1/24/01 4:55 p.m.
Why Gore Lost
The Democrats debate.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

sually, Washington spends the first two or three weeks after the election poring over exit-poll data in search of lessons, portents, and self-justifications. This time, the battle for Florida's electoral votes delayed that ritual. It wasn't until today that the Democratic Leadership Council held a forum on "Why Gore Lost and What's Next for the Democrats."

The DLC line on the election is that Al Gore ran too far to the left, associating himself with big government and class warfare rather than with the successful, centrist Clinton administration and the New Economy. Mark Penn, the DLC's pollster, put some flesh on those bones in his opening presentation.

According to Penn, Gore won on most specific issues. Three exceptions were guns, taxes, and abortion. Penn's finding on abortion is particularly useful because the networks stopped asking the most relevant question on the subject, viz., among voters for whom it was a top issue, which candidate won? Penn's poll showed that among the 7 percent of voters who cared deeply about abortion, George W. Bush took 61 percent of the votes and Gore 30 percent — pretty much keeping with the pattern of the previous two decades. (That makes for a net pick-up of 2.2 percentage points for Bush.) Penn thinks the issue helped Gore, however, among upper-class women, although the data he presented were not on point. (That data showed that women's support for abortion rose with income, but not how that support affected their votes.)

More important, though, was that Gore "lost on the broader meta-themes." Bush was seen as being to the left of his party — and so was Gore. On a scale in which 1 is the left pole and 9 the right, the average voter rated himself a 5.42 (slightly to the right of center). Gore was 1.5 points to the left of this average, Bush 1.06 to the right of it. Moreover, Gore's "people vs. the powerful" theme flopped badly among the voters who rallied to Bush in the last month. Gore's populist campaign hurt him among white males while merely matching Bill Clinton's performance among liberals. It also kept him from capitalizing on public contentment: Gore's margin among voters who thought the country was on the right track was 15 points lower than Clinton's in 1996.

Not surprisingly, Steve Rosenthal, political director of the AFL-CIO, disagreed with almost everything in Penn's analysis — including his premise. "I'm not convinced that Al Gore lost," he said, although he was willing to concede that Bush had taken the oath of office this weekend. The total vote for Gore and Ralph Nader suggested an emerging progressive majority to him. Later, former Clinton aide William Galston called that conclusion "a complete methodological mistake" since Stanley Greenberg's poll found that if Nader had not run, Gore would have gotten only 38 percent of Nader's voters and Bush would have gotten 25 percent. (Most of the rest would have stayed home.)

Rosenthal's two strongest points were that "Gore's only lead during the entire election cycle" came after his populist convention speech and that the geographic pattern of votes — Gore took California and lost Arkansas — did not suggest that Gore's problem was a failure to woo "wired workers."

In this debate, interestingly, it was the left wing of the party (represented also by Ruy Texeira of the Century Foundation) that stressed the damage that Clinton's scandals had done to Gore and the right wing that argued that "Clinton fatigue" was overblown — even though it was the party's left-wing base that did the heavy lifting to save Clinton in 1998.

Rosenthal seemed to want the party's base to get a lot of credit for all that heavy lifting. He pointed out, for instance, that the unions were able to keep gun-owning union members with Gore in the face of a massive effort by the NRA. But as Will Marshall, one of the New Democrat panelists, pointed out, whether the base had done its part in the election wasn't the issue.

Certainly there were points of agreement: Everyone thought Gore was a lousy candidate. But achieving what Rosenthal called "Democratic bipartisanship" won't be easy. The wounds from past battles still seem raw. Rosenthal opened his remarks with a pointed reference to his presence at the forum as "a sign of new openness at the DLC." He also made the catty, albeit accurate, remark that if Gore had won Penn would have been at the forum explaining how he had done so as a New Democrat.

It was certainly a stimulating panel, with serious disagreements about political strategy engaged seriously. Maybe, given the mixed results of the election, members of the Republican coalition would profit from a debate of their own.

Rebel Zell
Republicans shouldn't think that Democratic senator Zell Miller's embrace of the Bush tax plan is a prelude to party switching. True, his tax-relief partner is Phil Gramm, who broke ranks to back President Reagan's tax cuts when he was a Democrat in the House and then got so much grief from his colleagues that he became a Republican. But Miller already has said that the thought hasn't even crossed his mind, although rumors of a switch were buzzing around Capitol Hill earlier this week. Just as well, Republicans might figure: He's more useful to them as a Democrat.

Georgia's other Democratic senator, Max Cleland, will be on the ballot next year. That means Cleland will face added pressure to get on board the bipartisan bandwagon of tax relief. Otherwise, he'll look out of step not only with the Georgia public on this issue, but with an important member of his own delegation.