COMMENTS: Shifts in the Political Alignments

...Republican Party ALL THESE TRENDS—both the rising median income from 1950 through 1974, and the stagnation since—have worked to the advantage of the GOP Rising incomes increased the pool of likely Republican voters, particularly as the correlation between Republicanism and high income grew...

...What this generally translates into is a drive to reduce the leverage of blacks, women, and labor...

...The entire right-wing movement was given at least the veneer of intellectual and economic legitimacy by the growth of such conservative think tanks as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution...

...The possible entry of Christian Broadcast Network president Marion (Pat) Robertson into the GOP presidential primary contest could split the religious community...

...The GOP gains in part grow out of the fact that from the postwar period through the mid1970s, median family income, in real, constant dollars, grew significantly...

...In this split, the Reagan administration has generally sided with the high-tax corporations in the debate on tax reform (these companies would sacrifice the investment tax credit and accelerated depreciation in order to lower the top corporate rate), and with the corporate users of junk bonds (many of whom are part of the GOP's affluent base of support in the Sunbelt...

...The changing structure of partisan allegiance to the two parties has been paralleled by voting patterns...

...While the emergence of class- and income-based commitments worked to the advantage of the Democrats in the realignment of the 1930s, in the 1980s it has worked, so far, to the advantage of the Republicans...

...The ability of House Democrats to convert Reagan's tax reform proposal into a traditional Democratic bill suggests that there is more political vitality on the economic left than many thought after 1984...

...Such groups as liberal unions, the Children's Defense Fund, the Center for Budget Priorities, and the labor-financed Citizens for Tax Justice demonstrated an ability to significantly influence the tax debate in a fashion that has not been seen in Washington for over a decade...

...In 1981, when Ronald Reagan first took office, the battle lines were visibly drawn, and power was clearly on the side of the political right...

...the Christian right was emerging as a national force with the capacity to produce votes...

...When the Democratic House by the end of last year modified the legislation to restore a progressive distribution, the strongest opponents were House Republicans...

...The political map has, however, changed substantially...

...One of the core strengths of the Republican party has been its ability to place the Democratic party in the position of defending a liberal establishment...

...By 1984, these differences had grown respectively to 31 and 64 percentage points...

...from the presidential race will lead to intensified competition for the support of the left in the Democratic primaries, just as the absence of Ronald Reagan leaves the constituencies of the Republican right up for grabs in the GOP...

...The debate over tax reform has, however, demonstrated that the GOP is in no way prepared to take its "populist" stands on social issues—opposition to abortion, support of school prayer—into the arena of economic policy...

...Despite financial setbacks, Viguerie, Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus, and Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation, have all demonstrated an ability to exercise political muscle, capitalizing on the anxieties of George Bush and Jack Kemp that the conservative movement will somehow repudiate their candidacies...

...and for the nation's economic stability, contributing to what has become an extremely fluid political and economic situation...

...Such organizations as Common Cause, Planned Parenthood, abortion rights groups, and the anti-Moral Majority group, People for the American Way, have all had banner fundraising years...

...For the Republicans, these divisions are between the Eastern establishment wing (currently represented by Bush), the traditional Midwestern wing (Senator Robert Dole), and the new guard seeking to institutionalize a version of the "Reagan Revolution" (Jack Kemp, who claims to represent both cultural and supply-side conservatism...

...Reagan in 1984, while winning almost the same overall percentage as Eisenhower, decisively lost among the very poor, 32-68, and only slightly less so among the lowermiddle class, 43-57, while overwhelmingly carrying the upper-middle class, 64-36, and the most affluent, 75-25...

...Tax reform legislation has divided American corporations between firms and industries (wholesalers, IBM, high-tech) paying high effective rates of taxation and companies (Chrysler, steel, heavy manufacturers, defense) paying low effective rates or no federal taxes at all...

...It means that candidates and power centers seeking to push the party toward the right have a strong tendency to disregard, if not repudiate, the strongest Democratic voters: the poor and the black...

...The "Inside-The-Beltway" Right and Left THE NEW RIGHT, PARTICULARLY THE NETWORK of organizations financed by direct mail specialist Richard Viguerie and those trained by him, has run into hard times...

...To further this effort, many Democrats are pressing for a Southern regional primary to be held early in 1988, during the week of March 8. This strategy has the strong potential, however, of accomplishing just what the Democrats are attempting to avoid: if, early in the contest, there are still, say, seven or eight serious contenders for the nomination, the one most likely to win the largest number of delegates in a Southern regional primary is Jesse Jackson...

