Chart 142. The Decline in the Big City Presidential Vote, 1960–68
* The eleven largest cities of 1960 (excluding Sun Belt Houston); several will no longer be on the list when the 1970 Census is completed.
The long-range meaning of the political upheaval of 1968 rests on theRepublican opportunity to fashion a majority among the 57 per cent of the American electorate which voted to eject the Democratic Party from national power. To begin with, more than half of this protesting 57 per cent were firm Republicans from areas—Southern California to Long Island’s Suffolk County—or sociocultural backgrounds with a growing GOP bias. Some voted for George Wallace, but most backed Richard Nixon, providing the bulk of his Election Day support. Only a small minority of 1968 Nixon backers—perhaps several million liberal Republicans and independents from Maine and Oregon to Fifth Avenue—cast what may be their last Republican presidential ballots because of the partisan re-alignment taking place. The third major anti-Democratic voting stream of 1968—and the most decisive—was that of the fifteen million or so conservative Democrats who shunned Hubert Humphrey to divide about evenly between Richard Nixon and George Wallace. Such elements stretched from the “Okie” Great Central Valley of California to the mountain towns of Idaho, Florida’s space centers, rural South Carolina, Bavarian Minnesota, the Irish sidewalks of New York and the Levittowns of Megalopolis. Map 3 shows the locales of Democratic disaffection.
Although most of George Wallace’s votes came from Democrats rather than Republicans, they were conservatives—Southerners, Borderers, German and Irish Catholics—who had been trending Republican prior to 1968. As Maps 14, 36, and 41 illustrate, the Wallace vote followed the cultural geography of obsolescent conservative (often Southern) Democratic tradition. There was no reliable Wallace backing among blue-collar workers and poor whites as a class; industrial centers in the Yankee sphere of influence from Duluth to Scranton, Fall River and Biddeford shunned the Alabama ex-governor with a mere 2 per cent to 3 per cent of the vote. Areas of eroding Democratic tradition were the great breeding grounds of Wallace voters.
In the South, Wallace drew principally on conservative Democrats quitting the party they had long succored and controlled. Generally speaking, Wallace’s Southern strength was greatest in the Democratic Party’s historic (pre-1964) lowland strongholds, while the Alabaman’s worst Southern percentages came in the Republican highlands. White voters throughout most sections of the Deep South went two-to-one for Wallace. In the more Republican Outer South, only one white voter out of three supported the third-party candidate. In the South as a whole, 85 to 90 per cent of the white electorate cast Nixon or Wallace votes against the re-aligning national Democratic Party in 1968, an unprecedented magnitude of disaffection which indicates the availability of the Wallace vote to the future GOP.
Four of the five Wallace states had gone Republican in 1964, and although the Alabaman greatly enlarged the scope of Southern revolt by attracting most of the (poor white or Outer South Black Belt) Southerners who had hitherto resisted Republican or States Rights candidacies, much of his tide had already been flowing for Goldwater. Nor does the Nixon Administration have to bid much ideologically for this electorate. Despite his success in enlarging the scope of white Southern revolt, George Wallace failed to reach far enough or strongly enough beyond the Deep South to give his American Independent Party the national base required for a viable future. Republican Nixon won most of the Outer South, establishing the GOP as the ascending party of the local white majority. Having achieved statewide success only in the Deep South, and facing competition from a Southern Republicanism mindful of its opportunity, the Wallace movement cannot maintain an adequate political base and is bound to serve, like past American third parties, as a way station for groups abandoning one party for another. Some Wallace voters were longtime Republicans, but the great majority were conservative Democrats who have been moving—and should continue to do so—towards the GOP.
The linkage of Wallace voting to the obsolescent Democratic loyalties of certain areas and groups can also be proved far beyond the old Confederacy. Map 36 shows how the pattern of Wallace support in the Ohio Valley, instead of standing out in backlash-prone industrial areas, followed rural contours of traditional Democratic strength, moving farthest north along the Scioto River, central Ohio’s roadway of Virginia and Kentucky migration. And in New York and Pennsylvania, Map 14 illustrates how certain levels of Wallace support probed farthest north along the Susquehanna, Delaware and Hudson valleys, outliers of traditionally Democratic non-Yankee rural strength. Out West, Wallace percentages were greatest in the Oklahoma- and Texas-settled towns of California’s Central Valley, the populist mining and logging counties of the Rocky Mountains, the traditionally Democratic Mormon reaches of Idaho, and in Alaska’s long-Democratic sluice and sawmill districts.
