As originally published in The Atlantic
Monthly
July 1992
The Suburban Century Begins
by William Schneider
THE United States is a nation of suburbs. The 1990 census makes it official.
Nearly half the country's population now lives in suburbs, up from a quarter in
1950 and a third in 1960. This year will see the first presidential election in
which a majority of the voters will in all likelihood be suburbanites--the
first election of the suburban century.
That explains the obsessive focus on the middle class in the 1992 campaign. The
middle class is who lives in the suburbs. The word that best describes the
political identity of the middle class is "taxpayers." Democrats have been
talking about "the forgotten middle class," and for good reason. For the past
twenty-five years the Democrats have forgotten the middle class. And they have
paid dearly.
They can't afford to do that anymore. The third century of American history is
shaping up as the suburban century. Until 1920 most Americans lived in rural
areas. By 1960 the country was a third urban, a third rural, and a third
suburban. That balance didn't last long, however. By 1990 the urban population
had slipped to 31 percent and the rural population was down to less than a
quarter. We are now a suburban nation with an urban fringe and a rural
fringe.
The first century of American life was dominated by the rural myth: the sturdy
and self-reliant Jeffersonian farmer. By the end of the nineteenth century,
however, Americans were getting off the farms as fast as they could, to escape
the hardship and brutality of rural life. How could you keep them down on the
farm after they'd seen Kansas City?
Most of the twentieth century has been dominated by the urban myth: the melting
pot; New York, New York; the cities as the nation's great engines of prosperity
and culture. All the while, however, Americans have been getting out of the
cities as soon as they can afford to buy a house and a car. They want to escape
the crowding and dangers of urban life. But there is more to it than escape. As
Kenneth T. Jackson argues in Crabgrass Frontier, a history of suburbanization
in the United States, the pull factors (cheap housing and the ideal of a
suburban "dream house") have been as important as the push factors (population
growth and racial prejudice).
The 1990 Census tells the story of the explosive growth of suburbs. That year
fourteen states had a majority suburban population, including six of the ten
most populous states (California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and
New Jersey).
Five of the nation's ten fastest-growing counties were majority suburban; two
others had considerable suburban development. Three were outside Atlanta.
Nineteen of the nation's twenty-five fastest-growing "cities" were really
suburbs. They included the Los Angeles-area suburbs of Moreno Valley, Rancho
Cucamonga, and Irvine; the Phoenix suburbs of Mesa, Scottsdale, and Glendale;
and the Dallas suburbs of Arlington, Mesquite, and Plano.
Suburban growth is not likely to end anytime soon. According to the polls, 43
percent of Boston residents, 48 percent of people who live in Los Angeles, and
60 percent of those who live in New York City say they would leave the city if
they could. When the Gallup Poll asked Americans in 1989 what kind of place
they would like to live in, only 19 percent said a city.
Is there a suburban myth? Sure there is. It has been a staple of American
popular culture since the 1950s, from television shows like The Adventures of
Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver to movies like E.T. The suburban myth
was challenged in highbrow culture as soon as it emerged, however, in books
like David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (which criticized suburbia's
"other-directedness") and William H. Whyte Jr.'s The Organization Man (which
called it "group-mindedness"). The debunking of the suburban myth has now
reached American popular culture, where television comedies like Roseanne and
The Simpsons portray the harsh realities of suburban life--unemployment,
dysfunctional families, and, above all, stress.
Suburban stress has not produced any large-scale countermovement back to the
cities or out to the countryside, however. Instead, the larger suburbs have
become what the author Joel Garreau calls "edge cities"--places where jobs have
migrated to follow the population. These, in turn, have spawned more-distant
suburbs of their own--"exurbs." The prevailing life-style in all these places
remains distinctively suburban, meaning home-owning, homogeneous, and largely
white.
The prevailing imperative of suburban life is security--both economic and
physical. When I interviewed Dan Walters, a columnist for the Sacramento Bee
and one of the keenest observers of California politics, he explained to me how
the culture and life-style of the suburbs work to undermine political
consensus.
"The theory of California," Walters explained, "is, 'I bought this house. It's
mine. This is my little preserve.' The first thing the homeowner would do was
put up a six-foot fence around his entire house. Then the developers started
putting in the fences themselves.
"The next step after that was to put a fence around the entire development and
put a guard at the gate. The development became a walled community. These
walled communities created their own governmental structures. They might be
private structures, like homeowners' associations, that exercised
government-like powers. But in some cases they actually created public entities
that served as private guardians."
