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The Main Challenge for Bush Will Be Expanding Support Base of the GOP

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Among the reasons Time magazine gave for naming George W. Bush its “Person of the Year” for 2000 was that the president-elect “remade and united the Republican Party.” The magazine got it half right. Bush is president because he reunited much of the GOP coalition. But the other piece of praise was premature; indeed, remaking the Republican Party to broaden its base of support is the preeminent political challenge Bush faces after squeezing into office with the narrowest electoral college majority in 124 years.

From his highly diverse first round of Cabinet appointments, it’s clear Bush wants to remake the GOP. But it’s equally clear that he didn’t make much progress in last month’s election.

Bush won his slim victory far more by consolidating than expanding the Republican base. He recaptured a series of conservative-leaning states (primarily in the South and West) and voter groups (such as white males) that had drifted toward Bill Clinton in 1996. But Bush mostly failed to attract the principal target for his “compassionate conservative” message: moderate swing voters in the big suburbs outside the South. That failure leaves Bush with a formidable political puzzle: How to reach out to the centrist voters who resisted him without alienating the culturally conservative voters to whom he owes his new job.

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The electoral map tells a clear story. Bush gained ground on two principal fronts. First, he reestablished the Republican dominance of the South; Bush won every state of the old Confederacy, plus Oklahoma and Kentucky. Second, Bush restored a commanding Republican advantage in rural America. With Ross Perot twice siphoning off some socially conservative rural voters, Clinton ran about even in small-town America during his two races. But this time, Bush ran up huge margins in just about every county with a cow.

Bush recaptured 11 states that voted for Clinton in 1996. About half of them were Southern and border states with substantial rural populations (Louisiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee and Florida, a special case); in almost all of the rest (Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Missouri and West Virginia), rural votes were key to Bush’s advance. Bush’s only breakthrough in a Northern state with a large stake in the new economy was New Hampshire, which he carried by fewer than 8,000 votes.

Overall, Bush lost 71% of the electoral votes at stake outside of the South. And he fell short in almost all of the coastal and Midwestern suburbs where he had hoped to convince voters that he was “a different kind of Republican.”

In the quarter of a century after 1968, when Republicans held the White House for 20 of 24 years, these suburbs were the backbone of the GOP’s electoral majority. From 1968 through 1988, the Republican presidential candidate won six straight times in populous suburban counties such as Oakland and Macomb outside of Detroit; Franklin outside of Columbus, Ohio; Bergen in New Jersey; and Bucks, Del., and Montgomery outside of Philadelphia. But Clinton carried all of those in 1996, and Al Gore held them all this time.

In the big Midwestern suburban counties, Bush at least generally ran better than Bob Dole did in 1996. But in the suburban counties along the coasts, Bush lost ground in many. Gore’s winning margin, for instance, was larger than Clinton’s in 1996 in each of the three big suburban counties outside of Philadelphia. Gore also ran ahead of Clinton in the Silicon Valley.

Exit polls fill in the picture of a Bush campaign that succeeded more through mobilization than expansion. Bush showed his biggest gains among white men and rural voters, traditionally conservative groups that had strayed in the 1990s. His showing was more ambiguous among the swing voters near the top of his target list: white women, married women and independent voters. The exit polls showed Bush dividing all three groups about evenly with Gore. But Bush’s strength in the South hid weakness elsewhere. Outside of the South, Gore carried white women by 11 percentage points, married women by 8 points and independents by 3 points, according to a Los Angeles Times exit poll.

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GOP strategists acknowledge that it will be difficult for Bush to construct a stable majority of support--or for the GOP to rebuild a governing majority in Congress--without regaining more of those swing voters, especially in the Northeastern and Midwestern suburbs. “Ultimately, if you are going to get into control and build a plurality or majority coalition, you’ve got to be able to carry those counties,” veteran GOP pollster Robert M. Teeter says.

Yet it’s not clear how much leeway Bush has to pursue those voters. Good times in the economy and progress on education reform probably represent the next president’s best hopes of gaining ground in the cul-de-sacs of the Midwest and the coasts. But Bush, to a large extent, is a prisoner of his success. Given his reliance on culturally conservative rural voters, it’s unlikely he can make the dramatic moves to the center on guns and abortion rights that might significantly broaden his reach in the suburbs outside the South.

The best news for Bush may be that Democrats face the same problem in reverse. They are now so reliant on socially cosmopolitan voters--big-city residents and white women in the suburbs--that they probably can’t do much to assuage the doubts that rural voters hold about them concerning cultural issues.

In short, the two parties have battled to a parity so delicately balanced that neither can now make big advances without threatening ground it already holds.

If anything, however, Bush faces the greater challenge. At a time when voters are rewarding moderation, he arrives heavily dependent on the country’s most conservative region (the South)--and with the sobering knowledge that, in each of the last three elections, the Democratic nominee has carried at least 21 states worth 267 electoral votes, just three short of a majority. And despite concerted efforts by Bush in this year’s campaign, California, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania all remained well out of his reach. “Bush didn’t make progress in the areas of the country where he wanted to make progress the most,” says Ruy Teixeira, a liberal political analyst.

As governor of Texas, Bush effectively courted Democratic-leaning voters who initially were skeptical of him. He now has a little less than four years to prove he can do it again, on a much more demanding stage.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.

See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.

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