In addition to Western or Southern Democrats of conservative or populist bent, Wallace also scored well among Catholics, but only in certain areas. From Maine to Michigan, across most of the belt of Yankee-settled territory where local cleavage, though changing, still pits Protestant Republicans against urban Catholic Democrats, the Catholic trend away from the Democrats was slight. However, in the greater New York area, as well as Gary and Cleveland, where minority group (Negro and/or Jewish) power has taken control of local Democratic machinery, Catholic backing of Wallace was considerable. Here, as discussed in Chapters II and IV, Catholics are leaving the Democratic Party.
The common denominator of Wallace support, Catholic or Protestant, is alienation from the Democratic Party and a strong trend—shown in other years and other contests—towards the GOP. Although most of Wallace’s votes came from Democrats, he principally won those in motion between a Democratic past and a Republican future. In the last few weeks of the campaign, labor union activity, economic issues and the escalating two-party context of October, 1968, drew many Wallace-leaning Northern blue-collar workers back into the Democratic fold. Only those fully alienated by the national Democratic Party stuck with Wallace in the voting booth. Offered a three-party context, these sociopolitical streams preferred populist Wallace; a two-party context would have drawn them into the GOP. Three quarters or more of the Wallace electorate represented lost Nixon votes.
A few states—Mississippi or Alabama—may indulge in future third-party or states rights efforts. The Wallace party itself, however, has dubious prospects, being not a broad-based national grouping but a transient 1968 aggregation of conservative Democrats otherwise trending into the Republican Party. Generally speaking, the South is more realistic than its critics believe, and nothing more than an effective and responsibly conservative Nixon Administration is necessary to bring most of the Southern Wallace electorate into the fold against a Northeastern liberal Democratic presidential nominee. Abandonment of civil rights enforcement would be self-defeating. Maintenance of Negro voting rights in Dixie, far from being contrary to GOP interests, is essential if southern conservatives are to be pressured into switching to the Republican Party—for Negroes are beginning to seize control of the national Democratic Party in some Black Belt areas.
Successful moderate conservatism is also likely to attract to the Republican side some of the Northern blue-collar workers who flirted with George Wallace but ultimately backed Hubert Humphrey. Fears that a Republican administration would undermine Social Security, Medicare, collective bargaining and aid to education played a major part in keeping socially conservative blue-collar workers and senior citizens loyal to the 1968 Democratic candidate. Assuming that a Nixon administration can dispel these apprehensions, it ought to be able to repeat—with much more permanence—Eisenhower’s great blue-collar success of 1956. Sociologically, the Republican Party is becoming much more lower-middle class and much less establishmentarian than it was during the Nineteen-Fifties, and pursuit of an increasing portion of the Northern blue-collar electorate—an expansion of its 1968 Catholic triumph in greater New York City—would be a logical extension of this trend.
Although the appeal of a successful Nixon Administration and the lack of a Wallace candidacy would greatly swell the 1972 Republican vote in the South, West, Border and the Catholic North, the 1972 GOP may well simultaneously lose a lesser number of 1968 supporters among groups reacting against the party’s emerging Southern, Western and New York Irish majority. As discussed in Chapters II, IV and V, Yankees, Megalopolitan silk-stocking voters and Scandinavians from Maine across the Great Lakes to the Pacific all showed a distinct Democratic trend in the years between 1960 and 1968. Such disaffection will doubtlessly continue, but its principal impact has already been felt. Richard Nixon won only 38 per cent of the total 1968 presidential vote on Manhattan’s rich East Side; he took only 44 per cent of the ballots in Scarsdale, the city’s richest suburb; New England’s Yankee counties and towns produced Nixon majorities down 10 per cent to 15 per cent from 1960 levels; fashionable San Francisco shifted toward the Democrats; and Scandinavian Minnesota and Washington state backed Humphrey, as did the Scandinavian northwest of Wisconsin.