Walters offered the following theory: "Personal security in a time of economic
and social uncertainty is a very salable commodity. Developers are not selling
security but a sense of security." The result, in his view, was "the loss of a
sense of common purpose" in California. "We don't have a social consensus," he
said, "so we cannot achieve a political consensus. All politics does is
implement the social consensus."
The Declining Urban Sector
IN the 1890s the social consensus broke down in this country when declining
rural areas rose up in rebellion against urban America. The Populists spoke for
the old rural America that was being displaced economically and culturally by
immigration and the rise of great cities. The countryside was driven to radical
extremes by economic pressure and the loss of political influence. In the
election of 1896 the Democrats fused with the Populists and nominated William
Jennings Bryan, shutting themselves out of presidential politics for most of
the next thirty-six years.
The social consensus is breaking down again in the 1990s. Urban America is
facing extreme economic pressure and the loss of political influence. The
cities feel neglected, and with good reason: they are the declining sector of
American life. Just as the Populists of the 1890s exalted the rural myth, urban
leaders of the 1990s are trying to glorify the urban myth.
In 1990 the mayors of thirty-five of the nation's big cities held an "urban
summit" in New York City. They published a position paper pleading the case
that their urban agenda was, as the title suggested, "In the National
Interest." "Urban centers are the focus of national vitality in trade,
manufacturing, finance, law and communications," the mayors insisted. "American
culture is profoundly affected by the artistic and intellectual communities
that thrive in the compressed space of cities." Mayor Tom Bradley, of Los
Angeles, warned, "If we do not save our cities, we shall not save this
nation."
The mayors wanted to designate the 1990s "The Decade of the City." They called
for "a public education campaign around the theme of why cities are essential."
Finally, however, they gave in. They said "city" needs to be redefined "to
include the entire urban region as a community." If you can't beat the suburbs,
join them.
Like the Populists before them, today's urban activists react with rage and
frustration to the neglect of their agenda. Jesse Jackson grumbles that the
Democratic Party is turning away from its base. Last year he complained about
"an unholy alliance between the two parties--leaving the electorate with two
names but one party, one set of assumptions, and no options."
Jackson's mission in 1984 and 1988 was to rally the declining urban sector in a
populist protest movement. But this year Jackson decided not to run--much to
the relief of Democratic strategists, who dreaded the spectacle of Jackson's
again extorting concessions from the party's nominee. They fear that Jackson is
as out of step with suburban America today as Bryan was with urban America in
the 1890s.
When the U.S. Conference of Mayors met in Washington, last January, the
Democratic mayors decided not to rally around a presidential candidate. Mayor
Raymond L. Flynn, of Boston, the conference president, complained that none of
the major contenders performed strongly enough on the urban agenda. "I want a
little fire in the belly here for America's cities," Flynn told The New York
Times. "There's still this hesitancy among the candidates. . . . We want
somebody who's really going to have a feeling of commitment to problems like
homelessness and AIDS."
Actually, one Democratic candidate did draw a positive response from the
mayors--Larry Agran, the former mayor of Irvine, California. Agran was
regarded, of course, as a long shot for the nomination. The mayors' conference
was one of the few candidate forums that included him. What he promised was $25
billion in direct, no-strings-attached aid to cities, paid for by a gigantic
cut in military spending. Delighted, the mayors said he was the only candidate
who understood the needs of urban America.
The mayors and other liberal activists worry that the Democrats are moving
toward a suburban agenda. They are right. The mayors know that problems like
poverty, homelessness, and AIDS can't be solved with middle-class tax cuts and
entitlement programs. Even robust economic growth doesn't do the cities much
good, as the country discovered in the 1980s. What the cities need is targeted
resources. But that's exactly what Democrats are afraid of--redistributive
programs that take resources from the suburbs to pay for the problems of the
cities. That sounds like the Great Society programs that got the Democrats in
trouble with the suburban middle class in the 1960s. But isn't it "in the
national interest" to bail out the cities? The suburbs have given their answer:
walled communities.
Nowhere has the gap between city and suburb been more dramatically demonstrated
than in the notorious not-guilty verdict in the trial of four Los Angeles
police officers last April. The trial, which took place in Simi Valley, an
overwhelmingly white suburb, produced an incomprehensible verdict. The reaction
in the inner city of Los Angeles was one of incomprehensible violence.
The Republicans' Suburban Edge
PRESIDENTIAL politics these days is a race between Democratic cities and
Republican suburbs to see who can produce bigger margins. The suburbs are
winning.
In 1960 urban areas cast 33 percent of the national vote, 20 percent Democratic
and 13 percent Republican. So the Democrats came out of the cities with a
seven-point lead. In 1988 the urban vote was down to 29 percent of the total.
