Democrats Out of Touch With America

George Bush and the Republicans won riding the coattails of middle-class aspirations. Until the Democrats learn to appeal to such hopes and dreams, they are likely to remain very much behind in the political wars.

This demographic and economic reality trumped all the forces that, logically speaking, should have made for a John Kerry and Democratic victory, even a landslide. Yet in the face of a clearly bungled war and an uneven recovery, the Democrats suffered what has to be considered a humiliating setback.

Much of the story can be seen in three sets of statistics -- demographic, economic and finally political. Wherever there has been strong economic and demographic growth, generally speaking, the Republican tide flowed. Where job and population increases have been weak, the Democrats scored big.

Take, for example, the Phoenix area. Among the fastest-growing economies in the country, the region now vies with greater Atlanta as the leader in new housing permits. It also turned out a huge margin for both Bush and Sen. John McCain.

The growth of Phoenix -- as well as Republican hotbeds such as central Florida, greater Atlanta, metropolitan Houston, Dallas and San Antonio -- stems from several major factors. Most important has been reasonable housing costs, an influx of young families and a business climate that is bringing jobs, including coveted business service and technology-related industries, to these regions. Many of these areas have benefited smartly from the president's military buildup, and have strong personal ties to our soldiers abroad.

For these same economic and political reasons, the president did surprisingly well -- perhaps with somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of the vote -- among Hispanics, the very group Democrats had been counting on to snatch their chestnuts out of the fire in Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. Hispanics are moving to suburbs in regions like Phoenix and Houston, seeking their piece of the "American dream" just like everyone else.

Forty-three percent of Hispanics in Maricopa County, according to exit polls, voted for the president. Democratic attitudes on gay marriage and other social issues probably didn't help either with a group that notably tilts conservative on social issues. "If this holds up," one Democratic analyst said, "this could be the most significant shift in the country's politics."

Tactically, the key to victory lay most of all with geography, based on Republican strength in the periphery and rural areas. In Ohio, as demographer William Frey has noted, the Republicans have gained most in the expanding exurbs of Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland. The new voters in the fast-growth land of McMansions, Target stores and office parks outweighed the energized legions of young hipsters, labor unionists and African-Americans who rallied to Kerry's cause.

The thin, red/blue line

Even in California, which went for Kerry but not as overwhelmingly as might have been expected, the political fault-lines followed these same patterns. Kerry piled up huge majorities in the San Francisco Bay area, which has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and has experienced strong net out-migration since 2000. Bush won handily in Riverside-San Bernardino and the Central Valley, winning upward of three-fifths the vote in the emergent "Third California" that is experiencing the bulk of the Golden State's population and job growth.

These inland areas are where Arnold Schwarzenegger won his election during the recall and where, by 2008, a Republican like a John McCain or Rudy Giuliani could sweep the nation's most populous state back to the GOP. If that happens, the Democratic Party as we know it will be all but moribund.

The economic and demographic fault lines in California and elsewhere do not favor the Democrats in their current configuration. Nowhere is this clearer than in Kerry's hometown of Boston, which has been losing jobs and population since 2000. Nearly 40,000 have dropped out of the greater Boston region's workforce since 2002 alone.

Like Boston, many Democratic strongholds -- Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Chicago -- all lost population since 2000. Some of these cities had much ballyhooed revivals during the late 1990s with often highly celebrated, but statistically tiny, increases in downtown lofts, arts venues and other measurements of urban "hipness." But viewed from a regional perspective, these regions continued to lose both jobs and middle-class families to the periphery.

In contrast, the sprawling metro areas -- from Atlanta to Phoenix and California's Inland Empire -- have continued to gain both population and jobs. The Southeast, for example, now stands as the home to more large corporate headquarters than any region, confirming a shift in economic fortunes from the urban boutiques of the Northeast and the Pacific Coast.

The Democrats increasingly have identified themselves ever more with stagnant or shrinking urban centers. The most overwhelmingly Democratic cities, like Seattle, Boston or San Francisco, are also the cities with the lowest percentages of children. This allows them to take their signals on social issues such as gay marriage from the reigning hip-ocracy, often alienating voters with children.

