PERSPECTIVES ON THE DEMOCRATS : Why It’s Crucial to Woo the White Vote : In a three-man race, Clinton must win back middle-class defectors while keeping minorities in the fold.

The Democratic Party faces a stark choice: In a three-man race, should the party orient its presidential campaign to reinforce its core supporters among minority groups, family farmers and union members; or should it reach out to the disaffected white voters who have abandoned the Democratic presidential candidates in significant numbers since 1968? On the answer rests the party’s chances for the White House.

Many Democratic leaders believe that reaching out to moderate and conservative white middle-class voters is too risky: Not enough may be drawn back into the fold, while the party’s most loyal supporters will feel abandoned and will stay home in November.

In fact, it’s not a case of either/or; the party’s chances for winning the Oval Office depend on both energizing core Democrats and bringing back a share of wayward middle-class white voters.

Certainly the first rule in politics is never to run away from your base. Bill Clinton cannot hope to defeat George Bush and Ross Perot if black and Latino voters fail to enthusiastically support him. On moral grounds, too, the party must never turn its back on people of color whose cause it embraced as far back as the 1948 convention.

But it is the drastic defection in white middle-class support that has bedeviled the party’s presidential candidates in recent years. The Democratic nominee cannot win even a plurality in a three-man race without at least the average percentage of the vote that the past two nominees received in a two-person race--an impossible task if the base is not broadened. In 1984, Walter Mondale won but 40.6% of the popular vote overall and only 35% of the white vote. In 1988, Michael Dukakis won 45.6% of the total and only 40% of the white vote.

The only Democrat elected to the White House in the past two decades, Jimmy Carter, did so by retaining the votes of minority citizens while also recapturing a significant percentage of voters who supported Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968 and in 1972.

The loyal remnants of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition--city dwellers, union members, family farmers, racial and religious minorities--are simply numerically too small now to win even a three-person presidential race without a far larger number of white working- and middle-class votes than Mondale and Dukakis received. Only about a third of Americans live in central cities; almost half live in suburbs. The family farmer is a disappearing breed. In the early 1950s, one in three salaried workers belonged to a union; today about one in ten do. Black Americans are only 10% of the electorate, and in the last presidential election, only 47% of them voted. Jewish voters, another loyal core constituency of the Democratic Party, constitute only 4% of the electorate.

While moderate white voters have left the party for a variety of reasons, none was more important than the Republicans’ subtle stoking of white animosity to black political demands that arose after generations of deprivation and discrimination. This tactic goes back to 1964, when the Goldwater campaign first peeled off conservative white Southern votes. That success was skillfully broadened into an electoral majority in the Nixon, Reagan and Bush campaigns through code words-- silent majority, busing, quotas, states rights, capital punishment. Race became the great divide of American politics.

If the Democratic Party can’t win back white middle-class voters without simultaneously alienating loyal black Democrats, it cannot succeed in 1992 or in the future in winning the presidency.

The key to retaining the party’s base and expanding its appeal is the broad, racially neutral message of economic opportunity and growth embodied in the party’s 1992 platform and in Gov. Bill Clinton’s economic message. His plan calls for a fair tax system, incentives for greater private investment, and enhanced public investment in education, job training, health care and early childhood intervention that reaches across racial and income lines.

An unparalleled opportunity exists for this strong economic growth message to resonate simultaneously with whites and blacks, with the middle class and the poor, due to the record of the Bush Administration, the worst four-year record on jobs, personal income and GNP growth since the end of World War II.

Blacks and Latinos will be among the prime benefactors of a broad economic growth program, both through the generation of additional federal revenues to support social programs that go disproportionately to low-income Americans, and, most important, in the creation of a political climate in which middle-class Americans, becoming more secure in their economic status, recognize the value of helping the disadvantaged.