It split 18 percent for the Democrats and 11 percent for the Republicans.
That's still a seven-point lead. Thus, from 1960 to 1988 two things happened to
the urban vote: it became smaller, and it became more Democratic. As a result,
the Democrats' lead coming out of the cities held constant.
Over the same period the rural vote became smaller and more Republican. So the
Republican lead coming out of the countryside also stayed about the same (a
two-point lead in 1960, a three-point lead in 1988).
What happened to the suburban vote from 1960 to 1988 was quite different. While
the suburbs grew larger, they also became more Republican. In l960 the suburbs
generated a third of the national vote. The suburban third divided 18 percent
for the Republicans and 15 percent for the Democrats. So the Republican Party
came out of the suburbs that year with a three-point lead. In 1988 the suburbs
accounted for 48 percent of the vote. And that vote split 28-20 for the
Republicans. Thus they came out of the suburbs with an eight-point lead in
1988--enough to cancel out the Democrats' lead in the cities. The suburbs had
arrived, politically.
The suburbs are growing larger faster than the cities are becoming more
Democratic. That has tipped the balance to the Republicans in presidential
elections in a number of key states.
Illinois is a case in point. In 1960 Chicago cast 35 percent of the Illinois
presidential vote. With a little help from Richard J. Daley's machine, the city
voted 63 percent Democratic that year. In 1988 Chicago's vote was down to 23
percent of the Illinois total. With no apparent help from the Daley machine,
the city voted 69 percent Democratic.
At the same time, the suburban vote outside Chicago became slightly more
Republican, moving from 60 percent for Nixon in 1960 to 62 percent for Bush in
1988. The number of voters in the suburbs grew enormously, however. The suburbs
accounted for 26 percent of the Illinois vote in 1960--a quarter less than
Chicago. They cast 38 percent of the Illinois vote in 1988--two thirds more
than Chicago.
In 1960 the Democrats came out of Chicago with a 456,000-vote lead for
President. The Republicans came out of the suburbs 254,000 votes ahead.
Illinois went Democratic. In 1988 the Democrats came out of a smaller but more
Democratic Chicago with a 420,000-vote lead. But the Republican margin was
423,000 votes in the suburbs. Illinois went Republican.
In 1960 Detroit cast 22 percent of the Michigan vote. Seventy-one percent of
those votes went Democratic. Kennedy got a 312,000-vote lead out of Detroit.
The Detroit suburbs also went Democratic that year, by 84,000 votes. Michigan
ended up in the Democratic column.
By 1988 Detroit voted a whopping 85 percent Democratic. But the city was down
to eight percent of the Michigan vote. It gave Michael S. Dukakis a
217,000-vote lead. Detroit's suburbs were now voting 60 percent Republican. And
they accounted for a third of the Michigan vote. The suburbs gave Bush a
230,000-vote lead. Michigan went Republican.
In 1960 Los Angeles County had two and a half times as many voters as the five
suburban counties of southern California. But the Republican lead in the
suburban counties (138,000 votes) was already large enough to offset the
Democratic lead in Los Angeles County (21,000 votes). By 1988 L.A. County and
the southern California suburbs were casting the same number of votes. The
Democrats' lead of 133,000 votes in L.A. County was dwarfed by the Republicans'
lead of 717,000 votes in the suburbs. A state that had gone Republican by
36,000 votes in 1960 went Republican by 353,000 votes in 1988.
How bad has it gotten for Democrats? Bush's margin in Ohio (477,000 votes) was
far larger than his total vote in Cleveland (34,000 votes). His margin in
Michigan (290,000) was greater than his total vote in Detroit (44,000). Ditto
for Georgia and Atlanta. And for Louisiana and New Orleans. The same was very
nearly true for Maryland and Baltimore and for California and Los Angeles.
Bush's margin in Missouri (83,000 votes) was about the same as the total number
of votes he got in St. Louis and Kansas City together (85,000).
In other words, Bush could have carried most of these states without getting a
single vote in their largest cities. Republicans can afford to ignore the
cities. But the Democrats, like many urban residents, have to worry about
becoming trapped in them--exactly the way the Democrats got trapped in rural
America in the 1890s.
The Suburban View of Government
DEMOCRATS have not done badly among suburban voters in elections below the
presidential level. California, for instance, is a heavily suburban state that
has voted for the Democratic ticket only once since Harry Truman (the 1964 LBJ
landslide), but Democrats have won ten out of twenty-four elections for
governor and senator since 1952, have held a majority of California's seats in
the House of Representatives since 1958, and have controlled both houses of the
state legislature since 1974.