...The religious right has not yet, however, shown anywhere near the capacity for permanent political organization of the economic right, which now has such institutions as the Heritage Foundation and the Center for the Study of Public Choice, and which exercises significant power in the Republican party...

...In addition, the emergence of a strong correlation between income and partisan commitmenti...

...After 50 years as a minority, the GOP has now gained effective parity with the Democratic party, particularly when voter turnout patterns favoring the affluent are taken into account...

...These incomebased commitments to the two parties declined sharply in the 1950s and 1960s, only to begin to resurface in the 1970s, probably as a result of a stagnating national economy, and then to return in force in the 1980s, almost assuredly because the policies of the Reagan administration produced a regressive redistribution of tax burdens and spending benefits...

...The cost of financing the mortgage on a median-priced home has gone from 14 to 44 percent of a 37-year-old median wage-earner's income...

...These divisions split House and Senate Republicans according to the special interests of their states and districts...

...General Trends PERHAPS THE SINGLE MOST important political development in recent years has been the reemergence of class- or income-based commitments to the two major political parties...

...As originally proposed and sent to Congress by President Reagan, the tax legislation billed by the White House staff as the means to convert the working and lower-middle classes to the Republican party was, in fact, another attempt to lessen the tax burden of the richest Americans...

...The Democratic party loses presidential elections for a number of reasons, but two simple ones are that the party fails to persuade the poor and lower-middle classes to turn out, and it fails to win adequate votes among the middle class...

...Eisenhower in 1956 received majority support from all income groups...

...In this context, the two key tests of strength for left and right throughout the remainder of this year will be the tax bill, which faces lengthy Senate consideration, and the Gramm-Rudman mandated budget cuts, depending on the outcome of court decisions...

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...Robert Martinez, the Hispanic Mayor of Tampa...

...The persistence of divisive issues within the corporate community suggests that for the time being there will not be a recurrence of the political glory days of business when, in 1981, a unified lobby, through campaign contributions, grass-roots lobbying, and the financing of think tanks, effectively defined tax policy for both parties...

...A $500,000 program last summer to persuade 100,000 Democrats to re-register as Republicans in four states fell far short of the goal...

...Liberal donors have not, however, been inspired to give to the Democratic party, which experienced an extremely sharp decline in direct mail support after the 1984 election...

...and such issues as the Panama Canal, abortion, and SALT II had produced a steadily rising flow of cash for both the Republican party committees and the conservative organizations capitalizing on the high-tech fundraising techniques pioneered by such men as Richard Viguerie, Steven Winchell, and Bruce Eberle...

...At the same time, however, it is a wild card with as yet undetermined consequences not only for domestic spending, but also for the defense buildup...

...for the network of education, mass transit, road, and public works programs benefiting all groups, particularly the middle class...

...Over the past decade, however, growth in the median family income has come to a dead halt...

...The National Conservative Political Action Committee and the Conservative Caucus have been unable to raise the kind of money they have in the past through direct mail solicitation, and Viguerie spent much of 1985 struggling to stay afloat...

...In 1956, for example, the nation's poor and lower-middle class—the bottom 30 percent— were only 8 percentage points more Democratic than the upper-middle class, and 43 percentage points more Democratic than the nation's affluent, 152 those falling in the top ten percent of the income distribution...

...In a process sharply accelerated by the Reagan administration, the central difference between the Republican and Democratic parties has come to be the income of their supporters, reviving the kind of partisan division characteristic of the 1930s and 1940s...

...While still conducting what amounts to a rearguard, defensive action, the "issue-based" moderate left-liberal community has experienced a resurgence of financial support...

...The GOP has portrayed the Democratic party as dominated by a bureaucratic and special interest elite, more interested in protecting those dependent on the state than in promoting economic growth...

...What follows is an outline of some of the developments that will, in part, define the political outcomes of the 1986 and 1988 elections, and the shape of national economic policy...

...This kind of conflict exacerbates the Democrats' substantial losses, starting with the independent candidacy of George C. Wallace in 1968, of conservative working and lower-middleclass white voters, alienated from the party by its liberal social agenda, and by a belief that they are the losers under public policies promoting affirmative action, busing, and, in some cases, abortion and equal rights for women...