As Map 3 shows, all of these locales shifted towards the Democrats during the 1960–68 period. Because the local re-alignment pivoted on liberal Republicans rather than conservative Democrats, these areas evidenced little or no support for George Wallace (see Map 2). Beyond the bounds of states that went Democratic in 1968, the Yankee, silk-stocking establishmentarian and Scandinavian trends predominate only in Vermont, New Hampshire and Oregon. Although Northern California, Wisconsin, Ohio’s old Western Reserve, central Iowa and parts of the Dakotas are likewise influenced, other conservative trends—those of Southern California suburbanites, German Catholics of the upper Farm Belt and the quasi-Southern Democrats of the Ohio Valley—should keep those states Republican. Yankee, Northeastern silk-stocking and Scandinavian disaffection with the GOP is concentrated in states which the party has already lost, and it menaces only a few states which the GOP won in 1968.
The upcoming cycle of American politics is likely to match a dominant Republican Party based in the Heartland, South and California against a minority Democratic Party based in the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest (and encompassing Southern as well as Northern Negroes). With such support behind it, the GOP can easily afford to lose the states of Massachusetts, New York and Michigan—and is likely to do so except in landslide years. Together with the District of Columbia, the top ten Humphrey states—Hawaii, Washington, Minnesota, Michigan, West Virginia, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine—should prove to be the core of national Democratic strength. As drawn in Map 4, the new battlegrounds of quadrennial presidential politics are likely to be California, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Unluckily for the Democrats, their major impetus is centered in stagnant Northern industrial states—and within those states, in old decaying cities, in a Yankee countryside that has fewer people than in 1900, and in the most expensive suburbs. Beyond this, in the South and West, the Democrats dominate only two expanding voting blocs—Latins and Negroes. From space-center Florida across the booming Texas plains to the Los Angeles–San Diego suburban corridor, the nation’s fastest-growing areas are strongly Republican and conservative. Even in the Northeast, the few rapidly growing suburbs are conservative-trending areas (see Chart 51). Because of this demographic pattern, the South and West are gaining electoral votes and national political power at the expense of the Northeast. Chart 135 illustrates how the conservative Sun Belt cities are undergoing a population boom—and getting more conservative—while the old liberal cities of the Northeast decline. And Chart 134 shows how the Northeast is steadily losing relative political importance to the Sun Belt.
One of the greatest political myths of the decade—a product of liberal self-interest—is that the Republican Party cannot attain national dominance without mobilizing liberal support in the big cities, appealing to “liberal” youth, empathizing with “liberal” urbanization, gaining substantial Negro support and courting the affluent young professional classes of “suburbia.” The actual demographic and political facts convey a very different message.
Chart 142. The Decline in the Big City Presidential Vote, 1960–68
* The eleven largest cities of 1960 (excluding Sun Belt Houston); several will no longer be on the list when the 1970 Census is completed.
As Chart 13 suggests, the big city political era is over in the United States. Chart 142 lists the considerable 1960–68 slippage in the presidential vote cast by the leading big cities. With Negroes moving into the cities, whites have moved out. Moreover, white urban populations are getting increasingly conservative. Richard Nixon and George Wallace together won 40 per cent of the vote in liberal New York City. Perhaps more to the point, leading big city states like New York, Michigan and Massachusetts are no longer necessary for national Republican victory.
Youth is important, but voters under 25 cast only 7.4 per cent of the nation’s ballots in 1968. And while many Northeastern young people are more liberal and Democratic than their parents—especially the affluent and anarchic progeny of the Establishment—the reverse seems to be true in Southern, Border, Rocky Mountain, Catholic, lower middle class and working-class areas. In these locales, the young electorate’s trend against local political tradition helps the GOP, as does resentment of the blithe nihilism of the children of the affluent society.