Across the country suburban voters usually vote more Democratic in state
elections than in presidential elections. The difference averages between five
and eight points in nonsouthern states like California, Illinois, and Michigan.
Among suburban voters in southern states like Texas and Florida, Democratic
candidates for governor and senator typically do 15 to 25 points better than
Democratic presidential candidates.
In 1990 a hundred and seventy congressional districts had majority suburban
populations (according to data in the 1980 Census). That was substantially more
than the number of majority urban (ninety-eight) or majority rural
(eighty-eight) districts. (The remaining seventy-nine districts were "mixed.")
Democrats represented more than 80 percent of the urban districts, almost 60
percent of the rural districts, and a bare 50 percent of the suburban
districts. The Democrats' ability to sustain a majority in the House of
Representatives depends on the party's continuing competitiveness in the
suburbs.
And that, in turn, depends on the Democrats' ability to understand the suburban
view of government. Suburbanization means the privatization of American life
and culture. To move to the suburbs is to express a preference for the private
over the public. The architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk offer
this disdainful characterization:
"The classic suburb is less a community than an agglomeration of houses, shops,
and offices connected to one another by cars, not by the fabric of human life.
. . .The structure of the suburb tends to confine people to their houses and
cars; it discourages strolling, walking, mingling with neighbors. The suburb is
the last word in privatization, perhaps even its lethal consummation, and it
spells the end of authentic civic life."
There is a reason why people want to be confined to their houses and their
cars. They want a secure and controlled environment. Suburban commuters show a
determined preference for private over public transportation. Automobiles may
not be efficient, but they give people a sense of security and control. With a
car you can go anywhere you want, anytime you want, in the comfort of your own
private space.
Entertainment has also been privatized. Suburbanites watch cable television and
rent videos. They can watch anything they want, anytime they want, in the
comfort of their own private space. People have control over what they
see--remote control. And they don't have to put up with the insecurity and
disorder of public spaces. Historically, enjoying public spaces was one of the
reasons people lived in cities.
Even public activities like shopping have been privatized. The difference
between a mall and a downtown is that a mall is a private space, a secure
environment. Young people can hang out there. Old people can "mall walk" for
exercise. Those are difficult and dangerous things to do in uncontrolled public
spaces. Even the streets of a suburb are not really public areas. Suburban
houses have decks, which protrude into private back yards. In the great
American suburb there are no front porches.
Suburbanites' preference for the private applies to government as well.
Suburban voters buy "private" government--good schools and safe streets for the
people who live there. They control their local government, including taxes,
spending, schools, and police.
There are rich suburbs (Fairfax County, Virginia) and poor suburbs (Chelsea,
Massachusetts); black suburbs (Prince Georges County, Maryland) and Hispanic
suburbs (Hialeah, Florida); liberal suburbs (Marin County, California) and
conservative suburbs (Orange County, California). Can suburban voters, then, be
said to have a defining characteristic? Yes: suburban voters are predominantly
property owners. And that makes them highly tax-sensitive.
A major reason people move out to the suburbs is simply to be able to buy their
own government. These people resent it when politicians take their money and
use it to solve other people's problems, especially when they don't believe
that government can actually solve those problems. Two streams of opinion seem
to be feeding the anti-government consensus as American politics enters the
suburban era. One is resistance to taxes, which is strongest among middle-class
suburban voters. The other is cynicism about government, which is strongest
among the urban poor and the poorly educated.
Upscale voters are the most likely to say that government has too much power
and influence, that taxes should be kept low, and that people should solve
their problems for themselves. That's the "elitist" suburban view. Downscale
voters express doubts about what government can do. They are the most likely to
say that public officials don't know what they are doing, that most of them are
crooks, that they don't pay attention to what people think, that government is
run by a few big interests, and that you can't trust the government to do what
is right. That's the cynical, "populist" view. Put the two together and you
have a powerful, broad-based, anti-government, anti-tax coalition.
Polls show that people want government to do more about education, the
environment, the infrastructure, and health care. But they trust it less than
ever. The more expansive view of what government should do has been canceled
out by the more constricted view of what government can do. No one wants to
give politicians more money to spend, even if the nation's problems are
becoming more serious.
The last time the nation was in this kind of anti-political frenzy was during
the Progressive era, in the early decades of this century. Progressives,
however, were anti-political but pro-government. The reforms of that era were
aimed at curbing the power of political parties by expanding what Progressives
saw as the rational, managerial authority of government (for example, having
cities run by professional city managers instead of politicians). They used the
attack on politics to justify an essentially liberal agenda: making government
more professional.