In contrast, many GOP strongholds, particularly outer-ring suburbs and exurbs like San Bernardino Riverside, have been becoming favored grounds for raising families. These voters represent roughly two out of five voters, and far outweigh the population of gays or young singles. Concentrated in the suburbs, these voters went more for Bush this year than in 2000.

Overall, Democrats increasingly seem clueless in finding ways to appeal to people with children or those seeking a new life in an affordable place. Instead they often ask suburbanites to subsidize trendy downtown development and attack their way of life as anti-environmental "sprawl." Suburbanites on the periphery are accorded little honor among Democrats; not surprisingly, they were not well-rewarded for their attitudes.

Who you callin' rich?

Nor, finally, did the Democratic economic message resonate as well with people in the suburban hinterland. The attack on the "rich" -- odd enough from a man married to a billionairess who pays a smaller share of her income in taxes than the average housepainter -- were rightly interpreted by many small-business people as an attack on either their current income, or on where they hoped to be in a few years.

The Kerry economic plan was more convincing to other constituencies such as public employees, subsidized artists, downtown property speculators, public bond traders and university researchers, all of whom might well have benefited from more public spending on higher education, subsidies for cultural institutions and other favored amenities. Not surprisingly, educated people, particularly academics and others with post-graduate degrees, emerged as both Kerry's largest source of funding and his strongest political base.

Given these realities, is there any hope -- or even a need -- for a Democratic Party? The answer is assuredly yes, but only with massive changes. Many Bush policies are wrong-headed and fail to address basic needs, in the form of a rational energy policy, job training for the underskilled and health care for the uninsured. At very least, the nation deserves some progressive alternative to the baldly pro-corporate policies of the Republican Party.

This can occur only in a Democratic Party that espouses middle-class values, not elite values, that celebrates upward mobility, not celebrity. It must be a party that can communicate with middle-class people where they live and work.

Makin' too much Whoopi

More than anything this will require a redefinition of the party's core constituency and its priorities. Today, the Democrats' true center lies with the most privileged portions of society -- Hollywood, the Wall Street municipal bond traders, the professoriate, the major media moguls. The issues that these people care most about are those that reflect their personal interests, such as keeping their neighborhoods and recreational playgrounds pristine, helping gay friends get married, sending more public funds to elite educational institutions or financing medical research for diseases and the aging process that money alone can not ward off.

These causes, however valid, do not constitute a winning political platform. Even worse, the overwhelming elite influence has also proved pernicious, since many among them also possess an instinctive dislike for American military power, and favor a more European approach to defending America's national interests.

Si desole, Monsieur Kerry

No matter what happened in the campaign, Kerry simply could not shed the conceit that he was also running for president of the European Community. In contrast, it's hard to believe Harry Truman would have spoken of a "global test" or asked Charles de Gaulle for permission to drop the atomic bomb. John Kennedy may have consulted Europe in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but decisions were made in the White House.

Europe was rarely seen as a role model for much of anything in traditional progressives; it certainly did not inspire the New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt or the New Deal of his cousin Franklin. These progressives drew their inspiration from American values and capacities. They wanted America to lead by example, not mimic European models.

In contrast, New Urbanists point to Europe, and places like Toronto, as role models for how we should refashion our cities through enforced crowding and eliminating single-family houses. Talk to today's left-wing activists, and they will speak longingly of European social policies on labor laws, the environment, genetically modified foods, taxation or health care.

"Upper-middle-class Democrats need to get over the idea that progress means getting more like Europe," notes Fred Siegel, senior fellow at Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic think tank.

These constricting elitist notions within the contemporary Democratic Party undermine a party whose historical base lies with the middle and working class, and which has long reflected a faith in the ideal of American exceptionalism. They leave the Democrats hopelessly vulnerable to assaults even by bumbling yet somehow more familiar conservatives, like Bush, who at least can relate to the aspirations of ordinary Americans.