Gore’s Problem Will Be Convincing White Men to Jump Back on Board

Even with his recent uptick in the polls, there’s a specter from the Democratic past haunting Al Gore: the ghost of the angry white men. Actually, after eight years of economic expansion, white men, like the rest of the electorate, don’t appear particularly angry this year. But they do seem particularly cool toward Gore. The vice president doesn’t have to win a majority of white men to win the November election, but if he can’t reduce his disadvantage among white men, especially in the Midwest, he’s unlikely to be hearing “Hail to the Chief” any time soon.

This focus on white guys may seem hopelessly retro. In the perennial search for the nouvelle in U.S. politics, white men often are overlooked. This year, for instance, there’s been much more attention paid to the swing vote potential of Latinos--who make up about 1 in 20 of voters nationally. But white men are a vastly larger constituency--about 40% of the electorate. College-educated white men tend to vote reliably Republican. But working-class white men (about a quarter of all voters) have been genuinely up for grabs. Indeed, Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief strategist, says that “younger, blue-collar men are the soccer moms of this election”--the key swing block that could decide the victor.

Gore’s problem with these voters has a back-to-the-future quality. During the three presidential elections of the 1980s, the Republican candidates--former Presidents Reagan and Bush--trounced their Democratic opponents among white men by an average of 30 percentage points. Bill Clinton, with his centrist New Democrat message, succeeded in reducing the GOP advantage among white men to just 3 percentage points in 1992 and 11 points in 1996. By keeping that deficit to a modest level, Clinton was able to build a winning coalition from his advantage with minorities and white women.

But now Gore is facing a wave of rejection among white men approaching the heights of the ‘80s. Polls consistently show Bush leading him among white men by 20 percentage points or more--sometimes much more. Like his father in 1988 and Reagan before that, the younger Bush is even cutting into Gore’s support among union members--ordinarily a bedrock Democratic constituency--by siphoning away culturally conservative men. Those trends are doubly ominous for Gore because Bush’s emphasis on education is helping him suppress the traditional Democratic advantage with women. That means Gore can’t simply rely on overwhelming support from women to overcome a massive repudiation by men.

In some ways, this flight from Gore is surprising. During the 1980s, the white male exodus from the Democrats was inspired by deeply ingrained views of the party as weak on defense, soft on crime, unwilling to demand personal responsibility and profligate in raising taxes. And nominees such as Walter F. Mondale and Michael S. Dukakis personified a cultural liberalism that seemed as out of place as a Perrier in a corner bar. From his support of the balanced budget to the signing of welfare reform, Clinton has worked relentlessly to reverse those images, and Gore has followed his lead this year, defending the death penalty and the welfare reform legislation. Yet the gap has reopened anyway.

How come? Some analysts think Clinton never really solved the Democratic problem with white men. And, in fact, Clinton didn’t draw much more of the white male vote than Democrats did in the ‘80s; the GOP margin dropped largely because so many white men who had backed Reagan and Bush peeled off to vote for Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. “Did Clinton do some stuff right? Sure,” GOP pollster Bill McInturff says. “But he had some help, because there was an outlet for the white guys to not have to vote for the Republican.”

With Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader showing narrower appeal in this campaign, many of those men are drifting back to the GOP. Gov. Bush has accelerated the process by putting a more reasonable face on his party. Even for many white men, the “revolutionary” anti-government GOP rhetoric after 1994 went too far, notes Ruy Teixeira, co-author of the new book “America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters.” By contrast, Teixeira believes, Bush’s promise to limit but not tear down government more closely reflects the beliefs of many blue-collar men.

Even more important than issues may be gut reactions to the two contenders. With his frat-boy irreverence, Bush clearly strikes many men as stronger and more of a guy’s guy than Gore--with his terminally earnest public persona and palette of soothing earth-tone suits. It’s probably not a coincidence that one poll earlier this year found that the more likely someone was to watch “Monday Night Football,” the more likely they were to prefer Bush over Gore. “There is a more visceral negative reaction that white men have for Al Gore than was the case for Clinton and is clearly the case in a comparison between Bush and Gore,” says Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington, D.C.

The problem is worst for Gore in the South, where men are the most conservative; it’s most manageable along the coasts, where men (like women) tend to be more liberal, especially on cultural issues. The most troubling sign for Gore is the trend in the Midwest, where he’s facing more resistance from white men than anywhere except in the South. Gore doesn’t need the South to win, but he will find it hard to get 270 electoral votes without states such as Ohio and Michigan (where the most recent public polls show him trailing among white men by about 25 percentage points) and Wisconsin (where he’s about 20 points down with white men). No matter how well Gore runs with women, he will find it hard to win those critical states unless he can convert more men.

Can he? For all their cultural conservatism, blue-collar men still often respond to the kind of economic populist argument that Gore recently has been emphasizing; if he can paint Bush’s tax cut and Social Security reform proposals as a boon to the rich and a threat to the economic security of working Americans, Democrats believe he can regain some of the lost ground. “If Gore does well with white men,” Democratic pollster Geoff Garin says, “it will be on the basis of pocketbook issues.”

Issues, though, aren’t likely to solve all of Gore’s problem. If he can’t show more men he’s the kind of guy they would like to follow up a hill, he’s unlikely to persuade enough of them to follow him into the voting booth.

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See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at:https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.