Today the attack on politics serves an essentially conservative agenda: taking
government out of the hands of a professional political elite and making it
more responsive to the people. How? By limiting terms, limiting pay, limiting
spending, and limiting taxes. In the suburban eras unlike the Progressive era,
opposition to politics and opposition to government go hand in hand.
Spend Broadly, Tax Narrowly
THE suburbanization of the electorate raises a big problem for the Democrats:
How can they sell activist government to a constituency that is hostile to
government? The answer is, they have to learn how to talk about taxes and
spending in ways palatable to the middle class. There are two lessons the
Democrats should have learned by now.
One is that the only social programs that are politically secure are those that
benefit everybody. Medicare, for example, is the principal enduring legacy of
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Like Social Security, Medicare helps everybody,
not just those in greatest financial need. The Democrats found it impossible to
sustain support for LBJ's War on Poverty, however, precisely because it was not
a universal entitlement. It was targeted at the poor.
Consider two kinds of government spending. Public-works spending is salable to
middle-class voters. Social-welfare spending is not. Public-works spending
involves benefits that are available to everyone and that people cannot provide
for themselves--things like good schools, fast highways, safe streets, and a
clean environment.
Social-welfare spending is targeted by need. It helps disadvantaged people get
things that others are able to provide for themselves, like housing, food, and
medical care. That is fine with middle-class voters, as long as they are
persuaded that the benefits are going to the "truly needy" and that no one is
taking advantage of the system. But middle-class voters tend to be suspicious
of programs aimed at creating social change rather than providing public
services.
Entitlement programs are like public works. By definition, entitlements are not
based on need. People are entitled to a benefit because they belong to a
certain category, and it is a category anyone can belong to--the elderly,
children, veterans, disabled persons (everyone was once a child, everyone
expects to get old, and everyone can join the service or become disabled).
True, entitlement programs are wasteful, expensive, and inefficient ways to
bring about social change. But that is not their purpose. Entitlement programs,
like Social Security, are only incidentally redistributive. In effect,
middle-class voters are bribed to support them because they get benefits too.
It is worth remembering that the New Deal was not a social-welfare program. The
Great Depression was a natural disaster that affected everybody, the just and
the unjust alike. When the Democrats took the White House in 1933, they did not
attempt a tremendous program of social change. What they came up with was an
ambitious program of public works.
The other lesson for Democrats comes from the Reagan era: Don't raise taxes
that hurt everybody. Democrats saw what happened to Walter Mondale in 1984 when
he proposed a general tax increase. Suburban middle-class voters, however, are
willing to consider specifically targeted fees and taxes. That was the
principle behind the highway bill passed in 1987 over President Reagan's veto.
The bill designated revenues from the highway trust fund to pay for road and
bridge construction. Congress proudly pointed to the fact that the bill did not
do anything to increase the federal deficit. Of course, it did not do anything
to reduce the deficit either.
An even more ingenious solution to the revenue problem is not to raise taxes or
spend government money at all. Just mandate that employers pay more in benefits
to their workers. Raise the minimum wage. Require employers to pay for health
insurance and grant parental and medical leave. The idea is to expand "workers'
rights" and "family rights"--that is, entitlements--by making business, not
government, pay for them. These kinds of proposals elicit a great many
complaints from business, particularly small business, which bears most of the
burden. But they draw few complaints from taxpayers.
According to The New York Times, state and local governments have been relying
increasingly on special-purpose taxes, revenues frequently raised from specific
groups of taxpayers and used for specific purposes. Among the examples: a $10
increase in marriage-license fees in Colorado to pay for child-abuse prevention
programs. Higher real-estate taxes for downtown property owners in an
eighty-block area of Philadelphia to pay for enhanced security and special
street-cleaning services. A dollar a year added to automobile insurance
premiums in Michigan to pay for auto-theft prevention programs. Taxes on beer
in several states to pay for anti-drunk-driving and alcohol rehabilitation
programs.
"The logical place for this to wind up," the criminologist Lawrence W. Sherman
told the Times, "is that every crime will have its own tax, except for the
unpopular offenses that involve the poor or that are not important to
middle-class voters." Precisely. Special-purpose taxes are the suburban
ideal--not just private government but private taxes.
The message to Democrats is: In order to compete for a suburban electorate,
keep spending as broad as possible and make taxes as specific as possible.
