Call It the Flyover Party

To say there’s “an emerging Republican minority” would be an exaggeration. Democrats don’t have an electoral lock on the presidency. If they did, Gore would have defeated Bush handily. But it’s now clear the end of the Republican lock on the White House was not a function of Bill Clinton’s strength. Rather, the GOP lock was a product of the Cold War and the conservative backlash against the 1960s. Absent those factors, it’s gone. And the country has become a bit more liberal and slightly less Republican.

For the first time since 1964, liberal presidential candidates got more than 50 percent of the vote. True, Jimmy Carter received 50.1 percent in 1976, but he didn’t run as a liberal. This year, Gore and Ralph Nader combined got 52 percent. This is ominous, given what happened in 1968: Richard Nixon and George Wallace combined took 56.9 percent of the vote — presaging the Republican presidential lock that dominated the 1970s and 1980s. Compared with 1996, this year’s exit polls found 2 percent more voters identifying themselves as liberals and 3 percent fewer calling themselves conservatives. And there were 5 percent fewer self-identified Republicans and 2 percent more voters labeling themselves Demo-crats.

The linchpins of the GOP lock were California and Florida. Capture them, as Nixon and Ronald Reagan did twice and President George Bush did in 1988, and the Republican presidential candidate wins. Now, California is a staunchly Democratic state and Florida a tossup. This year, George W. Bush’s biggest failure was in California. He spent $ 12 million on TV and radio advertising. He devoted many days to campaigning in the state. He relentlessly courted Latino voters. Meanwhile, Gore did nothing. After the Democratic convention in August, he visited once, to appear on Jay Leno’s TV show. Yet Bush lost the state by 11 points and failed to make inroads among Latinos, receiving less than a quarter of their votes.

It gets worse: Florida and California aren’t the only big states lost for Republicans. GOP pollster Scott Rasmussen says New Jersey and Illinois are also “trending away from Republicans at the presidential level.” Reagan won both states twice and Bush senior captured them in 1988. But George W. lost Illinois by 12 points and New Jersey by 15 points. In fact, he scarcely bothered to stump in either state, since they were out of his reach from the start of the campaign.

Among Latinos, Bush did better nationally than he did in California, getting 31 percent of their vote. But this was less than Reagan got in 1980 (33 percent) and 1984 (37 percent). And it came after Bush made heroic efforts to woo Latinos. Not only does he speak Spanish, but he spent millions on ads on Spanish-language television. The good news for Republicans is that Latinos are not a monolithic vote. Many were voting for the first time, so they may not be lost forever. The bad news is that Latinos are still basically a Democratic constituency. Even a pro-immigration, bilingual, compassionate conservative couldn’t come close to capturing them. By the way, Bush got 49 percent of Latinos when he was reelected governor of Texas in 1998. He won 43 percent of Texas Latinos on November 7.

More than ever, blacks are a monolithic voting bloc. All of Bush’s efforts — his speech to the NAACP, his appearances at dozens of black schools and neighborhoods, the high visibility of blacks at the Republican National Convention — were for naught. It turns out that race-baiting is effective in turning blacks against Republicans. There was plenty of it: the NAACP TV ad with slain black James Byrd’s daughter, Gore’s linking Bush to pro-slavery sentiments, venomous black radio, etc. Bush got 9 percent of the black vote. Bob Dole didn’t make nearly Bush’s effort to attract blacks in 1996 and received 12 percent. With strong racial appeals, blacks now vote in as high percentages as whites and maybe even higher. Oh, yes, in Texas, where 27 percent of blacks voted for Bush in 1998, only 5 percent did so on November 7.

The issue terrain isn’t exactly Republican turf either. Tax cuts are attractive to the converted. But for the foreseeable future, taxes aren’t an issue that grips the electorate. Sadly, the so-called investor class, that majority of voters who own stocks or bonds, didn’t emerge as a distinct voting bloc. Despite Bush’s promise of a big tax cut and use of Social Security funds for individual investment accounts, investors gave him a mere 51 percent to 46 percent advantage over Gore. Bush neutralized the education issue, but not health care. Steve Law, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, says health care “is probably our Achilles’ heel.” It hurts Republicans two ways. “People who can be persuaded to care about that issue will vote Democratic,” he says. And Republicans, insisting they’re also for a patients’ bill of rights and prescription drug benefit, are emasculated. They become me-too Republicans and appeal to practically no one.

There’s some good news from the election, just not much. Bush has forever altered the politics of Social Security. “The rhetoric on that issue is changed irreversibly,” says pollster Rasmussen. Bush may have been hurt marginally by his plan for individual investment accounts. But he wasn’t destroyed, and the private accounts were favored by 57 percent of voters in the exit poll. Reapportionment, which comes next year, is another Republican bright spot. The 2000 election gave the GOP more clout in state legislatures — thus power to influence redistricting — than it’s had in decades. So Republicans should gain House seats. And then there’s that map of how counties voted. It marks off a cultural divide in America. The heartland is solidly conservative on values: gays, guns, abortion, religion. So if Republicans can seize one juicy issue outside the cultural realm, they might burst into some of those Democratic areas on the map and create a political majority. Hope springs eternal.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.