While urbanization is changing the face of America, and the GOP must take political note of this fact, it presents the opposite of a problem. A generation ago, the coming of age of the working-class central cities condemned the Republican Party to minority status, but the new “urbanization”—suburbanization is often a better description—is a middle-class impetus shaping the same ignominy for the Democrats. All across the nation, the fastest-growing urban areas are steadily increasing their Republican pluralities, while the old central cities—seat of the New Deal era—are casting steadily fewer votes for Democratic liberalism. No major American city is losing population so rapidly as arch-Democratic and establishmentarian Boston, while the fastest-growing urban area in the nation is Southern California’s staunchly conservative Orange County, and the fastest growing cities are conservative strongholds like Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Anaheim, San Diego and Fort Lauderdale.
Substantial Negro support is not necessary to national Republican victory in light of the 1968 election returns. Obviously, the GOP can build a winning coalition without Negro votes. Indeed, Negro-Democratic mutual identification was a major source of Democratic loss—and Republican or American Independent Party profit—in many sections of the nation.
Chapter II analyzes the alleged suburban “liberal” trend. The liberal and Democratic 1960–68 shifts of a few (now atypical) silk-stocking counties were dwarfed by the conservative trends of the vast new tracts of middle-class suburbia. Actually, the Democratic upswing in a number of rich suburban areas around New York, Boston and Philadelphia is nothing more than an extension of the liberal establishmentarian behavior of Manhattan’s East Side, Boston’s Beacon Hill and Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. Typical suburban behavior is something else again.
Centered in the Sun Belt, the nation’s heaviest suburban growth is solidly middle-class and conservative. Contemporary suburban expansion in the Northeast pales next to the spread of the Florida, Texas, Arizona and Southern California suburbs. Rapid, although less spectacular, suburban growth is occurring in the areas around Camden (New Jersey), Washington, D.C., Richmond, Atlanta, Memphis, St, Louis, Chicago, Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Denver. These suburbs are also conservative, often highly so. And even the few fast-growing Northeastern suburban counties—Suffolk, New York; Burlington, New Jersey; Prince Georges, Maryland—are conservative-trending, middle-class sections (see Chart 51). The principal exception is Maryland’s rich but fast-expanding Montgomery County, liberal seat of the upper echelons of Washington’s federal bureaucracy.
From a national perspective, the silk-stocking liberal suburbs of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and (to a lesser extent) Chicago and Washington cast only a minute fraction of the ballots wielded by the preponderance of unfashionable lower-middle- and middle-income suburbs. And because more and more new suburbanites come from lower-middle-income backgrounds, this gap should widen.
The National Commission on Urban Problems, chaired by former Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, has drawn attention to the increasingly powerful shift of blue-collar and lower-middle-class population to suburbia, but surprisingly few establishment liberals understand or admit these demographic facts of life. Instead, they typically portray the large conservative majority of Americans as a mere obsolescent and shrinking periphery of society, meanwhile painting their own peer group as the expanding segment of the nation committed to cosmopolitan thinking, technological sophistication and cultural change.
Chart 143. Central City-Suburban Apartheid: The Demographic Projections of the President’s National Commission on Urban Problems, July, 1968
Note—As the chart indicates, the Commission expects the nation’s growth over the next twenty years to ignore the cities and focus on suburbia. Indeed, only the urban growth of the South and West will prevent a sharp decline in the nation’s central city population based on the steady shrinkage of northeastern central cities.
This myopia has considerable precedent. Since the days of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists, the United States—and the Northeast in particular—has periodically supported a privileged elite, blind to the needs and interests of the large national majority. The corporate welfarists, planners and academicians of the Liberal Establishment are the newest of these elites, and their interests—for one thing, a high and not necessarily too productive rate of government social, educational, scientific and research spending—are as vested as those of Coolidge-Hoover era financiers and industrialists. The great political upheaval of the Nineteen-Sixties is not that of Senator Eugene McCarthy’s relatively small group of upper-middle-class and intellectual supporters, but a populist revolt of the American masses who have been elevated by prosperity to middle-class status and conservatism. Their revolt is against the caste, policies and taxation of the mandarins of Establishment liberalism.