That, of course, is the exact reverse of urban priorities. The urban agenda
consists of broad-based taxes and targeted spending programs: tax as many
people as possible in order to provide for the needs of specific disadvantaged
groups. That requires means-testing. Probably the most difficult thing to do in
politics these days is to sell means-tested programs to suburban voters. They
know that they will end up paying for the programs and that the benefits will
go to people of more modest means. To middle-class voters, a program that helps
the few and taxes the many is an outrage. A program that helps the many and
taxes the few seems eminently fair.
The Collapse of Operational Conservatism
TWENTY-FIVE years ago, in The Political Beliefs of Americans, Lloyd A. Free and
Hadley Cantril described the American public as ideologically conservative and
operationally liberal. Their polls showed that Americans professed a belief in
small government but at the same time supported a wide range of government
subsidies and spending programs. The Democrats ruled by appealing to those
operational sentiments. "President Johnson was correct," Free and Cantril
concluded, "when he indicated that the argument over the welfare state had been
resolved in favor of federal action to achieve it."
The Reagan era appears to have reversed that formulation. During the 1980s
public opinion grew more liberal on issues of government spending and
intervention. Nevertheless, the anti-tax consensus has held fast. Today's
"operational conservatism" is sustained by both continued public resistance to
tax increases and widespread cynicism about what government can do. That
operational conservatism has enabled Republicans to control the agenda since
1978.
The operational liberalism of the Johnson era was legitimized by the Democratic
Party's ability to keep the country prosperous. The New Deal and the Second
World War, with their unprecedented expansion of federal power, had saved the
country from the Great Depression. Americans are pragmatists. They believe that
if something works, it must be right. If liberalism meant prosperity, as it did
from the 1930s through the 1960s, then it was all right with most Americans.
The operational conservatism of the Reagan era also had pragmatic roots. It was
legitimized by the Republican Party's ability to keep the country prosperous.
The Reagan Revolution, with its tax cuts and its unprecedented attack on
federal power, saved the country from the Great Inflation. As long as low taxes
and limited government worked, Americans had no quarrel with Reaganomics.
But Reaganomics isn't working anymore. The Boston Globe has reported that after
four years in office, Bush is likely to end up with the poorest record of
economic growth of any President since Harry Truman. Economists estimate that
the country's average annual growth rate from 1989 through 1992 will be 1.6
percent--far lower than the yearly growth rate under Ronald Reagan (3.0
percent), Jimmy Carter (3.1 percent), Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (2.2
percent), and Lyndon Johnson (4.6 percent). No President with that kind of
record is supposed to be reelected. During his 1988 campaign Bush promised to
create thirty million new jobs in eight years. At the rate he is going, fewer
than five million will have been created by the end of 1996.
Bush's failure gives Democrats an opportunity to woo the middle-class vote on
the economic issue--but only if they understand the middle-class view of
government. In 1988 Michael Dukakis went after middle-class voters the same way
Democrats have always gone after constituencies. His message was: You've got a
problem, we've got a program.
Dukakis had a program to provide child care to families with working parents.
He had a program to help young families afford home mortgages. He had a program
to help students cope with college-tuition costs. He had a program to provide
health insurance to all working Americans. His programs were, for the most
part, ingeniously designed to be self-financing. The Democrats could do it all
without a tax increase. How? All you had to do was read the position papers.
But middle-class voters were suspicious of government programs. They figured
that they would end up paying for the programs while the benefits would go to
someone else. George Bush's answer to "the middle-class squeeze" was far more
persuasive. What he promised middle-class voters was prosperity. "I am
optimistic and I believe we can keep this long expansion going," Bush said in
the second campaign debate.
That's what the middle class wanted to hear. Their message to the candidates
was: Just protect our jobs, keep the paychecks coming in, and hold taxes down.
We'll solve our problems for ourselves. We'll send our kids to college. You
just keep the recovery going.
But Bush didn't. And now he's in danger of losing the middle class. Some
Republicans believe that if they lose middle-class votes on the economy, they
can get them back with an appeal to values. A Republican strategist told The
New York Times early this year, "If you look at the middle class as just this
monolithic group driven by economic self-interest, I think that's wrong. . .
.that's what the Democrats are doing right now, and I think they'll get
blind-sided by a whole set of values and other issues that will appeal to these
voters."
The problem with that argument is that middle-class voters are well educated
and tend to be moderate on social issues. Democrats, too, can appeal to their
values. If the Supreme Court votes to overturn Roe v. Wade this year,
Republicans will find themselves on the defensive on values as well as
economics.
On social issues, the suburban voters of the 1990s are quite different from the
silent majority of the 1970s or the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s. They are not
backlash voters. Look at California, the model for the new suburban electorate.
