New Republic Analysis of the Election: Karl Rove Revived the Republican Strategy of the 1970s

John B. Judis, Ruy Teixeira & Marisa Katz, in the New Republic (Nov. 15, 2004):

George W. Bush's victory shows that the political strategy that conservative Republicans developed in the late 1970s is still viable. Bush won a large swath of states and voters that were once dependably Democratic by identifying Republicans as the party of social conservatism and national security. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry rallied a powerful coalition of minorities and college-educated professionals based in postindustrial metropolitan areas like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In the future, this coalition may triumph on its own. But, in this election, Democratic successes in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and West could not make up for Republican successes in the South, the border states, the Southwest, and the Great Plains. Fittingly, the election was decided in Ohio--a state that combines the metropolitan North and the small-town South.

Bush's strategy evolved out of Republican travails during the long era of New Deal Democratic dominance. Republicans understood after 1932 that they could no longer win elections simply as the party of business. They had to attract working-class and middle-class voters. After World War II, many Republicans tried mimicking New Deal liberals, but, in the '70s, conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms instead appealed to white, working-class voters enraged by Democrats' support for civil rights, feminism, and peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union. Reagan won landslides as the candidate of anti-communism and cultural conservatism.
But, in the 1990s, with the end of the cold war, Bill Clinton, armed with a new centrism and a common touch, won back some of these Democratic voters.
He also took advantage of the growing backlash against Republicans occurring among college-educated voters in metropolitan areas. In the Clinton years, the Deep South became almost uniformly Republican, but California, New Jersey, and Illinois moved into the Democratic column.

Bush has refashioned Reagan's strategy to revive the older Republican majority in the face of these defections. Like Reagan, he has appealed to business and the wealthy with tax cuts, but he has also presented himself as a simple Texan of conservative faith whose favorite philosopher is Jesus, able to appeal to voters who believe the country is in moral decline. And, because of September 11, he was able to rehabilitate the GOP's reputation as the party of national security. Although that rehabilitation was complicated by the failures of the Iraq war, Bush this year was able to reclaim the Reagan mantle and peel away traditionally Democratic white, working-class, rural and suburban voters.

Bush recreated the Reagan-era coalition by combining Brooks Brothers and Wal-Mart, the upper class and the lower middle class. He won wealthy voters--those who make over $200,000--by 63 to 35 percent. But he also won voters who had not completed college by 53 to 47 percent. If minorities, who voted predominately for Kerry, are excluded, Bush's margin among working voters was even higher. He reached these voters, who made up the bulk of his support, through opposition to gay marriage and abortion and through patriotic appeal as the commander-in-chief in a war against terrorism that seamlessly unites Osama bin Laden with Saddam Hussein. According to the Los Angeles Times, Bush's voters accorded the most importance to "moral/ethical values" and "terrorism/homeland security" in deciding their vote.

Kerry's Democratic coalition, by contrast, was composed of low-income minorities and upscale, college-educated professionals--two groups that, not coincidentally, were the least likely to accept the president's contention that the Iraq war was part of the war on terrorism. In national exit polls, Kerry got about 70 percent of the nonwhite vote. He tied Bush among voters with college degrees and bested him by 55 to 44 percent among voters who had engaged in postgraduate study. Kerry's voters, as one might expect, cared most about jobs and the war in Iraq. Luckily for Bush, however, voters without degrees still outnumber those with them. In Colorado, Kerry won voters with college degrees by 50 to 48 percent and those with postgraduate study by 55 to 43 percent. But Bush, by winning voters without degrees by 58 to 41 percent, was able to carry the state fairly easily....