There are many ways to analyze the results of the 2000 election, but my favorite begins like a James Michener novel with the ice age. When the temperature dropped, large quantities of ocean water were locked up in the polar ice caps, causing the sea level to drop by 200 feet. This exposed soft, sandy material around America’s shoreline. Rivers like the Susquehanna, the Delaware, and the Hudson carved trenches through this sandy material, which turned into bays and inlets when the ice caps melted and the water returned. Human beings turned these bays and inlets into ports. They became centers of commerce, immigration, and cosmopolitan culture. These ports, from Boston down to Norfolk, all went for Al Gore in the 2000 election. The South, which has fewer inlets and bays, and hence became a more rural region, went for George W. Bush.
During the ice age, glaciers swept over the northern part of what is now the United States, scraping off fertile soil and leaving behind boulders, sand, and gravel. This made large-scale farming difficult in what became the northern states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York, which went for Gore. Meanwhile, the soil that was pushed in front of the glaciers was picked up and then deposited by the wind, creating a great, flat, fertile belt across the Midwest and West — in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and so on. The great fertile plains went for Bush.
The glaciers also wiped out the pre-glacial drainage patterns in the North, and left behind thousands of lakes, the Great Lakes foremost among them. These waterways now serve as trade routes, and key areas around the Great Lakes went for Gore: Illinois, Michigan, northern Indiana, northern Ohio, western Pennsylvania. The Great Lakes form part of the great inland waterway with the Mississippi River. Most of the people who live along the Mississippi — in western Arkansas, eastern Mississippi, western Missouri, eastern Iowa, and western Wisconsin — voted for Gore.
Basically, the glaciers made some regions ripe for commerce and dense population centers, and some regions ripe for agriculture and small towns. The former went for Gore, the latter went for Bush. So the reason the Republicans don’t want to do anything about global warming is that they are hoping the polar ice caps will melt and the sea level will rise. That will wipe out America’s coastal regions, and with them the political base of the Democratic party.
Okay, now I’m pushing this analysis too far. But the ice age theory does point to one conclusion that is not farfetched. The Republicans have a geography problem. They are getting stronger and stronger in the center of the country, but the Democrats are getting stronger and stronger on the coasts, leading to the present near-perfect political balance. But it also means that Republicans will have trouble actually governing the country. As my colleague Richard Starr points out, it is a lot easier to control Appalachia from the coasts than it is to control the coasts from Appalachia. The media, finance, trade, government, technology, and culture all have their headquarters on the coasts.
Moreover, contrary to all the political science talk of dealignment or realignment, each party is getting more dominant in its home base. The 12 states where Al Gore got a higher percentage of the vote than Clinton did four years ago are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. The 12 states where Bush had his biggest gains over Bob Dole’s performance four years ago are Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
If you were a party leader, which set of states would you rather have trending in your direction, the Democratic list or the Republican list? And which states do you think carry the most cultural weight, Democratic California, Illinois, New Jersey, Florida, and Pennsylvania? Or Republican-trending Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Wyoming? The geographic picture, on the whole, is ominous for Republicans.
Why is this happening? Because the information age elites are trending Democratic.
Every year, U.S. News & World Report lists the 50 top universities and the 50 top liberal arts colleges in America. Eighty-six of the 100 schools it lists are in counties that went for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. That would be no big problem for the GOP if these counties contained only faculty members and assorted academic hangers-on. Nobody expects Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Madison, Wisconsin, to go Republican. But over the past two decades, university towns have become the dynamos of the information age. Stanford now sits in the middle of the most entrepreneurial region on Earth. The Research Triangle in North Carolina is a thriving hub of capitalist energy. Office parks are springing up around Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr on Philadelphia’s Main Line. And all these places are changing from Republican regions to Democratic strongholds.
This isn’t a new pattern, of course. Affluent suburbs have been trending Democratic for at least 20 years. A few years ago, National Journal did a survey of voting patterns in the 261 richest towns in America and found that the Democratic party had made gains in those towns in each of the past five presidential elections. The Democrats won 25 percent of the rich vote in 1980 and 41 percent of the rich vote in 1996. Bill Clinton carried 13 of the 17 most affluent congressional districts that year.
This year, if anything, the trends have accelerated. Silicon Valley used to be reasonably Republican. After this year’s election, all seven of the House members from the region are Democrats.
James Chapin, the brilliant columnist for United Press International, has shown that the same sort of pattern is occurring in affluent suburbs across the country. Gore won 57 percent of the vote in the suburbs on Chicago’s north shore, which includes prosperous communities like Winnetka and Lake Forest as well as middle-class communities like Niles and Berwyn.