Since the passage of Proposition 13, in 1978, California has tended to be
tax-averse and stingy with public funds. But it is also one of the most
environmentally conscious and pro-choice states in the country.
New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley knows these voters. He is one of them, and he
almost got destroyed by their tax revolt in his own state. In a deeply felt and
highly personal speech delivered in the Senate last July, Bradley accused
President Bush of "inflaming racial tension to perpetuate power and then using
that power to reward the rich and ignore the poor." Bradley said to Bush, "You
have tried to turn the Willie Horton code of 1988 into the quotas code of
1992."
Bradley's message was a simple and powerful "J'accuse." He didn't accuse Bush
of being a racist. He accused him of dividing the country and failing to
provide moral leadership. And he came close to accusing Bush of being a
hypocrite. "We measure our leader by what he says and by what he does," Bradley
said. "If both what he says and what he does are destructive of racial harmony,
we must conclude that he wants to destroy racial harmony."
In an interview later in his office, Bradley told me that he believes there are
a lot of voters out there who feel the way he does. He described them as
"independent suburban voters who are under fifty and who care about civil
rights, who care about America's role in the world, who are concerned about the
budget deficit because they are starting to have kids."
He didn't think those voters could be reached by appealing to their racial or
economic resentment. One had to appeal to their aspirations and ideals. "They
define our national identity partly in terms of ethnic and racial harmony,"
Bradley explained. The Democrats can get them by exposing the Republicans as
the party of divisiveness and intolerance. "They're going to turn off," Bradley
said, once they know they're being asked to support "someone whose path to
power has been to destroy that harmony, consciously, explicitly, and
deliberately."
Bradley is on to something. The swing voters in the electorate today are young,
well educated, moderate, and independent. They fill the suburbs of states like
New Jersey and California. They have been voting Republican, not because of
race but because they see the Democrats as either corrupt or fiscally
incompetent. These voters are uncomfortable with the Republican positions on
race and abortion; at least, they will be if the Republicans keep pursuing the
"southern strategy"--that is, running on the same conservative social values
they used in 1988 to portray Michael Dukakis as outside the national
mainstream.
A Southern or a Suburban Strategy?
THESE days, Democratic presidential candidates consistently do worse in the
South than in any other part of the country. Even Carter could not hold the
South against Reagan in 1980. Democrats can either try to win it back or pursue
a suburban or "California" strategy--go for the industrial states of the West
Coast, the Midwest, and the Northeast.
Which strategy seems more promising for 1992? If you rank the states by the
average vote they gave Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, you get the southern
strategy. The two elections in which the Democrats did best in California,
relative to the national average, were 1972 and 1988. Those were the years when
the Democrats nominated New Politics liberals, George McGovern and Michael
Dukakis. If you average the 1972 and 1988 Democratic votes and rank the states,
you have the suburban strategy.
There are eleven states (plus the District of Columbia) that the Democrats
would have to carry under either strategy to get an electoral-vote majority.
The eleven states are West Virginia, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Maryland,
Massachusetts, Delaware, New York, Hawaii, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and
Wisconsin. These are the Democrats' base. Seven of them are in the North and
East. The Democrats averaged 53.5 percent of the vote in these states and the
District in 1988. Eight went for Dukakis, while the other four (Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware) voted for Bush.
Under the suburban strategy, the Democrats would need to carry eleven
additional states, mostly on the West Coast and in the industrial Midwest. Only
three of those states went Democratic in 1988. But the vote tended to be close.
On average, the eleven states needed for the suburban strategy voted 48.4
percent Democratic in 1988.
The southern strategy also adds eleven new states to the Democratic base. All
of them are southern. Not a single one voted for Dukakis in 1988. The Democrats
averaged only 41.0 percent of the vote in these eleven states.
This means that it would take a much stronger swing to get the South to vote
Democratic in 1992 than it would to build a winning coalition outside the
South. Dukakis was supposed to be pursuing a suburban strategy in 1988. In
fact, Dukakis did pretty well in the prototypical suburban state,
California--47.6 percent, two points better than he did in the country as a
whole. In both 1976 and 1980 Carter did worse in California than he did in the
country as a whole. Nevertheless, Democrats know one thing about Dukakis: he
was a disaster. He got wiped out in the South, despite the presence of Texas
Senator Lloyd Bentsen on the ticket.
The southern strategy is the anti-Dukakis strategy. It targets Reagan
Democrats, the white, blue-collar constituency that is Democratic by heritage
but has abandoned the Democratic Party in presidential elections since the
civil-rights movement of the 1960s. Reagan Democrats tend to be liberal on
economic issues (pro-labor, pro-"fairness") and conservative on social issues
(race, religion, and foreign policy). In other words, they are populists.
