Published Sunday, Nov. 19, 2000, in the San Jose Mercury News

Landscape of loyalties

BY MARY ANNE OSTROM AND JIM PUZZANGHERA

The United States is immediately recognizable on any classroom map. But erase the patchwork of yellows, purples and greens typically used to separate one state from another, color the map based on the 3,142 American counties' recent presidential votes, and it looks like a very different country. A country divided in ways that have little to do with physical borders and everything to do with the type of people who live within those lines.

Voters for Al Gore and the Democrats hug the West Coast and the Mississippi River and stretch through the large cities of the South and Midwest and up into the heavily Democratic Northeast.

The country of George W. Bush and the Republicans is just about everything else: almost all of the vast interior West and the sparsely populated heartland, along with the rural counties of the South, Midwest and Northeast.

But the divisions are more complex than mere geography. Cities are largely the home of minorities. Suburbs and small towns are mostly white. Union voters cluster in urban and suburban pockets throughout the Midwest and Northeast. Few union members reside in the largely ``right to work'' states of the South and the interior West.

With the nation prosperous and facing no grave threats abroad, and with both candidates lacking the charisma to lure large numbers of crossover voters, some of the traditional political divisions of our nation -- urban/rural, white/black, and rich/poor -- have been revealed with great starkness. So has the divide between men and women, which was first widely apparent in 1980.

But, analysts say, while these divisions are clear, partisans at the extremes of the political spectrum overshadow a large middle. Many of those middle voters had a hard time making up their minds between two moderate-sounding candidates who took turns displaying their strengths and weaknesses.

That, of course, helps explain why the final vote was so close that a winner could not be declared on Election Day, or during the many days of legal maneuvering that followed.

Ironically, centrism drove voters back to their political roots. And in doing so, several key demographic groups also split in more traditional ways.

``Obviously they're divided. But they're divided around these two reasonably centrist candidates,'' said Howard Gold, an associate professor of government at Smith College who has studied American political behavior. ``Because both candidates were centrist and some people had difficulty choosing, traditional cleavages reasserted themselves.''

The phenomenon already has a name: retro-politics. The Pew Foundation coined the phrase last year as it studied the 2000 election campaign. What it means is that, without a candidate like Ronald Reagan, who had enormous appeal for some Democrats, people generally settle back into the comfort of their original party. The 1999 Pew report put it this way: Party divisions ``are more traditional than what we found in 1987 at the end of the Reagan era or in 1994 on the eve of the Gingrich revolution,'' which gave Republicans control of Congress.

Not only did party loyalists stick with their candidates, but swing voters -- moderates and independents without strong political leanings -- behaved differently than they had in recent elections. Several national elections in the past two decades have been decided by these voters. They helped Ronald Reagan win the presidency in 1980, and did the same for President Bill Clinton in 1992.

But unlike in 1980 or even 1992, those voters are no longer economically stressed. The ``angry white males'' who helped push Republicans to victory in 1980 and 1994 now trade stock tips. And, unlike 1996, when the ``soccer moms'' helped re-elect Clinton, suburban women this year were not turned off by harsh GOP policies of the past.

Without an all-encompassing issue to drive voters one way or the other, ``the swing vote didn't swing,'' said Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo. ``It split.''

Such an even divide in the electorate presents an immense challenge for the nation's leaders. The next president and the closely divided Congress will have to govern a diverse people with divergent views of government's role, the top priorities of the country and even what makes a good leader.

But before looking forward, the next president might want to look back -- to the contested election he'll surely want to put behind him.

Overshadowed by the colossal story of who actually won more votes Nov. 7 are other stories that illustrate the nation's political geography on the threshold of the 21st century: how voters in urban areas differed greatly from their counterparts in the countryside; how blacks resisted GOP pitches and backed Gore even more strongly than they did Clinton; how economic class affected votes, even in these good economic times; how the ``gender gap'' again played an important role in a presidential election; and how Bush failed to win as much support as he hoped from the traditionally Democratic, and growing, Latino electorate.
MARY ANNE OSTROM is a political writer for the Mercury News. JIM PUZZANGHERA is the Washington bureau chief. They wrote this article and related stories inside for Perspective.