...From 1950 to 1973, the median family income went from $12,341 to $24,663 (in 1981 dollars) and the percentage of families with income in excess of $25,000 (in effect, gaining some degree of economic security) grew from 8 to 42 percent...

...In this respect, just as both parties are experiencing similar vacuums created by the absence of Reagan and Kennedy as candidates, 1988 is likely to force both parties to address their most severe fissures...

...From 1973 to 1984, average gross weekly earnings fell from $198.35 to $173.48 (in 1977 dollars...

...By the end of the 1985 session of the 99th Congress, the House had passed a tax reform bill shifting—over the next five years—$140 billion of the nation's tax burden from individuals to corporations, and eliminating entirely the tax liabilities of six million workers at or below the poverty level...

...Similarly, on the political front, the Republican drive to press for a realignment among voters has not worked as well as party officials had expected...

...One significant wing of the elected leadership—the ad hoc Democratic Leadership Council run by Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri, Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt, former Virginia Governor Charles Robb, and Georgia 153 Senator Sam Nunn—is attempting to create a moderate-to-right power center in the presidential nomination process...

...Over the past five years, the conservative movement and the Republican party have continued to demonstrate muscle, and both the Democratic party and the political left have yet to regain the coherence necessary to compete effectively...

...A combination of business practices premised on the notion of a continually growing 154 marketplace and, more important, of complacence growing from the landslide victory of Ronald Reagan, has helped dry up the conservative fundraising pool of small donors...

...Democrats are, however, under severely conflicting pressures...

...The Moral Majority has run into hard times, as a low cash flow and negative public perceptions have forced Jerry Falwell to change the organization's name to the more neutral Liberty Federation...

...Stagnation gave credibility to the GOP charge that liberalism had failed, and encouraged a zero-sum view in which government transfers to the poor were increasingly seen as reducing the income of moderateincome workers...

...More important, the four most prominent converts to the GOP among Democratic politicians, who together provide a sampler of what was once the RooseveltTruman coalition, all now appear unlikely to win governorships: Kent Hance, a Texas redneck by his own description...

...A similar, but not identical split within corporate America has been created by the debate over junk bonds, and the attempts of both the FEC and Congress to regulate the issuing of these financing mechanisms, often used to provide the capital for takeover bids...

...Insofar as the Democratic party splits into centrist and Kennedy–Jesse Jackson wings, the two goals of getting more votes from the poor and the middle class become mutually exclusive, and party prospects decline...

...More important, economic pressures on working adults, particularly young adults entering the marketplace during the past 10 years, have sharply intensified...

...The same divisions are true in the case of Democrats, although the party, with its strongest base in the Northeast and Midwest, is more inclined to support low-tax corporate interests from areas with heavy industry...

...Edward King, the conservative Massachusetts pol of Irish descent...

...The Business Community THIS GROUP, WHICH, WHEN united in 1981, was the single most important force supplying political backing to the Reagan administration's budget and tax cut program, is now severely split...

...Perhaps most important, the business community was at that time united behind tax and spending cuts, providing the strongest base of support in at least a generation for a set of policies redistributing income upwards...

...These conflicting developments reflect an increasingly complex set of forces at work in the determination of national policy—complex in comparison with the relatively simple days at the outset of the Reagan administration...

...At the same time, Congress enacted the Gramm-Rudman balanced budget amendment sharply reducing federal spending through 1991, a proposal that potentially forces a major withdrawal of the federal government from domestic economic activity, thereby achieving one of the central goals of the conservative movement...

...and William Lucas, black Wayne County executive in Detroit and surrounding suburbs...

...Gramm-Rudman has an inherent conservative bias—its function it to reduce the size of the federal government...

...For the Democrats, these conflicts are between the middle class and poor, and between the party's liberal elite and white, working-class social conservatives whose economic identification with the party has been frayed, if not broken...

...e., the poorer the prospective voter, the more likely he/she is to be a Democrat—has significant consequences for a Democratic party in ideological turmoil...

...This leverage was reinforced by the sudden ascendancy of the political right—the National Conservative Political Action Committee contributed significantly to the 1981 Republican takeover of the Senate...

...Just as the presence of Reagan in the White House has quieted the enthusiasm of conservative donors, it has inspired liberals...

...Democratic Party IN ONE RESPECT THE situation of the Democratic party parallels that of the GOP The withdrawal of Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass...

...The religious right in 1984 showed tremendous strength, adding somewhere between two and three million new GOP voters to the rolls...