"It's become a more Republican area even though it's been Republican for 60 years," laughs state Senator Luke Kenley, who is planning a gubernatorial campaign for 2004 on the assumption that Hamilton and other suburban "donut communities" can boost him to a majority statewide.
Kenley may be right. But in order to build the GOP coalition he wants, some difficult assembly may be required. The partisan numbers may be remaining constant, but the Hamilton County of 2002 is not the same sort of Republican county it was even a decade ago. For virtually the entire 20th century, the area was dominated by farmers whose main political priority was to ensure that the government did not encroach on their private-property rights. The new upscale suburbanites are much different. They are hungry for government services. Most of them were drawn to Hamilton for the quality of its school system, and they want the schools funded generously.
They also want to spend money on transportation. Big fights used to take place in Hamilton County when a $1 million or $2 million dollar bond issue for a park or a courthouse got proposed. Recently, voters easily approved a $60 million bond issue to expand a roadway.
For all these reasons, Republicans who run for office in Hamilton these days frequently have to talk like Democrats, emphasizing their ability to obtain funding and deliver services to constituents. "Education is probably at the forefront of all political issues," followed by parks, police and fire, says Scott Faultless, president of the town council in Fishers, which actually quintupled in population, from about 7,000 to more than 35,000, over the decade of the 1990s. The number of full-time government employees in Fishers has risen 10- fold during the past decade.
As campaigns begin all over the country in this crucial election year, with 36 governorships at stake and candidates running in newly drawn legislative districts, both parties are looking rather nervously toward the Hamilton counties of America, places whose partisan loyalties seem predictable enough, but whose ideologies and stands on major issues are in a state of flux.
The 1990s were a remarkable decade for the Republican Party, in state politics as in national politics. Ten years ago, the GOP controlled only eight legislatures, compared with the 29 in Democratic hands. Almost 60 percent of all state legislators were Democrats, as were 31 of the 50 governors. Now, those Democratic advantages have all been erased, and some have been reversed. Republicans hold seven of the governorships in the 10 most populous states, and have been in a position to dominate the decennial redistricting process in Florida, Michigan, Ohio and several other large and politically important states.
But the central fact of political life in America as the year begins isn't Republican ascendancy, it's the uncanny evenness between the two parties. Control of state legislatures is split down the middle, with Republicans controlling 17, Democrats 17 and another 15 under divided control. There are 7,424 seats in state legislatures that are filled on a partisan basis. At the moment, Republicans hold 3,537 of them. Democrats have 3,867. The major exception is in the governorships, where Republicans have a 27-21 advantage. But those numbers, too, seem likely to approach parity by the time the votes are counted in November.
Moreover, even in the places friendliest to them, such as Noblesville and Hamilton County, Republicans are starting the year with a disquieting feeling that demographic and ideological trends may not be working in their favor. Well before September 11, voters in staunchly Republican areas had begun to sour on the anti-government rhetoric the GOP had so skillfully exploited in recent years. Tax cuts had become a much lower priority than traditionally Democratic causes such as education, transportation, health care and the environment. In the period since September 11, public approval of government has risen in public-opinion polls to a four-decade high.
The returns from the 2001 elections do not provide much GOP encouragement for the year ahead. With victories in New Jersey and Virginia, Democrats now have won 12 of the 15 gubernatorial contests held since 1999. This fall, Republicans will be having to defend 23 of the three dozen governorships at stake, including 11 that will be left open due to term limits and retirement.
Incumbent GOP governors look strong in several large states, notably New York, Ohio and Texas. In Florida, Democrats who hoped to "punish" Florida Governor Jeb Bush for his role in the 2000 presidential election recount are likely to see their hopes dissipate in a wave of Elián and Branch Davidian TV ads if, as expected, they nominate former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.
Looking at the nation as a whole, however, Democrats appear to have a better-than-even chance of ending the year holding a majority of the governorships. They are in a strong position to win in Illinois, where retiring GOP governor George Ryan has been tainted by scandal, and in Pennsylvania, where control of the governorship has switched parties every eight years since 1954, and Republicans have been in power since 1995. They enjoy good shots at coming back to power in Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Wisconsin, and can claim realistic hopes in Arizona and Kansas. They are competitive in Tennessee, where a victory would be a capstone to the southern Democratic comeback that has, over the past three years, reclaimed the governorships of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.
The biggest potential blow for Democrats would be the defeat of California Governor Gray Davis. Davis is a prodigious fundraiser and the state has been trending Democratic, but he is vulnerable given the state's electricity deregulation debacle and looming $12 billion-plus deficit. Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, a Republican, is leading Davis in some polls.
