Many Democrats Who Sided With GOP Are Coming Home

During the 1970s and 1980s, gritty blue-collar towns like this one were at the epicenter of the political earthquake that tore apart the Democratic majority in national politics and allowed Republicans to dominate the White House for a generation.

But today, voters here such as Les Withrow, a freight broker who defected to back Ronald Reagan a decade ago, are comfortably sliding back into the party of their parents to support President Clinton. Withrow was impressed when Clinton stared down the GOP Congress over its balanced-budget plan. And when he looks around his neighborhood, he can find little to complain about.

Clinton “has proven himself,” Withrow said as he paused outside a K mart. “The economy is going good. Things are looking up.”

Clinton’s success at bringing home Withrow and voters like him in unadorned working towns around Detroit and elsewhere in the nation is a rarely discussed key to his formidable lead in the polls over Republican nominee Bob Dole.

Once, small cities like Taylor in western Wayne County--and their counterparts just to the east in Macomb County--were breeding grounds for the celebrated “Reagan Democrats.” These culturally conservative, working-class Democrats bolted their party over such issues as taxes, crime, foreign policy and welfare, and provided critical votes for GOP presidential nominees Richard Nixon, Reagan and George Bush, in his first presidential run in 1988.

But dozens of interviews this last weekend suggest that voters in Taylor are poised to back Clinton and deny Dole the crossover blue-collar vote that lifted those earlier GOP contenders.

Although Dole has some support--and many voters haven’t firmly made up their minds--the conversations made clear that he faces a steeplechase of hurdles in reaching beyond the most reliably Republican supporters here. Good feelings about the economy, uneasiness about Dole’s age, doubts about his proposed tax cut as well as his critique of Clinton’s record on drugs and historic class suspicions of the GOP all block the former senator’s way.

“Clinton could be firmer in many ways,” said Regina Horn, who supports herself with disability checks. “But he considers the bottom-up a little bit more. Dole is a little bit harder.”

Dole’s inability to establish a beachhead in Taylor is symptomatic. While GOP presidential nominees won the votes of anywhere from one-fifth to one-fourth of Democrats nationwide during the 1970s and 1980s, Clinton this year is holding Democratic voters more successfully than any of the party’s nominees in a generation, according to various polls. Among Catholics--a key source of earlier working-class defection to the GOP in neighborhoods like this--Clinton holds poll leads of greater than 20 percentage points, both nationally and in the key Midwestern states.

In the most recent national Los Angeles Times survey, Dole was attracting support from 7% of Democrats, while Clinton held support from 89% of his party.

In Ohio, a recent poll showed Dole luring 7% of Democrats. In Michigan, Dole draws just 5% of Democrats, says a recent survey by the Democratic polling firm EPIC/MRA. Even among the one-fifth of Michigan Democrats who call themselves conservative, Dole claims just 9%, the survey found.

These numbers are significantly smaller than the support for Clinton among Republicans: 13% in Michigan, 12% in Ohio, 14% in New Jersey and 10% to 15% in national surveys. But, more important, the figures represent the lowest level of party defection for any Democratic presidential nominee since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

“The defection is extraordinarily low,” said David Lawrence, a Fordham University political scientist and author of “The Collapse of the Democratic Presidential Majority.” “It is remarkable to what extent the Republicans have opened up the middle ground for [Clinton], and how successfully he has filled it.”

Pollsters note that one reason for the paltry Democratic defection is that many conservative voters have already left the party and now call themselves independents or Republicans. That dynamic was apparent about 20 minutes up Interstate 275 from Taylor in Westland, a more comfortably middle-income suburb where Clinton managed only a narrow victory in 1992 and Dole evidences much more strength despite the president’s visit there last week.

Doug Kruse, a full-time National Guard employee from Westland, backs Dole because he fears “if Clinton is reelected, he’ll go right back to the liberal he really is.”

Standing in line for concert tickets on Saturday morning, Daryl Traver from nearby Redford says he’ll vote for Dole because he opposes legalized abortion. Pat Meyer, a registered nurse, now considers herself a staunch Republican and Clinton “a draft-dodging, lying womanizer.”

But no one who usually votes Democratic in either city said he or she intended to abandon Clinton. And among voters who work with their hands, the president held a clear edge, especially in Taylor, an overwhelmingly white city of 71,000 that Clinton carried with about 49% of the vote four years ago.

To a large extent, Clinton’s success is explained by dogs that no longer bark. Issues of strength abroad and race at home were among the most powerful solvents that separated white working-class Democrats from their party when the GOP dominated the White House.

But with the Cold War now merely a memory, hardly anyone brought up foreign policy in conversations here. And with Clinton supporting both the death penalty and welfare reform, those racially tinged issues have receded.

To reopen an ideological contrast with Clinton, Dole is relying on two principal arguments. But neither has yet taken hold here.

In Westland, Dole’s cornerstone proposal to cut income tax rates by 15% turns some heads. But in Taylor, it faces a virtually seamless wall of skepticism.

Although many would welcome a tax cut, hardly anyone interviewed here says he or she believes that Dole would actually deliver one if elected. With metronomic reliability, voters expressed their conviction that Dole would either raise other taxes, make unacceptable cuts in social programs to pay for his reductions or simply abandon his promise if elected.

“I’d like anything to bring home more money,” said Phyliss Thiede, a teachers’ assistant in the local schools who backed Reagan during the 1980s but now plans to support Clinton. “But they all say that and it never comes true.”

Nor do many voters in Taylor yet put much stock in Dole’s argument--now being relentlessly imprinted through television ads--that Clinton is to blame for a doubling in teenage drug use during his tenure.

Lori Verran, a factory worker, chides Clinton for “not keeping up” the “just say no” campaign of the Reagan years and plans to vote for Dole. Yet even she isn’t sure how much blame he should shoulder for such a diffuse social phenomenon as rising drug use.

Overall, as the election nears, Dole remains a remarkably indistinct figure here. From one angle, that may be grounds for GOP optimism: A significant minority of those interviewed said they were undecided and open to hearing more about Dole’s tax plan.

Yet Dole’s failure to fill in the blanks has allowed less flattering images to frame his campaign. One is his age, which troubles many here. Another is the association of the GOP with the rich that Reagan and even Bush in 1988 successfully dampened by presenting themselves as cultural populists.

Class barriers loom between Dole and Glen Ainscough, a General Motors factory worker from Taylor. Four years ago, Ainscough registered his discontent by voting for Ross Perot; but today, like virtually everyone interviewed here, he no longer considers Perot a viable option.

Ainscough doesn’t trust Clinton’s word--”there’s always that doubt in your mind that when all is said and done, he’ll veto the things he says he’s for now.” Nor does Dole’s age worry him.

Yet as of today, he says he’s likely to vote for Clinton. Dole’s allegiance, Ainscough complains, seems more toward “the big business end of it.”

Clinton is also being boosted by high hopes about the economy that are marred only by flashes of frustration about wages. Like many others here, Veronica Harrell says the economy is much stronger than four years ago.

Even Clinton’s failure to deliver the middle-class tax cut he promised in 1992 now strangely redounds to his benefit by increasing the skepticism that Dole would actually redeem his promise to slash income tax rates. “Sure Dole will cut taxes,” sneered Joe Fortson, a young restaurant worker. “They said that about Clinton, and Clinton didn’t cut my taxes at all.”

In the weeks remaining to him, Dole may break down some of this resistance with a stronger sales effort. But he must first find a way to command a second look from voters watching the presidential campaign only from the corner of their eye--and now see little reason to fire the man in the job already.