Lefty Nation?: What the trends portend

About a year ago, John Judis, a left-liberal journalist at The New Republic, wrote an article arguing that a new Democratic majority was aborning and that the election of George W. Bush as president would only "delay this trend." It seemed absurd at the time: Judis was suggesting that even if Republicans started 2001 with both houses of Congress, the White House, and most of the nation's governors, they were still doomed. The election results, however, made his thesis look a lot less silly. Maybe even prescient.

Al Gore and Ralph Nader got 51 percent of the vote between them, the best showing for left-of-center candidates since 1964. In the Senate, a slew of conservative Republicans lost seats (Abraham, Ashcroft, Grams), and liberal Democrats won them (Hillary Clinton, Dayton, Corzine). For the third time in a row, Republican numbers in the House fell.

All of this has emboldened liberals. They draw further encouragement from demographic trends that they think are working in their favor. Judis argues that the McGovern coalition-minorities and affluent social liberals-is growing and, combined with labor, will make for "an enduring political majority." Ruy Teixeira, another liberal writer, says that Republicans are doing well in parts of the country that are in decline, such as West Virginia, rather than high-tech centers. Their strategy, he says, is "to round up some of the backward areas of the country and draw on sentiments that I think are on the way out."

Pat Reddy, a consultant for the California Democrats, thinks that his party will become the dominant one because of the growth of three groups with an interest in larger government: immigrants, the elderly, and single women. He writes, "The statistic that should scare Republicans is that if every close statewide race in California over the last 40 years were rerun under today's ethnic line-up, the Democrats would win all of them based on a greatly expanded Hispanic/Asian vote. By 2008, we'll be able to say the same thing about national elections."

Republicans would be very foolish indeed to dismiss these analyses out of hand. Some demographic trends do look ominous for them. But some of those trends are overrated, and they are countered by other demographic shifts. The truth is that the parties are at parity, and it's awfully difficult to see which has the advantage going into the future.

Probably the most worrisome trends for the Republicans are the increased numbers of immigrants and single women. Even if Republicans can make a dent in the huge Democratic majorities among these groups, they are extremely unlikely to drawn even in them. So as the total numbers of immigrants and single women grow, Republicans will lose ground.

But even here, it's possible to overstate the trend. Hard as it may be to believe, Hispanics helped the Republicans in the presidential contest. Bush only got a third of their votes. But the Hispanics who voted Democratic didn't matter. A lot of them-75 percent-were in California and Texas. California would have gone for Gore without them, and they didn't keep Bush from winning Texas. Cuban-Americans, meanwhile, put Bush over the top in Florida.

Voter turnout among Hispanics and single women may also prove disappointing for Democrats. Hispanics made up only 4 percent of the electorate in 2000. Naturalization rates for immigrants from Mexico are quite low. The immigrants' participation in politics may catch up to their numbers by 2015-but who knows how they'll be voting by then? Democrats think that "waitress moms" will vote for them because they're struggling to make ends meet and need help from the government. But they may be too busy to vote.

The graying of the population won't necessarily help the Democrats, either, because the composition of the elderly population is changing. The New Deal generation is passing away, replaced by voters who are less committed to the Democrats. Republicans were able to get about half the senior vote in both 1998 and 2000.

"Wired workers"-people who work in high-tech industries-may become a Democratic constituency, but it's too soon to tell. It wouldn't be surprising if they voted for Clinton and Gore. Many of them are young and single. Almost all of them-at least until recently-felt that their economic circumstances were improving, and voters who felt that way went heavily for Gore. Yet the Democratic Leadership Council's postelection poll found that Bush actually carried wired workers. Evidently their social liberalism wasn't as strong as advertised. And there's not much evidence that social liberalism is growing. The movement in the polls over the last decade has been against abortion.

The GOP has some other economic trends on its side. The unions are still declining. (Bush beat Gore by 8 points among voters who don't belong to a union.) And then there's the growth of the new investor class. A survey done in October by John Zogby suggested not only that new investors are more likely to become Republicans than non-investors, but that this tendency increases with the length of time they've been investing. In an analysis of that survey for the Dean Witter Foundation, Richard Nadler estimated that if the trend of the last decade continues, Republicans should pick up about 175,000 votes a year. (Gore's plurality, remember, was 540,000.) And that's assuming that Republicans continue to refrain from making targeted appeals to these new investors.