The southern strategy means going after the states where Dukakis was weakest in
1988--and where the Democrats have been weakest for twenty-five years. The
alternative is to build strength in the states where Dukakis did relatively
well, like California. That requires a suburban strategy, which would target
the so-called "new collar" Baby Boom voters. (Southern suburban voters, in
contrast, are usually very conservative socially and economically, and
therefore much harder for the Democrats to capture.) They are relatively
affluent and well educated. They tend to be fiscally conservative and socially
liberal, the antithesis of populism. They are independent by heritage and
anti-establishment by inclination. They don't like racial politics. They are
pro-choice on abortion. And they feel betrayed by George Bush on the economy.
Ross Perot's prospective candidacy as an independent helps make the case for
the suburban strategy. The polls show Perot running strongest in the West.
Perot could take enough votes from Bush to tilt this historically Republican
region to the Democrats--but only if Clinton makes a credible showing in a
region where he, too, is weak.
To win back the middle class, Democrats will have to regain credibility on the
issue of economic growth. They will have to persuade the voters that Democrats
can manage the economy better than Republicans. The recession gives the
Democrats an opportunity--but only an opportunity--to do that.
Bill Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, pitches his message directly
at what he calls "the forgotten middle class." He calls on Democrats to abandon
the "tax and spend" policies of the past. He criticizes congressional Democrats
for contributing to the mismanagement of the economy during the 1980s. He talks
about restoring a sense of personal responsibility. That's a subtle way of
trying to change the Democratic Party's image. More personal responsibility
means less government responsibility. It's a way of saying, "We're not going to
have a program for every problem. People are basically responsible for
themselves. That's the middle-class way."
If New York Governor Mario M. Cuomo had run for President, Bill Clinton would
have been Gary Hart, the candidate of new ideas. Instead, after Paul Tsongas
won the New Hampshire primary, Clinton was thrust into the role of Walter
Mondale, the fairness candidate.
Clinton is not an Old Politics Democrat, however. The candidate who came
closest to that message in 1992 was Tom Harkin. Harkin's departure from the
race in early March marked a turning point. He was the last New Dealer. None of
the other Democrats defended the party's traditional message of taxing,
spending, and big government, and its championing of big labor.
In fact, the three Democrats who have done best this year, Clinton, Tsongas,
and Jerry Brown, share a skeptical, pragmatic view of government. Clinton,
after all, chaired the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization whose
objective has been to move the Democratic Party away from interest-group
liberalism (and from Jesse Jackson, who has referred to the DLC as "Democrats
for the Leisure Class"). Clinton's message, like that of Tsongas, is aimed
squarely at the suburban middle class.
Clinton won the primaries by combining the South with the Democrats' shrinking
urban base. That is not a formula for victory in November, however. The South
is no longer solidly Democratic. And the urban base doesn't have enough votes
anymore. The Democrats have to break into the suburbs by proving that they
understand something they have never made an effort to understand in the
past--namely, the values and priorities of suburban America.
Clinton may be able to do that. But he also has to do something else: overcome
unusually strong personal negatives. In some ways Clinton is in the same
situation that Ronald Reagan was in 1980. As unpopular as Carter was that year,
the voters were afraid of Reagan. They saw him as a right-wing extremist who
might start a war or throw old people out in the snow. The election remained a
dead heat until the last few days of the campaign, when Reagan took advantage
of the final debate to recast the election as a referendum on Carter's record
("Ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?"). Reagan also
reassured the voters that he was not a monster and would not do the foolish
things he often said he wanted to do. Things were so bad under Carter that the
voters finally decided they had to have change. The country couldn't keep going
the way it was going. So they took a chance and elected Reagan.
Bill Clinton has a harder task. He must reassure voters of his basic integrity.
He may be able to do it, because he is a skillful and accomplished politician.
That is his strength. It is also his weakness, because 1992 is a year when the
voters do not seem to be looking for a skillful and accomplished politician--as
the rise of Perot, the populist billionaire anti-politician, indicates.
Clinton is a master at having everything both ways. As he tries to straddle the
South and the suburbs, the shrinking Democratic base and the swing voters of
the middle class, that quality of his political persona and his personal
character will be put to the test. In fact, he will face two tests. One test is
whether he can do it. The other is whether the voters want someone who can do
it.
Copyright © 1992 by William Schneider. All rights
reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; July 1992; The Suburban Century Begins; Volume 270, No.
1; pages 33-44.
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