12/13/2004
KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
The Democrats’ Male Gender Gap
One of the interesting aspects of American presidential voting patterns
over the last four years has been the difficulty that Democrats have had in
speaking to male voters, especially white male voters. This last November Bush
had an 18-percentage point advantage over Kerry among white male votes.
Howard Dean, the original Democratic frontrunner, identified this problem
early on and got hammered by liberals for even mentioning it. Dean said that he
wanted “to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags on their pickup
trucks."
In stating things that way, he implicitly hit three nails on the head. First, he
correctly identified a geographic and cultural problem for the Democrats, the
South and its outposts throughout the West and rural America. Second he
identified a gender problem, males, who make up half of the voters. And third, he
identified a looming racial divide among males: black males overwhelmingly
support Democrats; white males, beginning with the emergence of the Reagan
Democrats, have increasingly voted for Republicans.
Some of this Democrats brought on themselves because they stood on
their principles while Republicans abandoned theirs. Almost a half-century ago
the Democratic Party, somewhat reluctantly, embraced the civil rights movement
and the Civil Rights Act. Led by a southerner, Democrat Lyndon Johnson, the
executive and congress finally followed the Supreme Court and declared an end
to the Jim Crow laws that had enforce the America version of apartheid.
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What had been the “solid south” of the Democrats immediately began to
unravel. Republicans, perversely “the party of Lincoln,” saw an opportunity and
sided with the segregationists. Shamelessly they cashed in on white fear,
caricaturing black males as violent predators and black women as “welfare
queens.”
As historical happenstance would have it, the economic status of less
educated white males began to collapse at about the same time. The working
class path to a middle class life style that had developed during the Second
World War and the early cold war era, built around unionized manufacturing jobs,
began to be dismantled. Young white males with limited education saw their
economic fortunes go into freefall. It did not take much to identify scapegoats:
Blacks, women, scruffy rebellious over-educated kids, and liberal-dominated
government. The fact that it was conservative economic policies that had pulled
the economic floor out from under young white working class men seemed to be
politically irrelevant.
On top of the civil rights and feminist revolutions, the Democrats also had
to digest our ignominious retreat from Vietnam. Before the image of the hijacked
planes plowing into and incinerating the World Trade Center, the most troubling
symbol of American helplessness had been the panicked helicopter evacuation
of our embassy in Saigon as we abandoned our Vietnamese allies to the
victorious Viet Cong. Democrats (and, of course, many Republicans, too) had
pushed for an end to that hopeless war. As political and cultural twists would
have it, the aggressive conservative architects of that failure quickly recovered
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from it and saddled the Democrats with the political burden of the failure of that
sad military adventure.
The party that had led the country through World War One, World War
Two, the Korean War, and actually initiated the Vietnam War was now portrayed
as the passive party, unwilling to defend the nation. The very rational caution to
avoid another Vietnam-like quagmire became a serious weakness for
Democrats, especially among male voters. The Democrats appeared to have no
foreign policy to deal with threats to America.
Conservatives, with familiar ideological focus, had no such problem even
though it was their policies that had failed in Vietnam. They simply insisted that
we had to strengthen our military, be confident in projecting our power, and take
the offensive against our enemies: a traditional masculine stance. Reagan,
Bush, and Son of Bush pursued such policies with considerable political success
at home even if they did not do so well abroad.
Howard Dean, despite his disquieting howl, had it right. Democrats
cannot win national elections if they ignore the South, Inland West, and rural
areas. They cannot win if they ignore the concerns of white males. They cannot
win if they are perceived as not having the conviction and fortitude to face down
our enemies.
That, of course, does not mean that they have to abandon their principled
stance on equal opportunity for women and minorities or their caution about
costly foreign military adventures. It simply means that Democrats can no longer
count on the patchwork coalitions of the past. They have to tell a convincing story
about why inequality in this country has increased so dramatically, primarily at
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the expense of young working class males. They have to project a confident
foreign policy that has us working cooperatively with a hundred nations around
the world to isolate and root out terrorists and quarantine rogue states.
They have a lot of communicating to do, communication that has to take
place long before the mind-numbing sloganeering of another election year rolls
around.
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