Democrats May Ditch NASCAR Strategy, Beg Soccer Moms for 2nd Chance

On Tuesday night, at a fund-raising dinner in Washington, all of the announced Democratic presidential contenders will take turns affirming their support for Roe vs. Wade -- the decision the Supreme Court handed down 30 years ago this week guaranteeing the legal right to abortion.

Get used to it: That may become a common sight.

Look down the road, around a couple of curves, and it’s easy to envision a 2004 presidential race in which the Democratic nominee promotes more aggressively liberal positions on abortion and, perhaps, gun control than at any point in recent memory.

That prediction flies in the face of the recent Democratic tendency to mute both issues. Most Democrats in the past two elections have put their greatest effort into reconnecting with culturally conservative voters -- such as blue-collar men and rural families -- by shooting skeet and hanging out with NASCAR drivers.

But these efforts are running into what looks like an impenetrable wall: President Bush’s enormous popularity with those same voters. And by 2004, that may force the Democrats to completely reverse course and pursue very different groups -- women, urban voters and upscale suburbanites along the two coasts and in the upper Midwest -- by stressing abortion and guns.

In 2000, a straightforward political calculus discouraged both presidential candidates from talking much about either issue.

The strategists in the Bush and Al Gore campaigns correctly concluded that the nation was so evenly divided between states with liberal and conservative majorities on the two issues that neither side could gain by stressing them.

Any votes Gore might have won in New Jersey or California by emphasizing his support for gun control and legal abortion might have cost him votes in Tennessee or West Virginia. The reverse was true for Bush. In the end, the country divided almost exactly in half, with Gore carrying almost all socially liberal “blue” states and Bush dominating in socially conservative “red” areas.

But Bush’s deepening strength in the socially conservative regions of the country may be undermining that balance. In November, in red states like Georgia, North Carolina and Colorado, Bush demonstrated he could inspire Republican voters to turn out in droves. It was a vivid signal of how difficult it could be for the Democrats to seriously challenge Bush next time in all but a handful of the 30 states he carried in 2000.

Many Democrats will likely respond to Bush’s demonstration of strength in the red states by arguing that the party needs to do even more to reconnect with socially conservative voters; North Carolina Sen. John Edwards will likely champion that position.

But most of the Democrats who expressly targeted those voters were still swept away last year in the pro-Bush Republican tide. Sen. Jean Carnahan in Missouri conspicuously went skeet shooting, but she still got buried in rural areas in her narrow defeat. Erskine Bowles toured with NASCAR drivers in North Carolina but was still run over by Republican Elizabeth Hanford Dole.

After those defeats, Democrats may be forced to conclude that Bush’s advantage is so pronounced in the red states that no amount of cultural outreach can overcome it. And that would point Democrats in a very different direction: toward emphasizing liberal positions on abortion and guns.

The logic would be this: If Democrats are likely to lose almost all of the red states anyway, why not stress the support for gun control and legalized abortion that represents one of their largest remaining advantages in both the states that Gore carried and the most socially liberal states that Bush captured in 2000 -- particularly Florida?

In other words, ditch the race-track dads and beg the soccer moms for a second chance.

A second calculation could point the party in the same direction: In 2004, Democrats are likely to be more dependent on the votes of women than at any time in the past 20 years.

That’s because Democrats are facing ominous trends among white men. In the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton reduced the Republican advantage among white men, partly because of the good economy and partly because Ross Perot siphoned many of them away from the GOP.

But that gap is expanding again; in both the 2000 presidential race and November’s congressional elections, white men favored Republicans by more than 20 percentage points.

Maybe a sharper economic deterioration will allow Democrats to recapture some of those votes in 2004. But it seems at least as likely that a successful war in Iraq will further expand Bush’s appeal to white men.

If American boots reach Baghdad at an acceptable cost, it hardly seems implausible that Bush could equal, or even exceed, the 27-point advantage that his father, George Bush, amassed among white men in 1988.

This would mean that the only way Democrats could win in 2004 would be to run the table with women. But here, too, the Democrats face an ominous trend. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and the elder Bush ran well with married women, offsetting the consistent Democratic advantage among single women and holding down the overall gender gap to a manageable level.

That’s happening again. Mothers have always been extremely sensitive to issues involving security, and the sense that Bush has effectively responded to the terrorist threat helped the GOP carry married women in November. If that trend persists into 2004, the Democratic nominee is almost certainly doomed.

In general, married women are more socially conservative than single women. But most still support legal abortion and gun control. With Bush not only dominating the security issue, but also dampening the traditional Democratic advantage on education, guns and abortion may be the most effective means Democrats will have to lure back married women, and maintain their lead with single women, in the next election.

Changed circumstances -- failure in Iraq, more terrorist attacks, a deeper economic downturn -- would reshuffle these calculations.

But the 2002 election results suggest that in anything like the current circumstances, Democrats will have to thread a needle to oust Bush in 2004. And that may impel them to risk polarizing the electorate around social issues that would undoubtedly cost them votes where Bush is strong -- but perhaps allow them to squeeze past the president where he is weakest.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: www.latimes.com/brownstein.