While redistricting has proven kind to Republicans in several key states, namely Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, Democrats have kept their legislative majorities safe in California and Georgia and have scored some unexpected breaks in states they don't control.
A commission-drawn map friendly to Democrats in New Jersey made it possible for the party to take control of the Assembly this fall, following a decade out of power, and to pull into a tie in the state Senate. Democrats in Illinois won the equivalent of a coin toss to control redistricting--and took full advantage of the opportunity. "While no election is ever a sure thing and there are no locks anywhere, I fully expect we're going to be able to control the House and win the Senate as well," says Democratic state Representative Lou Lang, who shelved his plans to run for governor this year given his party's brighter legislative prospects.
In Oregon, Democrats in the House initially refused to attend redistricting sessions, denying the chamber its quorum, but it was the Democratic governor's veto of maps drawn by the GOP-controlled legislature that kicked the process to the Democratic secretary of state's office. Democrats now have a real shot at erasing the thin GOP margin in the two chambers. "It certainly is a leg up, yes," says Kate Brown, Democratic leader of the state Senate.
In the long run, however, it is not the numbers from redistricting that are likely to cause Republicans the most concern. It is the numbers from the 2000 Census. Republican pollster Matthew Dowd predicts that if each major ethnic group votes in 2004 as it did in 2000, the GOP would lose the presidency, based on the much faster growth among minority populations. During the 1990s, the population of Hispanics increased by 10.4 million people, to 32.8 million. Non- Hispanic whites, by contrast, grew by only 8.6 million, to 196.9 million. "We are in need of diversity--women, Latin, African American, Asian," Rich Bond, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the Washington Post last year. "We've taken white guys as far as that group can go."
An initial glimpse at the 2000 Census made it appear that population trends were continuing to move in a GOP-favorable direction, with people continuing to empty out of cities into suburban areas like Hamilton County, and toward the Sun Belt. But that was a little bit misleading. In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush did win the 50 counties that grew at the fastest rate during the 1990s, including Hamilton, by an average of 62 percent to 33 percent. But those were not the counties that grew the most in absolute numbers. Al Gore carried those 50 counties by 54 percent to 42 percent. Bush came out of the rapidly growing smaller counties with a 500,000 vote margin, but Gore's advantage in larger fast-growing counties amounted to 2.7 million votes.
Older suburbs, meanwhile, are changing rapidly. The Democratic gubernatorial wins last year in New Jersey and Virginia can be attributed in large part to the lack of appeal that hard-line Republican social positions held for voters in affluent older suburban areas. In a small but telling sign of the GOP's continuing decline in its old Eastern Establishment base, Democrats in November won the mayoralty in Greenwich, Connecticut, longtime home turf of the Bush family, for the first time in 18 years. Democrats picked up other offices in Connecticut's shoreline towns that had been Republican since the days of Calvin Coolidge.
Republicans can, of course, try to trade off gradual losses in the suburbs of the Northeast for growth in the South and Southwest. Indeed, this is what they have been doing in the past decade, and it allowed them to run even on a national basis in the last presidential election, and to claim the presidency as a result. But Democrats are clearly getting better at responding to this strategy with a regional marketing strategy of their own, tailoring their candidacies to appeal to local tastes. They have stemmed the Republican tide at the gubernatorial level in states such as Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina by nominating candidates who do not frighten cultural conservatives. In Virginia last fall, when Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mark Warner wasn't talking to suburban voters about transportation issues, he was expressing to rural voters his love of guns, bluegrass music and NASCAR. Warner defeated Republican Mark Earley by a margin of nearly 100,000 votes statewide.
Republicans find Democrats such as Warner disingenuous, to use a polite word, when they echo the sound of the Republican message. But they admit the tactic's effectiveness nonetheless. When Warner called himself a conservative in a television ad and pledged never to raise taxes, "our campaign just crashed," says Christopher LaCivita, who was Earley's campaign manager.
Republicans have had a lot less success in recent years at the corresponding task of persuading core supporters to back more moderate GOP candidates in places where moderation is the order of the day. Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler defeated a more moderate former congressman for the GOP's gubernatorial nomination last year, only to have his anti-abortion, pro-school-voucher positions flame out in the suburbs.
In California this year, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan-- who strays from the standard Republican positions on abortion, gun control and gay rights--faces serious primary opposition. Similar intraparty battles over social issues will be fought in Republican gubernatorial primaries in Illinois and Pennsylvania, while Democrats appear to face few conflicts of comparable intensity. "It's a difficult balancing act," says political scientist Mark Rozell of Catholic University. "On the one hand, Republicans need the energy and enthusiasm of the social conservatives. On the other hand, they don't want to be seen as captives of one constituent group in the party."
