Reclaiming Our Base

“There is a clear message from the women we spoke to: never stand between a woman and her desire to protect and care for her family,” said EMILY’s List President Ellen R. Malcolm.  “Republicans will continue to lose women if they fail to respect that women see themselves—not government or politicians—as the arbiter of family values.  From the intrusion of government into private family decisions, the risk created by efforts to privatize Social Security, and the ‘my way or the highway’ foreign policy of the Bush administration — the Republican’s own agenda has worked to turn women away from that party.”

Minority Report

The frustration of some black and Latino operatives raises the question: How much longer can Democrats count on historic loyalties?

In May of 2004, Paul Rivera had an idea. His proposal, based on his experience working in three previous presidential contests: Put staff in every market where Hispanic and African American voters were important and spend $1 million to test different base-vote mobilization strategies so that by July, the best one could be implemented and carried out as part of the overall field operation. Rivera, a Puerto-Rican Democratic operative from the Bronx who was the highest-ranking Latino in John Kerry’s campaign, took the plan up the ladder.

But Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry’s campaign manager, let the proposal die on the vine. Her intentions may have been understandable — she wanted to run a streamlined, centralized field operation, say insiders, not a bunch of different projects — but the net result of the strategy she oversaw was an election-day shocker for the Kerry campaign. Not only did Kerry win a smaller fraction of the Hispanic vote than any Democratic presidential candidate in recent history; he lost a couple of points with black voters, too. And, unlike Bill Clinton in 1996, Kerry lost white women voters, who have by and large remained loyal to the Democratic Party even as their husbands, boyfriends, and brothers grew into a core Republican constituency over the past 40 years.

“One of the biggest problems with the Democratic Party is we don’t know how to speak to the people we claim to represent,” Rivera told me in late May over a plate of mini-burgers and parmesan onion curls at hip downtown D.C. eatery Matchbox. “If we say blacks are for Democrats, Hispanics are for Democrats, women are for Democrats — the data don’t show that any more.”

While Republicans have benefited from perceptions that Democrats are the party of big government, their positioning on issues of intrusion is eroding that edge. Twenty percent of women are uncomfortable with abortion rights and believe that abortion should be legal only in extreme cases or not at all, but are also uncomfortable with government intrusion into moral decisions. These voters, who chose Bush over Kerry by eight percentage points, have fallen precipitously in their Republican allegiance. Now 38% plan to vote Democratic for Congress and only 30% plan to vote Republican, a 20-point shift toward the Democrats.

Those structural problems led to a kind of strategic blindness to the importance of minority-voter contact and outreach. Kerry spent less on paid media in Hispanic markets than Gore did in 2000, despite spending more than twice as much overall. Indeed, Kerry spent less on targeted Hispanic media — $3 million — than he did on political strategist and consultant Bob Shrum.

In the Democratic Party, ensuring minority turnout has always been seen as something best solved through the traditional transactional political relationships that have characterized the Democratic Party’s approach to minorities for decades. Transactional politics means, essentially, that we’ll give you X in return for Y — the “you” often being a high-ranking figure in a given community who can be counted on to deliver votes. It’s a top-down model, and it’s the one the Kerry campaign emphasized, turning to prominent minority leaders to help it out, just as Democratic presidential campaigns have done for decades.

But even in the African American community, where the model was developed, times have changed. During the general election, the campaign had the Democratic National Committee (DNC) pay $86,000 to race-baiter Al Sharpton, who at most can move 140,000 voters in midnight-blue New York City, as well as substantial sums to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, an aging civil-rights leader whose currency among younger black voters is open to question (and whose organization, Rainbow/PUSH, was recently fined by the Federal Election Commission for campaign-finance rule violations during the 2000 election). What that campaign got in exchange for this was an electorate that was just as white as in 2000, even as the country became more diverse.

The transactional model’s opposite is a ground-up operation that involves more direct outreach and financial support for local get-out-the-vote efforts and ethnic media, and a recognition that in immigrant communities, there may not be a leadership or organizational infrastructure capable of moving and turning out voters, no matter how well they are cultivated. The Republican Party, truth be told, recognizes this more than the Democrats do, which has led some younger Democrats to feel that the party is either out of touch or taking minority votes for granted. “There are Democratic decision-makers who ask, ‘How little can I spend on these voters to get them to shut up?’” Rivera says.