As Chapin writes, “Gore beat Bush in the four Republican-leaning suburban counties around Philadelphia, as well as New Jersey’s Bergen and Passaic Counties, which are across the Hudson River from New York City. Gore also carried the two suburban counties north of the Detroit city lines, which include Macomb, home of the Reagan Democrats. In other Republican suburbs, like those around St. Louis, Gore battled Bush to a draw, even while he was losing the state to Bush.”
The information age is creating a new type of elite. This is a highly educated meritocratic elite with university values. (Gore beat Bush among people with graduate degrees by 8 percentage points.) They see themselves as artists and intellectuals, rebels and free spirits. Even as they have entered the world of the marketplace, they have brought their bohemian values with them. Although they are now making a lot of money as consultants, TV producers, and software writers, they see themselves as the cultural opposite of those boring Chamber of Commerce white males who vote Republican. They see themselves on the side of the oppressed, the gays, the minorities, the working class.
When Al Gore launched all that class war rhetoric at the Democratic convention, many people, including me, thought it was a politically disastrous move. It wouldn’t appeal to the working-class non-college-educated folk who were the chief target, and all the contentious fighting talk would turn off upscale voters. We were half right. The rhetoric clearly failed among the white working class. Bush carried white voters with incomes under $ 75,000 by 13 points, and non-college-educated white voters by 17 points. But the posture worked beautifully among members of the affluent educated class, especially women. Gore won among women with graduate degrees by 22 points. Though they themselves may be making $ 150,000 a year, they are concerned about widening income inequality. They respond to attacks on the overclass and to laments about the gap between rich and poor (so long as these laments aren’t accompanied by any actual policy ideas for doing anything about it — a very important point).
In these quarters, support for the Democratic party is like the African totem on the wall and the Shaker table in the eat-in kitchen. It is a sign that you haven’t sold out. Even though you have achieved a lot, you remain faithful to your countercultural ideals. And the funny thing is that many of the people in places like Silicon Valley who vote Democratic detest intrusive government with a fervor that would make a libertarian blush.
These voters present a long-term problem for the GOP. As the information age continues, there will be more and more of them. In 1980, 27 percent of the voters had college degrees. Now 42 percent of the voters do. When Reagan won, it wasn’t even worth counting the number of voters with advanced degrees. Now their number approaches 10 percent of the electorate. They control the cultural and commercial heights of the country. They are part of the coalition that gave the center-left candidates, Gore and Nader, 52 percent of the vote.
For Democrats, these trends are a boon, yet present a short-term quandary. Most Democrats seem to feel that the political breezes are truly blowing in their direction. Democrats have gained ground in every election since 1992, with the notable exception of 1994. That Republican victory was huge, but it is now clear that it wasn’t the precursor to an era of Republican dominance, as many thought at the time.
How far left has the pendulum swung? Is there an opportunity for a great liberal offensive, or is this now basically a moderate country with a slight Democratic tilt?
The press always talks about splits inside the GOP, but the Democrats are actually the more riven. You can tell because even amid the furor of the Florida imbroglio, when Republicans were united in their anger and concern, Democrats were already arguing amongst themselves. The liberals, on the one hand, and the centrist New Democrats, on the other, were pointing to the results as vindication for their views. And if you want to know what kind of campaign Al Gore ran, all you have to do is observe the tone of these essays. The liberal authors are cheerful and see the Gore campaign as a wonderful harbinger of things to come. The New Democrats are detached and regard the Gore campaign as a missed opportunity.
Two of the best thinkers on the liberal side are John Judis and Ruy Teixeira (pronounced Rooey Teshera). Judis wrote an essay for the New Republic with the provocative headline “How George McGovern Won Election 2000 for the Dems.” Judis’s argument is that in 1972 George McGovern tried to build a three-legged coalition: minorities, highly educated social liberals, and union members. He failed, because the union members deserted him. But it was this coalition that Gore rallied to win the popular vote.
This coalition is crucial, Judis says, if Democrats are going to win key states. In Michigan, he notes, Gore won 91 percent of the black vote, 64 percent of the union vote, a majority of those with advanced degrees, and a majority of those with incomes over $ 75,000 a year. He carried the state even though he did poorly among nonunion households with incomes between $ 30,000 and $ 75,000 a year.
A version of this coalition can even win elections in some southern states. In North Carolina’s gubernatorial race, Judis notes, Democrat Mike Easley won 90 percent of the black vote, 56 percent of the voters with advanced degrees, and 57 percent of those with incomes over $ 100,000, which more than compensated for the fact that he did relatively poorly among non-college-educated whites.
The implication, of course, is that the Democrats don’t need to worry about those non-college-educated whites, with their hostility to big government and their conservative social values. Instead, they can appeal to the educated class by being pro-choice and anti-gun. They can appeal to blacks via racial solidarity. And they can win union votes with a liberal economic agenda. One plus one plus one equals a ruling majority.
