11/15/00 2:50 p.m.
Taking Stock
The aftermath of Election Day 2000.

By NR’s Editors

he passing of Election Day leaves us in the dark about the identity of the next president, but considerably enlightened about the polity over which he will preside. The political parties are at rough parity, with the Republicans arguably ahead: They have 29 governors, and the congressional and presidential votes are split. Two generations of conservatives can indulge in some self-congratulation for achieving this parity. But the elections also suggest that conservatism's momentum within the electorate has stalled. If we continue on our present path, we will not attain a majority and will therefore fail to secure our aims.

The fault is not primarily Gov. Bush's. He ran a strong campaign, as evidenced by the fact that he was able to win 48 percent of the vote even as a challenger in a time of peace and plenty. He did, of course, make mistakes. Bush was curiously muted on the subject of the economy. In exit polls, more voters listed it as their top issue than any other, and Gore took their votes by 22 points. In addition, Bush's response to Gore's election-eve demagoguery on Social Security was incomplete: His ads noted that he would not cut benefits, but neglected to mention that he offered young people the prospects of high returns (a point he often made in stump speeches, to strong applause). The public favored his proposal, but its chief beneficiaries were not excited about it. Among those who voted on Social Security, Gore won by 18 points.

It must be said, however, that Bush's campaign was much more daring and principled than those of the congressional Republicans. They ran on incumbency and pork rather than tax cuts, Social Security reform, and school choice. Having won Congress in 1994 by nationalizing the elections, they have kept it since by fudging national issues and tending to local concerns. The Republican revolution has come full circle: Tip O'Neill is back.

Republican congressmen are, for the most part, neither fools nor knaves. They are politicians who recognize that they do not have the political strength to enact a substantial conservative agenda. And it does not look likely that they will have it any time soon.

At present, Republicans are not a majority party — but they may usefully be described as the party of the majority. When the electorate is divided into voting blocs, the majority bloc favors the Republicans. Protestants, who were 54 percent of the electorate, gave 56 percent of their votes to Bush. The 74 percent of the electorate who came from nonunion households gave 52 percent of their votes to Bush. But the two parties are at parity because the minority bloc is much more intense in its support for the Democrats. Members of union households went 59–37 percent for Gore. The heterosexual 96 percent of the voters preferred Bush to Gore, 50–47 percent, but the homosexual 4 percent gave 70 percent of their votes to Gore: hence parity. The same pattern applies when voters are grouped by marital status or geography (a map of the vote by county shows a Republican sea surrounding tiny, but teeming, Democratic islands).

The pattern applied as well, of course, to race. Bush tried, more than any previous Republican candidate had, not to offend liberal sensitivities on race. He embraced immigration, supported bilingual education, obscured his position on race preferences, appeared before the NAACP, split the difference on hate crimes, and had Colin Powell guilt-trip the Republican convention. His reward: 35 percent of the Hispanic vote and a smaller share of the black vote than Bob Dole got in 1996. Asian-Americans, who favored Bob Dole and Bush's father, supported Gore by a 14-point margin.

So the kinder, gentler strategy on race flopped. Pacific gestures are not enough to overcome a constant stream of propaganda in the black media to the effect that Republicans are lynchers and church-burners — Klansmen in suits. What few Republican ads ran on black radio stations made the case that Republicans weren't that bad, were getting better by the day, and might one day be worthy of blacks' votes. This approach doesn't get blacks to vote Republican, or even to stay home (which is its real intent). Republicans would have been better off with a less apologetic stance, one that indicted Democrats for keeping blacks' taxes too high and their kids in failing and dangerous schools.

And they should have campaigned against race preferences. Doing so might have won some white-working-class votes in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Bush lost. It could hardly have inflamed blacks against Republicans any more than the Democrats did. And any substantial political realignment of blacks will in any case have to follow the destruction of the corrupt networks of racial patronage that keep today's black political elite in power.

The black electorate, in other words, has to be transformed; and not only the black electorate. All the evidence of the last five years suggests that the conservative coalition cannot expand much within the bounds of the existing electorate. The Christian conservative movement has stopped growing. Libertarian conservatives are thin on the ground. Every attempt to expand the conservative coalition — from Buchananism to "national greatness" — has failed, expelling more members from the coalition than it attracts.

The Democrats are not content with the existing electorate. That's why Clinton and Gore have sped up immigrant naturalization at election time. Unlimited immigration is expanding the Democratic constituency for big government and multiculturalism. (Immigrants from Asia may tend to be more conservative than their neighbors, but as Steve Sailer points out, that's no comfort when they tend to settle in some of the most liberal enclaves in the country, from New York to San Francisco.) Since the beginning of the Republican party, voting for it has been a mark of assimilation to the national culture. Continuing mass immigration impedes that process, and Republicans ought to rethink it — if not for their nation's interest, then for their own political survival.

Republicans can change the electorate, too, in more salutary ways. The expansion of the new investor class is a case in point. Those Republicans who have paid any attention to it seem to believe that it is a trend that will inevitably benefit them, with no exertions on their part required. But the new investors are a natural conservative constituency, not an inevitable one. They favored Republicans in the election, but not by much. Many investors come over time to see the links between their finances and their political behavior. But conservatives can help them along — not only by supporting policies that benefit them, but by targeting them with direct mail and advertising.

In other words, conservative political success depends on a citizenry that is culturally cohesive and that sees its interest in liberty; and those tendencies within the citizenry can be encouraged. The point is not merely to understand the electorate, but to change it.