Proposal Is Geared to Core Backers, Not Swing Voters

With his endorsement of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, President Bush on Tuesday spotlighted one of the 2004 campaign’s key characteristics -- the tendency of each party to appeal to core supporters in a nation sharply polarized along partisan lines.

Bush and his leading Democratic rivals, Sens. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina, have aimed their agendas and messages more at their political base than at swing voters.

Unlike the 1990s, when President Clinton sought to convince moderate voters he was “a different kind of Democrat,” or 2000, when Bush ran as “a compassionate conservative,” the two parties this year are focusing on more traditional -- even primal -- distinctions.

Kerry and Edwards have emphasized economic populism, identifying closely with organized labor, criticizing business and condemning Republicans as servants of the wealthy.

These positions were central to virtually every Democratic presidential campaign from the 1930s through the 1980s.

Bush and the GOP have begun to portray Kerry, the most likely Democratic presidential nominee, as a cultural elitist who will raise taxes and weaken national defense. These are arguments every Republican presidential candidate since Richard M. Nixon in 1968 has wielded against his Democratic opponent.

Bush’s move to ban gay marriage, coming the day after he said the election offered Americans contrasting “visions of government,” underscored his determination to frame the presidential contest in the starkest terms possible.

“Clearly our belief is -- and we’ll test it against reality -- the brighter and bolder the lines, the bigger the issues, the more fundamental the debate, the better it is for us,” said one Republican strategist close to the White House.

Democrats, recoiling from the party’s muted message in the 2002 midterm election, have made much the same calculation. The result is a developing debate in which each side is presenting choices that may seem shrill and doctrinaire to many of the swing voters who could ultimately decide the election.

“Neither party’s base is large enough to win an election,” said GOP pollster David Winston. “So at some point in time, they are going to have to address the middle in order to put together a majority coalition.”

The president’s embrace of the proposed amendment seems more likely to confirm rather than redefine the electorate’s divisions.

In particular, Bush’s decision could fortify one of the nation’s most powerful political trends: the inclination of Americans to divide between the parties more along cultural than economic lines.

“For Bush, the gay marriage statement is a way to say that, ‘We are not going to let this be a noncultural election, because we are pretty confident of how a cultural election plays out,’ ” said Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg.

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said Bush’s backing of the amendment -- following the moves toward authorizing gay marriage in Massachusetts and California -- increased the odds the issue would emerge as the central cultural conflict in the 2004 campaign.

“It will reinforce the cultural divisions that we saw in 2000, but it reaches beyond them,” Ayres said. “I think this clearly has the potential to be a highly visible, highly emotional and highly symbolic issue.”

In the 2000 presidential vote, conducted against the backdrop of the Clinton sex scandal, cultural affinities influenced voters more than economic status.

Bush dominated among culturally conservative voters, people who lived in small town or rural areas, married couples and those who regularly attended church.

Democrat Al Gore ran best in culturally cosmopolitan areas along the coasts and in the upper Midwest. He amassed big leads among single voters and those who attended church less frequently. He also maintained Clinton’s inroads among upscale, socially liberal suburbanites who had mostly voted Republican during the 1970s and 1980s.

Opposition to gay marriage transcends many of these divisions: polls have shown that about three-fifths of Americans do not believe gays should be allowed to marry.

But the surveys also show the country divides along many of the same lines as in the 2000 campaign over a constitutional ban on gay marriage.

In the most recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, 53% of Americans said they supported a constitutional ban on gay marriage, while 44% opposed it. Support for the ban was greatest among the same culturally conservative constituencies that tilted toward Bush in 2000: rural voters, those who attend church most often and married couples with children.

Given those attitudes, many Republicans think Bush’s support for the amendment will widen the advantages he enjoyed in 2000. While Kerry and Edwards say they oppose gay marriage, both oppose writing a ban into the constitution, creating a clear contrast with Bush.

Democrats generally agree that the increased prominence of gay marriage gives Bush a powerful card to play with blue-collar and small-town voters who may be disillusioned with his economic performance.

But some analysts say the issue is just as likely to cost Bush votes among socially liberal suburbanites outside the South. Bush could be hurt among these voters if it seems to them that he is trying to exclude or punish gays, these analysts argue.

“Soccer moms and suburban voters ... could be tilting Republican for a variety of reasons, the war on terror for example, but a constitutional amendment on gay marriage may be perceived as crossing the line,” said John Zogby, an independent pollster.

It’s not clear whether the emergence of gay marriage as a full-scale national issue will significantly change the electoral equation.

If the controversy had not grown more visible, it’s almost certain that the White House would have found other ways to depict Bush’s Democratic challenger as culturally out of touch.

Republicans, nervous about polls showing Kerry making inroads among some GOP-leaning constituencies, have tried to portray him as weak on crime and national defense, and associate him with the anti-Vietnam war movement’s most extreme elements. Kerry, conversely, has appealed to socially liberal voters by pledging only to nominate Supreme Court justices who explicitly support the legal right to abortion.

On most other fronts, Kerry and Bush have taken positions that tend to buttress the electorate’s current divisions. There are exceptions: Bush has gestured toward Latinos with his immigration reform package and seniors with his Medicare prescription drug plan; Kerry has emphasized his determination to cut the federal deficit in half over four years.

But Kerry, reverting to themes more prominent in the party before Clinton, has built his domestic agenda around a populist message that accuses Bush of encouraging a “creed of greed.” Kerry promises to significantly increase spending on healthcare and education, while expressing growing skepticism about free trade.

In a speech Monday laying out his campaign themes, Bush sought to define the election as a choice between big government and small government and vacillation vs. toughness in national defense.

Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, argues that eventually each side will have to develop more nuanced appeals aimed at swing voters. But others think that at a time when Bush’s approval rating has consistently run around 90% among Republicans and less than 20% among Democrats, each side may continue to focus on stoking turnout from its committed supporters, rather than persuade those on the fence.

Which means Americans could be hearing plenty about gay marriage and tax cuts from Bush, and a steady barrage of class-conscious populism from the Democrats.

“The candidates may suggest from time to time they are running national campaigns aimed at everyone,” Zogby said. “You are not going to see it. The country is split in its starkest terms.”