Granted that the new populist coalition includes very few Negroes—they have become almost entirely Democratic and exert very little influence on the GOP—black solidarity within the Democratic Party is rapidly enlarging Negro influence and job opportunities in many old Northern central cities. In New York, few Negroes have deserted the Democratic Party even to support Republican liberals Rockefeller, Javits, and Lindsay (see Chart 31). These intensely Democratic Negro loyalties are not rooted in fear of the GOP or its promise of a return to law and order, but in a realization that the Democratic Party can serve as a vehicle for Negro advancement—just as other groups have used politics to climb the social and economic ladder of urban America.
Ethnic polarization is a long-standing hallmark of American politics, not an unprecedented and menacing development of 1968. As illustrated throughout this book, ethnic and cultural division has so often shaped American politics that, given the immense midcentury impact of Negro enfranchisement and integration, reaction to this change almost inevitably had to result in political realignment. Moreover, American history has another example of a persecuted minority—the Nineteenth-Century Irish—who, in the face of considerable discrimination and old-stock animosity, likewise poured their ethnic numbers into the Democratic Party alone, winning power, jobs and socioeconomic opportunity through local political skill rather than the benevolence of usually-Republican national administrations.
For a half-century after the Civil War, the regular Democratic fidelity of the unpopular Irish city machines helped keep much of the nation Republican, and it seems possible that rising Negro participation in (national) Democratic politics from Manhattan to Mississippi may play a similar role in the post-1968 cycle. Growing Negro influence in—and conservative Southern, Western and Catholic departure from—the Democratic Party also suggests that Northeastern liberals ought to be able to dominate the party, which in turn must accelerate the sectional and ideological re-alignment already under way.
To the extent that the ethnic and racial overtones of American political behavior and alignment are appreciated, they are often confused or mis-stated. For example, far from being opposed by all non-whites, Richard Nixon was strongly supported by one non-white group—the Chinese. San Francisco’s Chinese electorate was more Republican in 1968 than the city’s white population. Nor is today’s Republican Party Protestant rather than Catholic. In New York City, the party is becoming the vehicle of the Italians and Irish, and in the Upper Farm Belt—Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota—German Catholics are moving to the fore. From the first days of the Republic, American politics have been a maze of ethnic, cultural and sectional oppositions and loyalties, and this has not deterred progress or growth. The new popular conservative majority has many ethnic strains, and portraits showing it as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant monolith are highly misleading.
The emerging Republican majority spoke clearly in 1968 for a shift away from the sociological jurisprudence, moral permissiveness, experimental residential, welfare and educational programming and massive federal spending by which the Liberal (mostly Democratic) Establishment sought to propagate liberal institutions and ideology—and all the while reap growing economic benefits. The dominion of this impetus is inherent in the list of Republican-trending groups and potentially Republican Wallace electorates of 1968: Southerners, Borderers, Germans, Scotch-Irish, Pennsylvania Dutch, Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans and other urban Catholics, middle-class suburbanites, Sun Belt residents, Rocky Mountain and Pacific Interior populists. Democrats among these groups were principally alienated from their party by its social programs and increasing identification with the Northeastern Establishment and ghetto alike. Except among isolationist Germans, resentment of the Vietnamese war, far from helping to forge the GOP majority, actually produced Democratic gains among the groups most affected: silk-stocking Megalopolitans, the San Francisco-Berkeley-Madison-Ann Arbor electorate, Scandinavian progressives and Jews. As for the Republican trend groups, nothing characterizes their outlook so much as a desire to dispel the Liberal Establishment’s philosophy of taxation and redistribution (partly to itself) and reverse the encroachment of government in the social life of the nation.
Shorn of power, stripped of vested interests in misleading and unsuccessful programs, the Liberal Establishment may narrow its gap between words and deeds which helped to drive racial and youthful minorities into open revolt. So changed, Democratic liberalism will once again become a vital and creative force in national politics, usually too innovative to win a presidential race, but injecting a needed leavening of humanism into the middle-class realpolitik of the new Republican coalition.
