News Analysis: U.S. could see party realignment

News Analysis: U.S. could see party realignment
By David D. Kirkpatrick
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: October 15, 2006



WASHINGTON In May 1980, the pollster Richard Wirthlin huddled with his presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, to plot a course through what looked like a daunting landscape for their party. Just over half the country told pollsters that they were Democrats or leaned that way, compared with just 30 percent who said they were Republicans - a gap that had held steady more or less since the 1930s.

The rest is political history. By winning over millions of white working-class Democrats, Reagan ushered in 26 years of Republican dominance at the voting booth.

Now, on the eve of midterm elections, surveys show mounting impatience with both the war in Iraq and Republican rule. Some political analysts, including Wirthlin, say they see a chance for a potential Democratic comeback.

In recent Harris Interactive polls, the number of respondents who refuse to acknowledge a preference for either party has risen to about 25 percent of the electorate from about 12 percent for most of the last decade.

Much of this growth in independents, Wirthlin said, is probably accounted for by former Republican voters not quite willing to say they lean Democratic, but also unlikely to turn out this year.

"It is a red flag that Republican politicians need to watch," he said. Although Republicans have long outperformed Democrats at turning out their voters, he added, "this year they may be raking water up a hill."

Dramatic shifts in political allegiance are clear only in retrospect and hard to foresee. The White House strategist Karl Rove long predicted that President George W. Bush would cement a Republican majority that could govern Washington for decades.

On the other side, Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic pollster, and John Judis, a liberal journalist, responded with their 2002 book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority," just months before the Republicans defied history to enlarge their majorities in the midterm elections.

There are reasons to consider a Democratic resurgence a long shot. No Democratic presidential candidate has won a clear majority of the national vote since Jimmy Carter in 1976, in the aftermath of Watergate.

President Bill Clinton won with pluralities, thanks in part to the third- party candidacy of Ross Perot in both elections. And in the first midterm elections of his presidency, in 1994, Democrats decisively lost control of the House, which reflects national political trends more closely than the Senate.

Still, the current polls are reigniting the debate: Can Democrats crack apart the Reagan coalition of white blue-collar workers, evangelical Protestants, Southerners and chambers of commerce? Or will shifts in population toward the outer suburbs, the South and the West combine with the Democrats' secular, liberal Northeastern image to keep the party a minority in national elections for years to come?

At the heart of the debate is the war in Iraq, which pollsters on both sides agree is the biggest factor propelling Democratic hopes for the autumn.

To many analysts, the backlash against the war is an inevitable and transient reaction that could fade when the Republicans pick a new standard- bearer in 2008. John Mark Hansen, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, said every conflict since the Mexican-American War has hurt the president's popularity and cost his party in midterm elections. Even in 1942, less than a year after Pearl Harbor, the Democrats lost 45 seats in the House and nine in the Senate.

Democrats argue that Iraq may be singular. No other fight, however, has been so closely associated with one party or its leader. None has been justified with arguments that crumbled as quickly as the suspicions of weapons of mass destruction or a tie between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And the war's end, for now, remains far out of sight.

"Iraq has the potential to be to the Republican Party on national security what the Depression was to the Republican Party on economics," said Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The Democrats hope the war changes the reputations of the two parties in a way that may lead to remaking their constituencies, just as Roosevelt's New Deal formed a lasting bond with union members and urban immigrants.

By tarnishing the Republican image of greater competence in foreign affairs, Democrats say, the war could open new inroads for their party among white working-class voters. White voters without a college degree make up about half the electorate, according to the census. And Democrats have long contended that those voters should be the natural constituency for their party's brand of economic populism.

But the white working class has voted overwhelmingly for Republicans since Reagan. One reason for the Republican edge with those voters, many pollsters say, has been the party's reputation as the one that shares their values, especially those of traditionally religious Christians.

But another major factor has been national security. By two to one, voters in 2004 trusted Bush over his Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry, to handle terrorist threats. Now that security edge has all but disappeared.

Turning momentary popularity into a more lasting majority, of course, takes more than a midterm election. For one thing, voters typically develop a party preference based on the political atmosphere at the time they come of age and grow more attached to that party over the course of their lives.

Recent surveys and exit polls suggest that the Democrats have regained the upper hand among the young voters who entered the electorate over the last 15 years, and political scientists say dismay at the Iraq war is likely to prolong that trend. Voters around the age of 36 are the only age group in which Republicans outnumber Democrats, according to 2006 surveys by the Pew Research Center.

The true political consequence of the Iraq war also remains to be seen. American voters may hate wars, but they also favor candidates who take a muscular approach to foreign affairs, said Donald Green, a political scientist at Yale.

Others argue that the travails of the Bush administration will be less transformative than the Democrats hope.

What is more, Democrats will need solutions to capitalize on their opportunity, said Jack Pitney Jr. of Claremont McKenna College.

"Franklin Roosevelt had a clear answer, a very specific program, the New Deal," he said. "Do the Democrats have the same kind of clear answer to Iraq?"

Still, Wirthlin, puzzling at Republican troubles even in a relatively prosperous economy, pointed to Sept. 11.

"Foreign policy took on a different and darker edge with the destruction of the twin towers," Wirthlin said. "My assumption is that was a mega-event that refocused people politically from 'myself and my neighbor and getting a job' to 'how are we doing in the world?'"

And at the moment, that has meant an even greater focus on the war in Iraq, he said, turning what was once the Republicans' greatest strength into a major liability.