WASHINGTON — Analysts have offered many reasons why President
Bush worked so hard for liberal Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) in his
primary race against conservative challenger Rep. Pat Toomey
(R-Pa.). At the heart of this tack by the White House is a struggle
to maintain the GOP as the party of white-bread suburbia.
The Republican establishment is resisting the realignment in
American politics that soon will have the parties divided primarily
along the lines of cultural issues. The Bush team is not ready to
trade in their pro-choice, upper-middle class, fiscally
conservative Specter voters in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and
Westchester County, New York, for the church-going union members in
York County, Pa.,. and Corning, New York. In this, the Bushes are
fighting the future.
As of April, Pennsylvania had 445,000 more Democrats than
Republicans. Bush will need to win many of those Democrats in order
to take the Keystone State and its 21 Electoral College votes. This
is where the Bush campaign comes to a fork in the road.
AFTER THE 2002 Pennsylvania Democratic Gubernatorial primary
between former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell and state Auditor Bob
Casey, Jr., a color-coded county-by-county breakdown of the vote
looked even more polarized than the famous Red-and-Blue U.S. map of
the 2000 presidential race.
Rendell won only Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, State College, and
the Philly suburbs. Casey, whose father as Governor tried to
overturn Roe v. Wade in the 1992 case Planned
Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, won every
other part of the state. Rendell won 702,000 votes to Casey’s
539,000.
The dramatic geographic separation of Casey’s voters and
Rendell’s voters suggests that these are two very different kinds
of Democrats. Casey didn’t win the rural counties by promising farm
subsidies. He won the rural counties because his name is almost an
icon for the pro-life, hard-working Catholics and Protestant
Democrats who live in those counties.
The question is: Should Bush pursue Casey’s Democrats or
Rendell’s in order to get to 50 percent in November?
BUSH WILL NOT WIN OVER many of the Democrats in Philadelphia
proper, which is 43 percent black and 8 percent Hispanic. After
Philadelphia and urban Pittsburgh, Rendell Democrats mostly live
the “collar counties” which surround Philly. In Montgomery, Bucks,
and Delaware Counties, Rendell won by 125,000 votes, garnering 86
percent compared to his statewide 56 percent.
Bush lost these three counties in 2000. He hopes he can win or
tie there in 2004 with Specter on the ballot with him. Specter,
after all, got twice his margin of victory in these counties.
Specifically, Bush hopes to win over the Rendell voters who had
been Republicans but switched their registration in 2002 to vote
against Casey.
These suburban voters did this, in large part, because after two
terms of pro-choice Gov. Tom Ridge (R), they were not about to have
to choose between a pro-life Democrat and a pro-life Republican in
November. These voters insured there was a socially liberal
candidate on the ballot (Rendell), and then backed him in the
general election.
Despite their support for legalized abortion and acceptance of
homosexuality, Montgomery County voters have a strong Republican
streak. If a voter (a) graduated from college, (b) earns over
$50,000 a year, or (c) is white, he is more likely to vote
Republican than Democrat. All three of those describe much of the
collar counties.
These country-club Republicans are motivated by tax cuts and
welfare reform, and turned off by affirmative action and class
warfare, but they are not cultural conservatives. Bush used the
Specter-Toomey primary on April 27 as the trial run for his
get-out-the-vote machine in Pennsylvania, mostly in the collar
counties. If he hopes to win Specter/Rendell voters, Bush will need
to stay quiet on abortion and gay marriage.
THE CASEY DEMOCRATS, meanwhile, may be union members and may not be
the targets of John Kerry’s planned tax hikes, but they believe in
God, go to church weekly, and don’t really entertain a liberal
social agenda. However, they do come from Democratic families, and
so would need a dramatic reason to vote GOP.
The White House could give them this reason by running a
pro-life campaign, but the vigorous rejection of Toomey was a tacit
rejection of that sort of campaign. The bottom line is that the
Bush campaign would rather try to hold on to the white-bread social
liberals than try to win-over the blue-collar social
conservatives.
There will be a time, perhaps in eight or 12 years, when the GOP
will no longer be able to run from its identity as the socially
conservative party. The establishment of both parties will soon
have no choice but admit that the parties are defined, at their
heart, by their supporters’ attitudes towards abortion,
homosexuality, and marriage.
For now, however, the Bush team wants to slow this movement. The
lefties are already firmly against them. The Mountain states and
the South are clearly with them. It’s the blue-collar social
conservatives and the white-bread social liberals who are the
outliers — the exception to the rule.
After Election Day, check the results in Philadelphia’s suburbs
— let’s see if Bush has managed to keep the battle lines blurred
in the culture war.