Because the Republicans are little dependent on the Liberal Establishment or urban Negroes—the two groups most intimately, though dissimilarly, concerned with present urban and welfare policies—they have the political freedom to disregard the multitude of vested interests which have throttled national urban policy. The GOP is particularly lucky not to be weighted down with commitment to the political blocs, power brokers and poverty concessionaires of the decaying central cities of the North, now that national growth is shifting to suburbia, the South and the West. The American future lies in a revitalized countryside, a demographically ascendant Sun Belt and suburbia, and new towns—perhaps mountainside linear cities astride monorails 200 miles from Phoenix, Memphis or Atlanta. National policy will have to direct itself towards this future and its constituencies; and perhaps an administration so oriented can also deal realistically with the central cities where Great Society political largesse has so demonstrably failed.
When new eras and alignments have evolved in American politics, the ascending party has ridden the economic and demographic wave of the future: with Jefferson, a nation pushing inland from the Federalist seaboard and Tidewater; with Jackson, the trans-Appalachian New West; with Lincoln, the free-soil West and industrial North; with McKinley, a full-blown industrial North feeding from a full dinner pail; and with Roosevelt, the emergence of the big cities and the coming of age of the immigrant masses. Now it is Richard Nixon’s turn to build a new era on the immense middle-class impetus of Sun Belt and suburbia. Thus, it is appropriate that much of the emerging Republican majority lies in the top growth states (California, Arizona, Texas and Florida) or new suburbia, while Democratic trends correlate with stability and decay (New England, New York City, Michigan, West Virginia and San Francisco-Berkeley).
Map 47 sketches the emerging Republican majority. The GOP core areas are the Mountain, Farm and Outer South states. The Deep South will become a GOP core area once it abandons third-party schemes. The Democratic stronghold is obvious: New York and New England. Most of the upcoming cycle’s serious presidential campaign strategy will relate to three battleground areas: (1) the Pacific; (2) the Ohio-Mississippi Valley (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Missouri); and (3) the non-Yankee Northeast (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland). Overall trends favor the Republicans in each of these battlegrounds.
Explanation of Map 47
A. Plains and Mountain States—With 61 electoral votes, these constitute the conservative geographical heartland of the emerging Republican majority.
B. The Outer South—The states of Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee are not only conservative but ever more reliably Republican in presidential elections. Their 50 electoral votes are vulnerable only to Republican Administration policies which keep alive third-party sentiment.
C. The Contingent South—The conservative Deep South and Arkansas (totaling 53 electoral votes) will join GOP ranks—by default—against Northern liberal Democrats, provided simply that Republican policies pay sufficient attention to conservative viewpoints to undercut third-party movements and create a national Republican vs. national Democratic context.
D. Texas—Without third-party interference, Texas (25 electoral votes) will support moderate conservative national Republicanism against Northern Democratic liberalism. The South and rock-ribbed conservative sections of the Heartland have 189 of the 270 electoral votes needed to elect a President. Moderate conservatism will forge its emerging Republican majority in several battleground areas: The Ohio-Mississippi Valley (93 electoral votes); the Pacific (60); the Upper Mississippi Valley (31); and the non-Yankee Northeast (59).
E. The Ohio-Mississippi Valley—The erosion of Civil War-rooted German and Border Democratic fidelity, together with growing white urban Catholic conservatism from Cleveland to St. Louis should put most of the key 93 Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia electoral votes into the GOP column.
F. The Pacific—California, which casts 40 of the 60 Pacific electoral votes, is becoming more Republican than the nation as a whole in response to the middle-class population explosion of Southern California.
G. The Upper Mississippi Valley—The GOP is not on the upswing in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin—old Yankee-Scandinavian party strongholds—but it remains likely to win Iowa’s and Wisconsin’s share of 31 electoral votes.
H. The Non-Yankee Northeast—Of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, the latter three (30 electoral votes), all pushing below the Mason-Dixon Line, are particularly likely to participate in the emerging Republican majority.
It is doubtful whether either party could turn back the clock, but neither has attempted to do so. The 1968 election returns were barely final before Richard Nixon announced that he was transferring his voting residence from New York to Florida, and picked a cabinet notably short on representatives of the Northeastern Establishment. And the Democrats waited only a little longer to replace Louisiana’s Russell Long with Massachusetts’ Edward Kennedy as their Senate Whip. A new era has begun.
