberal premises can be fatal.
Michael Barone, a senior editor at Reader’s Digest, is co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
