The US Is Up For Grabs and Anyone Could Win It

All politics is local, the saying goes. The adage is particularly true in the United States. The attempt to understand next year's presidential election contest in simple terms of Left versus Right is profoundly misleading. The US is a country with culturally distinct regions bigger than many nation states. The party that wins next year will represent a confederation of regions, not a consistent political ideology.

Consider Howard Dean, the charismatic Vermont Governor who has emerged as front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. According to the media, he is a "liberal". But Dean is considered liberal chiefly because he opposed the Iraq war, which his rivals, North Carolina Senator John Edwards and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, supported. Kerry is a consistent liberal and Edwards a Southern working-class populist. Dean describes himself as a "fiscal conservative and a social liberal", a formula which described Bill Clinton, who also favoured universal healthcare and was thought of as a "centrist".

The degree of flux in American politics is clear, from the fact that Democrats such as Dean are now likely to describe themselves as "fiscal conservatives", while Republicans, once the guardians of fiscal probity, show no qualms about creating deficits by cutting taxes for the rich. In the 1950s the Republicans were the party of isolationism and protectionism; today, they are the party of foreign wars and free trade.

Geography explains these reversals. The South has always been martial in its outlook because white Southerners emulated the aristocratic culture of the Southern elite, for whom a military career was more honourable than one in commerce and industry. When the Democratic Party was predominantly Southern, from the 1830s to the 1930s, its priorities were those of the white South: foreign expansion and free trade (along with slavery, then segregation). The dominant parties in the North -- the Federalists, Whigs and Lincoln-to-Hoover Republicans -- reflected the priorities of the Northern manufacturers: industrial protection and "dollar diplomacy" rather than the dispatching of the Marines.

As a result of the New Deal, the programme of public spending and welfare reform introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, and the Civil Rights revolution in the 1960s, there has been a political inversion. The former heartland of the Democrats -- the South and West -- is now the base of the Republican Party. The historic homeland of anti-military, protectionist Lincoln-to-Hoover Republicans -- the Northeast and Midwest, and the Pacific Coast from northern California to Canada -- has become the new base of the Democratic Party. The result: the Democrats of 2003, like most Republicans of 1903, are the party wary of both economic globalisation and foreign military intervention.

Viewed in this light, the choice for the Democrats is not to go Left or Right, but North or South. The last three Democratic Presidents -- Johnson, Carter and Clinton -- were Southerners. By nominating a Southerner who is perceived as centrist or conservative, the increasingly northern Democrats split the new Republican base.

This strategy, however, backfired in 2000. The Democrats tailored their campaign to white Southern swing voters by emphasising religion and family values, the favourite topics of the Republican Right. By doing so, however, they alienated many secular progressives outside the South. Their votes for the third-party candidate Ralph Nader may have cost the Democrats the White House.

The alternative strategy for the Democrats is to write off the South and to consolidate a Northeastern-Midwestern-West Coast majority. The principal barrier to this is the presidential electoral college, which exaggerates the influence of small-population states. Some of these are in Democratic territory in New England (Howard Dean's own Vermont) but most of them are in the "heartland" prairie and Rocky Mountain states. In recent decades most of these states, which used to be politically progressive, have turned Republican, giving that party control of the White House and the Senate (where, as in the electoral college, small population states are over-represented).

Why have the historically progressive heartland states teamed up with the Southern Right? In the past few decades there has been a net migration from California and the West Coast of working-class whites and blacks who have been squeezed out between the growing Latino immigrant population and the super-rich. Embittered white immigrants in states such as Idaho and Colorado tend to be more hostile to the liberalism of the coastal states they left than older white heartland natives.

The Democrats have also become the party of the cities, of the urban poor and of elites affluent enough to live well downtown. The map of Bush and Gore country, resolved into fine details, shows urban Gore neighborhoods and rural Bush counties. The Republicans, for their part, are the party of rural and small town America.

Neither party represents the new suburban America. As the Democratic electorate becomes increasingly urban and foreign-born, the Democratic Party looks ever more culturally alien to the native-born white middle class. The Republicans owe their success to an alliance of the countryside and the suburbs against the inner cities -- that is, against the black and immigrant poor and urban gay culture.

But the country-suburb alliance on the Right is not stable. To begin with, rural America is shrinking. Also, the Republicans have lost the culture war. Having failed to overturn the Supreme Court's legalisation of abortion, the Right is now fuming over the legalisation this summer of gay sex and racial preferences by a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees. Since the 1960s, the social conservatives have lost every battle -- against racial integration and racial preferences, against feminism, against abortion, against the relaxation of censorship, and now against gay rights.

These geographic and cultural factors explain why neither party has been able to establish a solid majority since the 1960s. The Republicans have an advantage in the electoral college, given the present alliance of the heartland states with the South and a voting system which disproportionately favours states with small populations. To win a "real" majority, moderate suburbanites must become the senior partner in the Republicans' suburb-country coalition. But under George W. Bush, the rural Right has been more influential in the party than ever. And the very success of Republicans in persuading American voters, after 9/11, that they are now safe may permit the Democrats to change the subject to domestic issues such as health, education and pensions.

The Democrats have a different problem. From the 1960s to the 1990s, conservative white Southerners were important swing voters. Today, however, most conservative white Southerners are solid Republicans. The important swing voters now are white working-class Roman Catholics in the Midwest who tend to be socially conservative and economically liberal, and Latinos, whose values are similar. This suggests that Democrats should write off most of the South and concentrate on adding Midwestern Catholics and Latinos to their northern and West Coast base, while peeling off some underpopulated heartland states rich in electoral votes.

The upshot is that anyone who compares next year's election to an earlier US election can be dismissed. So can anyone who claims that this will be a critical realigning election. No matter who wins, it is unlikely that either party will be able to consolidate a lasting majority. The regional bases of the parties are shifting. Immigration is transforming the American population. And the familiar issues from the 1960s -- which defined the polarised left-right system for the past three decades -- are unlikely to continue to do so, now that the liberal positions on most issues involving sex, reproduction and race have prevailed. Meanwhile, the two parties are divided internally on the new issues of the 21st century, ranging from genetic modification of crops and people to "humanitarian wars".

For 30 years American politics has been frozen in the same pattern. It is about to become interesting again.