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August
12, 2002, 9:00 a.m. By Todd J. Weiner |
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f you're a baseball fan, the threat of a strike by the Major League Player's
Association is casting a dark cloud over your summer. And if you're a
George W. Bush fan, the repercussions of that strike could ruin your fall.
As the countdown to Baseball Armageddon continues — some sources put a strike date as early as August 16 — the political classes are letting out a collective yawn. The powerbrokers automatically assume that the hijacking of America's pastime by petty baseball players and owners will have little effect on the attitudes of voters and a negligible impact over who controls Congress after the fall elections. They ponder to themselves: How could the labor negotiations of a sport for mostly uneducated, middle-aged men be as important as say, the recent stock-market slide or the secret preparations for war against Iraq?
Here, as in so many cases, the conventional wisdom is far from wise. While the recent Dow Jones meltdown and occasional Middle East flare-ups are legitimately major news stories, for most Americans they are outside the purview of their day-to-day existence.
Baseball, on the other hand, is a part of their day-to-day existence. A Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll released last week shows that 47 percent of respondents consider themselves to be a baseball fan. Just as importantly, despite the much-believed slide in the sport's popularity, the percentage of Americans who consider themselves to be baseball fans has essentially remained the same over the past decade.
The reason that political insiders should take heed is that, if there is a baseball strike and the World Series is cancelled, a huge number of potential voters — myself included — are going to be pretty ticked off. The only time in baseball history that a players' strike cancelled the Fall Classic was in 1994 and most news junkies know what happened in the congressional elections that year: The Republican party humiliated the Democrats, seizing control of both houses of Congress for the first time in decades.
The cancellation of the baseball season was announced just weeks before the 1994 elections and fed into voter anger at a time when polls showed that 66 percent of adults were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the country, according to Gallup. The "right track/wrong track" question is referred to as the "Dow Jones Indicator of American Politics" by analysts such as National Journal's Charlie Cook and clearly the bear market was felt by Democrats in 1994. For much of 2002, Republicans smiled as polls showed American confidence near record highs. But the July 2002 Gallup poll shows that for the first time since just before the September 11 attacks, a plurality of Americans are dissatisfied with the country's direction.
Many political analysts associate the decline in national mood with the decline in stock prices and understandably so. But it should also be noted that over the past month millions of baseball fans have been following their sport's labor-negotiation saga, not to mention the horrendous outcome of this year's All-Star Game, which ended in a commissioner-imposed tie. For these folks who live outside the Beltway the drama between "greedy" baseball players and owners is more relevant than investors' concerns over "greedy" business executives and their accounting practices. In a country that still has more baseball fans than mutual-fund owners, a cancellation of the baseball season could have a more traumatic effect on swing voters than a bad day for the NASDAQ.
Not surprisingly, most baseball fans are men and in the past few elections, it has been men — not women — who have held the key to Republican victory. In their 1994 landslide and in George W. Bush's narrow victory in 2000, the Republican party racked up huge margins among men to neutralize the Democratic party's traditional advantage among women. On the other hand, when Democrats are able to draw even among men — as Bill Clinton did in 1992 and 1996 — the GOP falls short. This fall, Republican candidates desperately need to do well among middle-income, independent males — the segment of the population, incidentally, that would be most adversely affected by a baseball strike.
Sadly for Republicans, the political roles are entirely reversed from the time of the last baseball strike, eight years ago. This time it is the Republican party, not the Democratic party, who occupies the White House and controls the House of Representatives and it is the Republicans, not the Democrats, who may the feel the wrath of the so-called "angry white man."
President Bush, the former baseball team owner, should be praying that the country's baseball stadiums are full come October.
— Todd J. Weiner is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.