In May, Rivera, along with Navarro and three other high-ranking former Kerry campaign and DNC Hispanic political operatives, sent the Democratic leadership and potential ’08 candidates a biting 13-page memo. “Instead of developing strategies and political capacity in communities of color to increase the number of voters and votes, the Democratic Party is steeped in token commercial relationships and unaccountable voter-contact methods,” they wrote. “If the Democratic Party does not improve its performance with Latinos, it is doomed.” The memo, which grew out of a series of meetings of more than 30 elected and appointed Hispanic Democratic leaders, as well as political operatives, in November and March, has been understood within the party as the shot across the bow. Nonetheless, there are still those who ask, says Rivera, “How little can I spend on communities of color?”

The Future for Democrats

Overall, this survey contains three central lessons for Democrats. First, Democrats have an enormous opportunity in 2006 to expand their base, particularly among women, but they can do more to solidify these advantages. Women’s mood for change, combined with their focus on domestic issues—leading with Social Security—has resulted in defections of up to 20 points in some cases, in their support of Bush from just six months ago.

Second, any debate between the primacy of values and economics is irrelevant in reaching women who care about both and combine the importance of both in considering their families’ futures. Democrats need an agenda that addresses poignant economic insecurities among women, but that does so with due respect for the centrality of families and care giving in their values system.

Finally, in recognizing the centrality of families and care giving, Democrats can take advantage of Republicans’ overreaching on issues of intrusion. While Democrats do not have the advantage on values that they do on a prospective economic agenda, Republicans have promoted defections by appearing to endorse government intrusions into family privacy.

Democrats must be the party of change and hope. They also need a clear agenda that makes families more secure and must develop language that respects families and care giving to take full advantage of the opportunity that they have been granted. While women voters have lost confidence in President Bush and the Republicans, Democrats have not

yet closed the deal with women voters.

“Tower introduced me to Ronald Reagan,” during the Senate race, recalls Sosa. “He was governor at the time. I explained to him what I was trying to do. He said, ‘That’s going to be real easy.’ I said, ‘Why do you say that?’ He said that ‘Hispanics are Republicans; they just don’t know it.’” Reagan then explained that Hispanic families were taught to value family, faith in God, hard work, and personal responsibility, and to believe that America is the greatest country of all. Those, Reagan told Sosa, are Latino values and Republican values. “I was just astonished that in 30 seconds, he gave me the strategy, and I have followed it ever since,” Sosa says.

Democrats often attribute the GOP’s gains among Latinos to such factors as homophobia and anti-abortion sentiment. But in fact, such explosive personal issues are rarely discussed or even mentioned in GOP media for Hispanics (whether outside groups do so is another question). Those subjects, explains Bendixen, are so taboo in traditional Hispanic cultures that when he conducted focus groups to gauge Latino opinions on gay marriage (among other issues), more than 70 percent of one group said afterward that this was the first time they had ever discussed homosexuality with another person in their lives.

Thus, in 2004, Bush ads aimed at Latino voters showed pictures of college students graduating, prosperous-looking families with four kids laughing, and well-to-do-looking Hispanics at the office, while a very sentimental, specially composed Spanish song played in the background. Ads proclaimed that America is our country and Bush is our president. The message: Nos conocemos. We know each other. All told, Bush spent about $5.5 million on uplifting, aspiration-based emotional appeals in Spanish-language media in 2004 — a small cost, due to the inexpensive nature of the media markets in Hispanic battleground states — with a tremendous bang for the buck. The GOP increased its Hispanic margin by 10 percent in the states where 79 percent of Hispanic voters reside and where Democrats declined to target them, and overwhelmed ethnic media markets in battleground states. In New Mexico, which Gore won in 2000 and where Bush won in 2004 by less than 6,000 votes, Hispanics provided his margin of victory; Democratic targeting in the last few weeks before the election simply came too late.

In response to the dissatisfaction of minority communities, the DNC, under Chairman Howard Dean, is revamping the Clinton-era minority political desk system and plans to make voter targeting, including of minorities, a much more central aspect of the committee’s ongoing get-out-the-vote and field operations. Dean has won praise for his hiring practices, appointing the first black director of polling in party history, Cornell Belcher of Brilliant Corners Research and Strategy; a female political director, Pam Womack; and a mixed-race communications director, Karen Finney, who had previously worked for Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Edwards. Finney speaks of a “paradigm shift” and vows that from here on out, “We will not take a single vote or a single voter for granted. That is a mistake we will not make again.