HOW TO EMERGE A REPUBLICAN MAJORITY:

Why can't the Bay State elect a Democratic governor? (Robert Keough, 11/2/2003, Boston Globe)

IT'S MASSACHUSETTS'S LONGEST-running mystery. The Democratic Party dominates all levels of state politics -- from state representative to US senator -- but cannot capture the State House corner office. A year after losing their fourth consecutive gubernatorial election, Democrats are still asking themselves: Why?

Elaine Kamarck, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a former domestic policy adviser to Al Gore, seeks to answer the question in an article published in the summer 2003 issue of CommonWealth magazine. Examining Election Day exit polls from the last 12 years, she found that independents were most likely to split their tickets when voting for governor and president.

But the bigger news was the impact of the state's changing demographic makeup. Kamarck found that Democratic candidates, both state and national, fare best at the lower end of the income distribution (with voters from households earning less than $75,000 annually) and at the top of the educational spectrum (voters with masters' degrees and doctorates).

That's a problem for Democrats. People with advanced degrees may constitute the fastest-growing portion of the state's population, but it is still the smallest portion. And on the income side, the news for Democrats is even worse: The under-$50,000 bracket, where Democrats do best, shrank from 64 percent of the electorate in 1992 to 37 percent in 2000.

In short, Kamarck found, Democratic gubernatorial candidates were being abandoned by the broad middle class (households earning $30,000 to $100,000 per year) as well as by the most affluent. Meanwhile, the share of voters earning more than $100,000 a year grew from 9 percent in 1994 to 21 percent in 2000.

From these data, Kamarck concludes that the party's statewide candidates need to adopt a more "New Democrat" message -- stressing managerial competence, commitment to economic growth, and independence from interest groups such as unions and even the party apparatus itself.

Glass ceiling: Why the dominant Democrats can't elect a governor (Elaine C. Kamarck, Summer 2003, CommonWealth)

So what should this mean for the Massachusetts Democratic Party going forward? Some answers can be found in a book from the early 1990s, authored by Morley Winograd and Dudley W. Buffa, called Taking Control: Politics in the Information Age. The book was little known and largely overlooked by the purveyors of conventional wisdom in Washington, DC. But it did have one enthusiastic reader: President Bill Clinton.

The book's thesis was remarkably simple: The information-age economy will create a new politics that will replace the politics of the industrial age. "The new technology of the information age will change the American economy and the American government," Winograd and Buffa wrote. "Knowledge workers will become the new majority in American politics. Whoever first offers them a new social contract for the information age will become the dominant political force in America in the twenty-first century." Writing in 1994, Winograd and Buffa could have easily been writing about Massachusetts eight years later.

In the 1990s, Massachusetts found itself at the forefront of the information-age economy. But the Democratic gubernatorial candidates of these years, and since, often sounded as if they were stuck in the industrial-age economy. As recently as last year's state Democratic Convention, candidates for governor went out of their way to pledge increases in the minimum wage, always to the cheers of delegates. Raising the minimum wage is not a bad policy, but it is a policy with direct relevance to less than 20 percent of the electorate. (Indeed, the minimum wage has so little punch in Massachusetts politics that Republicans don't even bother to oppose it: Both Cellucci in 1998 and Romney in 2002 came out in support of an increase.) It is not a policy calculated to capture the imagination of the middle- and upper-income suburban voters who are increasingly critical to electoral success. At the same time, these Democrats did not manage-- or, in most cases, even try--to identify themselves with making government more efficient or with protecting the tax dollars of the voters.

As we learn more about information-age voters, one of the gross generalizations that can be made is that they tend to be conservative on economic policy, liberal on social policy, and, increasingly, resistant to partisan attachments. In national politics, as demonstrated in the presidential votes of the '90s, the indifference to safety-net needs and extremism on social issues associated with the GOP and its candidates alienate Massachusetts New Economy voters nearly across the board--independents as well as Democrats, moderates as well as liberals. But in governor's races, where Bay State Republicans are moderate and hot-button social issues are less relevant, the issues of economic growth, fiscal prudence, and administrative efficiency become paramount. On these issues, Democrats lose some, if not all, of their built-in partisan advantage. And where their deep penetration of the Massachusetts political fabric becomes associated with an old-fashioned, machine-style politics, the Democrats' very dominance can become an electoral liability.

These factors--overemphasis on traditional appeals to a stagnant, if not shrinking, Democratic base; feeble courtship of political independents in the high-tech belt; association with an insular and self-serving political establishment--could be seen in the waning days of the 2002 gubernatorial campaign. Take the four-day O'Brien campaign bus tour just before Election Day. Beginning with a rally in New Bedford featuring former President Clinton, the bus trip made 22 stops, most of them in the working-class enclaves and black churches of the Democratic base. Only one stop, on the Natick Common, was in a suburb. It is no wonder that suburban voters felt that the Democratic candidate had nothing to say to them.

The GOP obviously can't compromise its morality and shift on social issues--it will need to convince people instead--but a forceful advocacy of a thorough, though privatized and personalized, social welfare network, could serve to make Republicans the majority party nationally for decades.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 2, 2003 8:54 AM