John Rapley - Foreign FocusAT FIRST glance, last week's election victory by the US Republicans appeared to be a minor, probably temporary, shift to the right that resulted mainly from good campaigning.
But now that a week has passed and analysts have had a chance to study exit polls and data on turn out, some deeper trends seem to be emerging. And if these turn out not to be flukes, it could be that the 2002 elections were a turning point, heralding difficult years for the Democratic Party and a possible longer-term shift towards conservatism in US politics.
The hunch expressed in my column last week, that the election hinged on turn out, was confirmed by the data. A Gallup report indicated that Republican voters showed up in larger numbers than Democratic ones, reversing a long-standing trend. That alone is worrying for the Democrats. What is even more disturbing, however, is that African-American voters turned out in smaller numbers than had been hoped. Some black leaders had warned this would happen. According to them, the party leadership's replacement of a couple of black candidates seen as too pro-Arab, and their substitution by politicians seen more amenable to conservatives, sent a bad message to black voters.
Their apparent demoralisation feeds a growing trend that has caused some headaches for the Democratic Party. Since the early 1990s, there has been a fight over its soul. Bill Clinton and his many loyalists judged that tilting the party rightwards and adopting Republican principles would help the Democrats to win the middle ground. On the one hand, the strategy won Mr. Clinton two Presidential elections and appar-ently helped the party to claw back from its devastation in the 1994 "Republican Revolution."
Yet beneath the surface, problems were brewing. At the leftist margins of the party, discontent was bubbling up: not enough to split the party, but sufficient to cause disaffected voters to stay home, or gravitate towards the newly-formed Green Party. I maintained all along that it
was that, and not a poor campaign by Al Gore, that lost the Democrats the 2000 election.
After he came to office, President George W. Bush embarked on a campaign to woo black voters a bedrock constituency for the Democrats to the Republicans. Up to a third of Democratic voters are African-Americans. However, owing to their unwavering loyalty, they have arguably been taken for granted by the party leadership. Moreover, while black voters favour the Democratic Party because of its commitment to the civil rights movement, their conservatism on most other issues would seem to make the Republicans their more obvious home.
Mr. Bush had to find a way to appeal to them without going through the traditional patronage networks of the civil rights movement. He did this by targeting the other institution central to African-American lives, the church. His faith-based initiative, whereby churches would receive federal money to deliver social programmes, may have been ideologically-driven. It was also good politics.
At the time, a friend of mine who teaches at Howard University commented that if Mr. Bush could lure just a third of black voters to the Republicans, it would spell the end of the Democratic Party. On the one hand, last week's results indicate that black voters continue to prefer the Democrats by overwhelming margins. However, their poor turn out would seem to suggest that they do not feel as strongly as they once did. If Mr. Bush is not turning African- Americans on, it appears that he is not turning them off either. This, too, was a significant finding in last week's post results.
Mr. Bush galvanises Republican voters, but does not move Democrats to vote against him in similar numbers. At present, the Democrats have no leader of whom the same can be said. The one politicians who can move Democrats to go out and vote Bill Clinton neutralises his impact by mobilising an equally-large number of Republican Clinton-haters to get off their seats.
All things told, the Democrats are in a bind. They cannot live with Bill Clinton and his 'New' Democrats, and they cannot live without them. It seems likely that until they find an inspiring new leader who can restore faith in traditional Democratic values, the USA is likely to remain a Republican-run country.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
