Democrats’ Successes Tempered by Soft Gains With Middle Class

Even as Democrats celebrate their surprisingly strong showing in this month’s midterm elections, one glum and largely overlooked reality has emerged from the returns to cast a shadow over the party’s future.

Although winning back the middle class for his party has been one of President Clinton’s political priorities, exit polling on election day by Voter News Service indicates that Democrats have made little headway with this vital component of the electorate.

The polling found that on Nov. 3, Democratic House candidates combined to capture only 41% of white voters with annual household incomes in the $30,000-to-$75,000 range, according to an analysis of the data by Ruy Teixeira of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. The party’s showing this year represented only a slim improvement over the 40% that Democratic House candidates received in 1994 when Republicans took control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

So critical is this bloc of voters that the poll findings have prompted some Democrats to hash over what direction their party should take.

Liberals, blaming the loss of their dominance in Congress on the defection of these middle-class voters, call for a heavy dose of economic populism to win them back.

On the other hand, centrists argue that the Democrats should focus on the upper-income middle class, among whom the party scored surprisingly well in the recent vote. That means, these centrists contend, offering a broader and blander agenda of issues than liberals advocate.

The middle class has been a target for Clinton and his so-called New Democrat ideology since he took command of the party in 1992. Presenting himself as a champion of the middle class, Clinton accepted the Democratic presidential nomination that year “in the name of all those who do the work, pay the taxes, raise the kids and play by the rules . . . the hard-working Americans who make up our forgotten middle class.”

“Clinton is certainly more of a New Democrat than most Democrats in Congress,” said Sam Popkin, a political scientist at UC San Diego and a 1992 Clinton campaign aide.

Citing Clinton’s embrace of such proposals as school uniforms and the V-chip to protect children against offensive television, Popkin said that, although some write off these initiatives as trivial, they “have real resonance to people who don’t want a lot of help from government but just want to fix things a little.”

It is by appealing to such voters that Democrats can best position themselves for the future, in the view of the party’s centrists.

“The electorate is getting increasingly more affluent, more educated and more diverse,” said Al From, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist organization that served Clinton as an ideological base in his climb to the presidency. “To win, you have to go hunting where the ducks are.”

Reaching this segment of the electorate, in From’s view, requires a departure from the past Democratic emphasis on egalitarianism and activism. “You need to be credible on the fundamentals: economic growth, fiscal discipline, crime and welfare,” he said. “Those are important issues for middle-class voters. And if you are credible on those issues, they’ll listen to you on education and environment and health care,” the issues liberals tend to put first.

From and his allies take heart from the exit poll evidence that Democrats did better in November in reaching just the voters they are after: households with annual incomes exceeding $75,000. According to the polling, Democratic House candidates this year were backed by 47% of voters with incomes between $75,000 and $100,000 after receiving only 38% of this vote in 1994.

But liberals insist that if Democrats are to regain their majority on Capitol Hill, they must take the road that leads to the hearts and pocketbooks of the lower-income echelons of the middle class.

“Democrats have to be the party of working people and be clearly fighting for these people with populist economics,” said Robert Borosage, founder of the Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal policy group.

Borosage dismisses Clinton’s New Democrat approach as one that has minimal appeal to many middle-class voters, calling it “the politics of gesture.” Instead, he contends that Democrats should back an increase in the minimum wage, sweeping health care reform and a tougher trade policy that would oblige U.S. trading partners to adhere to higher standards for the environment and treatment of workers.

Liberals argue that the political tides are now running in favor of such an approach. The “wedge issues,” such as crime and welfare, which Republicans employed to divide and conquer the Democrats in the Reagan-Bush era, have lost their punch, Teixeira says.

He contends that the new wedge issues benefit the Democrats, citing poll results showing that voters have more confidence in Democrats than in Republicans to deal with such high-priority concerns as health care, education and Social Security.

To some analysts, the most striking aspect of this year’s election is the equilibrium that it demonstrated between the two parties, with each by and large holding its own.

“My view of the 1998 election is that was a maintaining election,” preserving the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats, said Walter Dean Burnham, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin.

Even the slight 51% to 49% advantage in the overall vote for House candidates that, based on the exit voting, voters gave Republicans is probably somewhat misleading, said GOP pollster Bill McInturff. The bigger GOP total seems due in part to the fact that Republicans had 55 candidates running unopposed, compared with 39 for the Democrats.