|
 |
|
Esta página no está disponible en español. The Washington PostGOP Pins Its Future On Wooing Minorities
December 23, 2002 The stinging rebuke that conservative pundits and Republican leaders rained down on Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) this month contrasted sharply with the more muted GOP responses to earlier racially tinged episodes, such as the 1988 presidential ad featuring Willie Horton and Sen. Jesse Helms's 1990 "white hands" commercial. Republican leaders, including President Bush, say their party has become more inclusive in recent years, making sincere efforts to attract minority voters and candidates. Several political analysts, however, suggest an additional reason. Starting with Sen. Barry Goldwater's anti-civil rights campaign of 1964 and continuing with Richard M. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" of 1968 and the 1980s' appeal to white working-class "Reagan Democrats," they say, Republican strategies have proven extremely effective in attracting millions of white voters into the party fold. So efficient, in fact, that the party has extracted every possible benefit and now must steer a more racially sensitive course to avoid alienating the growing numbers of minority voters and moderate white women who will be crucial in future elections. "We have just about maxed out with white men," a key Republican strategist said. "When you look into the future, all you see is smaller numbers and more and more Hispanics. Look at Texas. Unless we do something, in a decade or so it's going to go the way of California," a former Republican stronghold that now tilts decisively Democratic. "We have to adapt to survive." The denunciation of Lott by conservative intellectuals, commentators and elected officials struck a harsh tone that rarely, if ever, was heard from comparable sources in previous decades. Ronald Reagan was not condemned in that manner for his 1980 endorsement of "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Miss., best known for the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers by local members of the Ku Klux Klan. Nor was George H.W. Bush as sharply criticized for his 1988 ad featuring Horton, a black rapist and murderer who assaulted a white woman while on temporary release from a prison in Massachusetts, home to Bush's Democratic opponent, then-Gov. Michael S. Dukakis. Partly because of those campaigns, the white South is now a Republican bastion, and the party's candidates thrive in white working-class suburbs ringing heavily black cities such as Detroit and Chicago. This realignment has helped produce six Republican victories in the past nine presidential contests and Republican control of the Senate and House. Now, the Republican Party is seeking ways to keep these gains while also winning new support among constituencies with different agendas, especially Hispanics and working women. The strategic shift was forced by George W. Bush's 500,000-vote loss to Al Gore in the 2000 nationwide tally (although Bush won in the all-important electoral college), revealing the frailty of the Republican coalition. GOP operatives know that marginal voting shifts by any key group -- blacks, working women, Hispanics, suburbanites -- can spell victory or defeat in 2004 and beyond. They also know that the overwhelmingly white and heavily male coalition that produced victories for Nixon in 1968 and 1972, Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and the elder Bush in 1988 is a declining constituency. Having cracked open the once solidly Democratic South, Republicans now must chip away at newer Democratic constituencies, including Hispanics, working women and immigrants. To do this, and to make even modest inroads among African American voters, they must reduce black hostility to Republicans while keeping conservative whites motivated, top analysts said. "To be a majority party over the next generation, you have to be very responsive to what is happening demographically," Republican pollster Bill McInturff said. "To build a broad coalition that captures a majority of the sentiments of the voters of this country means a focus on the problems of the new immigrants and the Latinos." In 1990, media consultant Alex Castellanos produced the Helms reelection commercial showing a white man's hands ripping up a job rejection slip as the narrator said, "You needed that job . . . but they had to give it to a minority." Castellanos now says a different approach is needed. "The Californias of the future are majority-minority states," he said, meaning whites will constitute less than half the population. "The feminist revolution of the 1960s has succeeded, and economic power is now in working women's hands as never before. . . . It's a much more diverse country that is no longer run by a bunch of stiff old white guys in suits." The political world was different in 1980, when former California governor Reagan opened his general election campaign on Aug. 3 in Philadelphia, Miss. "I believe in states' rights," he said, borrowing a favorite phrase from Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential campaign and subsequent efforts to stop or slow integration. Eight years later, Lee Atwater, manager of George H.W. Bush's presidential campaign, vowed to "strip the bark off" Dukakis by turning Horton into "his running mate." A key proponent of new Republican strategies is Matthew Dowd, pollster for the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign. He said Republicans "can't be a majority party without expanding our coalition. . . . If you stand still with what you had in 2000, you are going to end up further behind." Republican successes in the Nov. 5 elections reinforced the view that the party must significantly moderate, if not abandon, the four-decade strategy of using race and racially charged issues as wedges to boost white support. Surveys by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research Inc. showed that the Democratic advantage among Hispanic voters fell to 21 percentage points this year, the lowest level in at least two decades. The Democratic vs. Republican edge among Latino voters was 29 points in 2000 and 26 points in 1998. As a share of the total electorate, the traditional white Republican base is declining, Dowd said. If Bush in 2004 were to match his 2000 percentage among every racial, religious, gender and ethnic group, Dowd said, he would lose not only the popular vote but also the electoral college as well. The GOP has won over a key constituency, he said: The "under-45 white male, in small towns and rural areas. They have become Republicans." But, he warned, "I don't know how much you can grow among that part of the population." White men under 50, according to the Greenberg survey, backed Republican congressional candidates this year 61 to 33 percent. Similarly, white men of all ages without college degrees backed Republicans, 59 to 37 percent. But these white voters are declining as a percentage of the electorate. That is especially true of white voters in rural areas and small towns. In 1980, nearly 80 percent of the U.S. population was non-Hispanic white; by 2000, it was 69 percent. The number of Hispanics more than doubled, from 14.6 million (or 6.5 percent of the population) in 1980, to 35.3 million (12.6 percent) in 2000. The proportion of African Americans increased modestly, from 11.5 percent to 12.1 percent of the population. What these trends mean, one Republican strategist said, is that "the white target just keeps getting higher and higher and, without shifting other groups, it's getting out of reach." In addition to the overall decline in the white electorate as a share of the whole, the dangers of racial strategies geared toward white men are the potential liabilities among white women, especially working white women whose views in general are more liberal than those of white men. Dowd said the number of working women living in the suburbs has increased 50 percent over the past 12 years. Women who work outside their homes voted for Gore over Bush 58 to 39 percent, while women who do not work outside the home backed Bush, 52 to 44 percent. Castellanos, asked if he would use in 2004 an ad along the lines of his famous "white hands" commercial of 1990, said: "The world has changed. That was 100 years ago -- longer."
|