That is particularly true if it is a constituent group that is not growing in relative size. It remains true that among religious denominations, the observant and evangelical are gaining strength. They are the core of the loyalist GOP vote, and are likely to remain so. But John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, points out that those who are non-observant and unaffiliated are growing faster still. "The United States," he says, "is slowly but significantly seeing growth in the number of secular folks."
While conservative Republicans confront emerging weaknesses among secular, affluent suburbanites, they must also struggle with difficulties among the fastest growing ethnic groups. During the latter half of the 1990s, the number of non-Hispanic whites old enough to vote grew by just 2.2 percent, while the numbers of voting-age Hispanics grew by 16.4 percent.
It's true that Latinos are not a certain vote for Democrats, as they showed this fall when they abandoned the Democratic choices for mayor in New York City and Houston. "The assumption is that Hispanics are Democrats," says Eduardo Garza, the Chicagoland area director of the U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute. "That's changing."
Nevertheless, in courting Hispanics, Republicans have a lot of work to do. In California, largely in response to an anti-immigrant ballot proposition pushed by former Republican Governor Pete Wilson, Hispanics have become the essential factor in tilting the state legislature and congressional delegation firmly into Democratic hands.
In other major states, Republicans are working to avoid a result of that sort. In Florida, the party helped fend off a California-style anti-immigration ballot initiative. The chairman of the state GOP, Al Cardenas, is a Cuban American, as is Mel Martinez of Orlando, who was the Orange County executive before being tapped by Bush to serve as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Hispanic representation spreads from them downward throughout the party in Florida. "They may not approve of Republican policies that are this, that or the other," says Lou Oliver, chairman of the Orange County GOP, "but the Democrats are not going to be able to make the argument that Republicans are not friendly to Hispanics."
Even here, however, there are signs that changing demographics are having an effect at the polls. Hispanics made up less than 10 percent of the Orange County population in 1990, but they have accounted for about half of the county's rapid growth since then, and today make up nearly 20 percent of the population. Perhaps two-thirds of the county's Hispanic growth has come from Puerto Ricans moving down from New York and other points north in search of jobs or a pleasant place to retire.
In the wake of that growth, Democrats now enjoy a slight edge in Orange County voter registration, and Gore actually carried the county in 2000, something no Democrat had managed to accomplish since 1944. Doug Head, the Orange County Democratic chairman, happily spends a portion of his time wooing ex-Republicans to switch parties and run for office on the Democratic side. Republicans continue to hold most county offices, but as Oliver concedes, "it's clearly a challenge for us, given the historic propensity of Hispanics to vote for Democrats in other places in the country that they come from."
All of these developments, even the most gradual ones, are going to have an impact on the 2002 campaigns. Republicans who once ran largely on opposition to immigrants and affirmative action will find themselves seeking state and local office this year with a different sort of emphasis. Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant known for crafting incendiary conservative ads on social issues, is telling audiences that the demographic groups that support the GOP are shrinking, and that Republicans face a "marketing challenge" in appealing more strongly to minorities and women.
The GOP certainly has plenty of other weapons in its arsenal as it looks to woo voters with a variety of backgrounds. Republican candidates tend to be better-funded, and the party has as its leader a president whose approval ratings have broken all records--even if Bush's popularity didn't translate well for Republicans in 2001.
But as the election year begins, it seems increasingly clear that the crucial reality of political competition in 2002 is no longer Republican growth--it is the evenness of the contest between the two parties. That is a significant change from most of the 1990s.
Four years ago, then-U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich spoke before the Republican National Committee, taking as the text for his homily the annual report of the Coca-Cola Co. "The symbol of their annual report last year was infinity," Gingrich said, hinting at how high one's goals can get. Making the point more directly, the annual report said that the average human being consumes 48 ounces of liquid a day, and that "only" two of those ounces were currently Coca-Cola. Gingrich thought that both Coke and the Republican Party could still do a lot better.
That was at a time when the RNC could delight in blasting out faxes on practically a daily basis, highlighting the news of yet another local judge or town official who had switched to the Republican Party, usually in the South. The defections numbered in the hundreds. But now it's more often Democrats such as Florida's Doug Head who host fundraisers in their homes for candidates who used to be Republicans.
The two parties are in a condition of parity. And they are likely to stay that way for a while. By and large, Republicans have won all the offices they're likely to get in the Hamilton counties of the country. If they are to build a genuine 21st-century majority, it will have to be by other means.