In an essay in the American Prospect, Ruy Teixeira considers some of the same data. Gore did phenomenally well among blacks and well-educated white women. And Teixeira concludes by pointing to essentially the same three-legged coalition Judis emphasizes: minorities, educated liberals, and working-class or union voters. But drawing on poll data by Greenberg Quinlan Research and others, he further argues that the Democrats have a huge issues advantage and that the only reason Bush was able to tie the election is that he blurred policy differences and thus could highlight Gore’s personal weaknesses. Teixeira notes that according to the Greenberg Quinlan poll, 40 percent of voters saw no difference between Gore and Bush on Social Security, and 50 percent of voters saw no difference on prescription drugs and a patients’ bill of rights.
Teixeira argues that when informed about the actual proposals, not only Democratic voters but even many Republican voters actually prefer Democratic ideas on Medicare, Social Security, prescription drugs, standing up to HMOs, and so on. The Democrats’ strategy in the future, therefore, must be to push these government programs harder. Like Judis, Teixeira admits that some voters are turned off by the Democrats’ liberal social policies, but he does not seem to worry that the party will alienate swing voters by promoting big government programs.
New Democrats argue the exact opposite. They say that the Democratic party will forfeit its momentum if it abandons the New Democratic task of reinventing government and reverts to the liberal task of reinvigorating it. A post-election poll for the Democratic Leadership Council done by Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates points out that 47 percent of the electorate regards itself as “moderate.” Bill Clinton carried those voters by 24 points over Bob Dole in 1996. But, stressing populist as opposed to New Democratic themes, Al Gore carried those voters by only 8 points over George W. Bush. Gore also did much worse than Clinton among younger voters. Clinton won voters under 29 by 19 points, Gore by 2 points.
The DLC study argues that Gore’s policies were more popular than Bush’s, but Bush’s themes were more popular than Gore’s. The theme of smaller government appeals to a lot of voters, the DLC memo concedes, and Gore did nothing to inoculate himself against Bush’s charge that Gore was a big government Democrat.
Moreover, the Penn, Schoen and Berland poll asked voters to rate themselves politically, with 1 being extremely liberal and 9 being extremely conservative. The average voter put himself at 5.42, a little right of center. The average voter put Al Gore at 3.92, 1.5 points further to the left, while he put George Bush at 6.48, only 1.06 further to the right. Thus, Bush made himself appear closer to the average voter than Gore. (Interestingly, voters think that Dick Cheney is more moderate than Bush, a sign of the importance of a calm delivery.) By losing the race to the center, the DLC people argue, Gore lost ground among the middle class. Clinton carried voters with incomes between $ 30,000 and $ 75,000; Gore didn’t.
Finally, the DLC study tried to discover which themes had the strongest pull for voters. They found that Gore’s theme of “People v. the Powerful” made 41 percent of the voters much more likely to support him, and Bush’s theme of “I trust the people” also made 41 percent of the voters feel much more likely to vote for him. But the single most resonant theme was the relatively non-ideological promise to “change the tone” in Washington. Gore’s themes were attractive to the Democratic base, but his populist message does not appeal to moderate voters the way an anti-ideological, “change the tone” message does.
So the DLC types, to no one’s surprise, argue that the path to future electoral success is the Third Way path that Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair have charted. It emphasizes centrist themes like community, opportunity, and responsibility, and offers centrist policy ideas that don’t pretend government can solve people’s problems, but use government to give people the tools to solve their problems for themselves.
If one had to guess which side will win the intra-Democratic party debate — to the extent that there is ever a clear winner to these sorts of struggles — one would have to say the liberals will dominate. One of the central messages of the Gore campaign was that the Democratic party is in a mood to reject the DLC implant. The party was willing to accept it when it believed that the DLC route was the only way to victory, but now liberals no longer believe that. Bill Clinton, the charming if unfaithful New Democrat salesman, is gone, while in the Senate there are a slew of new liberal leaders — Hillary Clinton, Debbie Stabenow, Jon Corzine, Mark Dayton, and so on — who will only bolster the liberal side of the argument.
Which, despite all the trends that are running against the GOP, may be the Republicans’ best hope, at least in the short term. Reading through the DLC agenda — give people the tools to help themselves, stress responsibility, blur polarizing social issues, reform programs like Social Security — one is struck by how well it describes the Bush campaign. The swing portion of the suburban electorate may still respond to DLC appeals, so that whichever presidential candidate hews most closely to that line wins. Even with the geography of the information age working for them, the Democrats may be on the verge of going off the deep end and blowing their advantage. After all, it’s their turn to screw up.
David Brooks, a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.
