Battling for the Blocs

Though Americans increasingly act independent on Election Day, the traditional racial, religious and socioeconomic voting blocs are alive and, well, kicking for attention from the candidates. And they are getting it. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter are making specific appeals to traditional groups, notably the following five:

BLACKS. "Mr. Roosevelt, he was de po' man's friend," goes a Georgia fieldworkers' song, and for four decades blacks have voted overwhelmingly for the party of F.D.R. and the New Deal. With Carter's popularity among blacks at 83% in the latest Gallup poll, this year promises to be no different. Blacks are drawn to Carter by his fair treatment of them as Governor of Georgia, his Baptist evangelicalism, which echoes their own language of love and trust, the presence of several high-ranking blacks in his campaign, and his support of programs like welfare reform and national health insurance. In particular, with unemployment among blacks running at 19% in urban ghettos, the jobs issue works strongly in his favor.

Even without all that, black voters would still be in his corner. Observes David Dinkins, chairman of the Council of Black Elected Democrats of New York State: "We would have to embrace him anyway when you consider the alternative." Many blacks fear that Ford wants to dismantle the remaining social welfare programs that were set up largely for them during Lyndon Johnson's presidency.

Nonetheless, Ford's campaign aides still pay lip service to the idea of winning black votes. Claims Campaign Chairman James Baker: "President Ford has made more significant black appointments than any other President, and that gives us reason to be optimistic." Privately, however, Republican strategists foresee a black landslide for Carter.

Even so, Carter could be hurt by the traditionally low turnout of black voters. Four years ago, blacks gave almost 90% of their ballots to George McGovern, but only 52% of voting-age blacks went to the polls, compared with 65% of the whites. About 57% of the country's 15 million black adults are registered, v. 70% of the whites. Through registration drives in black neighborhoods, black leaders intend to sign up a million new voters and increase the black turnout to 60%--or 9 million in all. In this way, they hope to provide Carter's winning margin in the South as well as in some key industrial states and gain a bigger voice in his Administration.

FARMERS. Though the country's 1.5 million farmers are generally conservative and Republican, Ford is now about as popular as an early frost among many of them. They and their families make up less than 5% of the U.S. voting-age population, but their views are often shared by millions of other voters who depend on the farmers economically, such as people employed by farm suppliers and food processors. Four years ago, farmers gave Richard Nixon 71% of their votes. But farmers usually vote for the incumbent party only when farm prices are high. Lately, prices have been running below 1975 levels as buyers anticipate bumper harvests of corn and wheat and lower demand from abroad for U.S. grain because of good harvests in the Soviet Union and India. Last week, September wheat contracts closed in Chicago at $3.19 a bushel, down from $4.13 a year ago.

This spells trouble for Ford, who needs the farm vote, particularly in his Midwestern home base. For one thing, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz has been urging farmers for several years to expand production. Also, they are still smarting from the embargoes on grain exports imposed by the Nixon and Ford administrations in an effort to stem food price increases.

Ford's weaknesses, however, are balanced by some farm-belt strengths. Butz still enjoys great popularity among some farmers; so too does Kansan Robert Dole. The President has also won points with farmers by urging a large increase in estate-tax exemptions to benefit owners of family farms. Further, Carter lost some standing among farmers two weeks ago for doing a soft-shoe shuffle on embargoes, at first ruling them out, then saying that he would permit them in the event of a catastrophic crop failure.

But farmers like the idea that Carter is a farmer who knows their problems. During a recent Carter swing through Iowa, a farmer whispered to a friend, "It's just like having a family member come home, his being here." Carter told a farm audience, "I understand you, and you can understand me."

EVANGELICALS. Catholics and Jews may be wary of Carter's Southern Baptist religion, but it makes him enormously attractive to the country's 40 million evangelical Protestants (30 million of whom are white). They are heavily concentrated in 17 Southern and Border states but also have considerable strength in the Midwest. Conservative by nature, white evangelicals have tended in recent presidential elections to vote Republican, according to an analysis in the evangelical fortnightly Christianity Today. Carter's down-home appeal has scrambled the evangelicals' loyalty, as was demonstrated by their heavy vote for him in the primaries of Illinois, Indiana and other states where they are concentrated.

Some evangelicals are breaking with their tradition of not becoming involved in politics. Argues Harold Lindsell, editor of Christianity Today: "We are members of two kingdoms, God's and Caesar's, and we must participate in both." Evangelical periodicals are publishing articles on politics, and at least one has run a full-page ad paid for by a group called Evangelicals for Carter.

Not all the born-again interest in political action will benefit Carter, of course. Paul Henry, professor at the conservative Protestant Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Republican chairman in Ford's home county, argues that "Carter has been able to exploit the religious issue because he speaks the language more freely." But Henry and other evangelicals believe that many of the conservative Protestants' votes will eventually go to Episcopalian Ford, who professes to be something of an evangelical and whose son Michael attends the evangelical Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass. Ford has wooed the conservative Christian vote for months with the help of Richard Brannon, a Baptist minister and assistant personnel director at the White House.

For all of Ford's efforts, however, a number of experts agree with Jim Wallis, editor of the leftist evangelical magazine Sojourners, that "against Carter, he's just going to be out-evangelicaled--in Carter, evangelicals see they've got a real, live one all of their own."

CATHOLICS. The Boston Roman Catholic newspaper The Pilot recently front-paged a photograph of Ford bathed in a halo of light and ran two accompanying articles emphasizing his "cordial" relations with church leaders. It was an unmistakable token of the hierarchy's dissatisfaction with Carter's refusal to endorse a constitutional amendment on abortion.

As Sociologist Thomas Gannon of Chicago's Loyola University points out, "The day in which the bishops could command votes is over." But steady criticism of Carter by the hierarchy is hurting him among some of the country's 33 million voting-age Catholics, whose ties to the Democratic Party have loosened in recent years. He has no trace of bigotry, and attitudes toward Catholics have softened among Southern evangelicals, but many church members remember the rabid anti-Catholicism of Southern Baptists of the recent past.

A recent TIME/Yankelovich poll found that Catholics support Carter over Ford, 48% to 37%; the latest Gallup poll reports that 54% of Catholic voters favor Carter. No Democrat since modern political polling began in the 1930s has won the White House without close to two-thirds of the Catholic vote, though that rule of thumb may not hold now because of the possibility of unusually high support for Carter among normally Republican evangelical Protestants.

Many of those Catholics who also qualify as urban ethnics are suspicious of Carter's background and lifestyle. They are unsettled by black support for him and fear that he does not understand their problems. Some Italian Americans, who constitute 20% of the 25 million white American ethnics likely to vote, were offended by his failure, apparently through an oversight, to meet with a group of their leaders at the Democratic Convention. To make amends, Carter met with Italian-American leaders in New York City last week and blundered into another apology for his "ethnic purity" gaffe of last April. He was immediately interrupted by City Councilman Louis Gigante, a Catholic priest, who said: "We knew what you meant, and you were right."

In contrast to Carter, Ford has less of a culture gap to bridge with the ethnics. Says New York Secretary of State Mario Cuomo, a Democrat and Carter supporter: "Ford is down to earth. He's a jock. Somehow he looks like a Catholic to some Catholics." Still, large numbers of ethnics are angry about U.S. acquiescence to the 1975 Helsinki accord on European security, which ratified the postwar boundaries of Eastern Europe. But many ethnics like Ford's conservative views on social welfare programs and his support for increased defense spending, giving him an opportunity to make inroads in traditionally Democratic neighborhoods.

BLUE-COLLAR WORKERS. From auto workers to postmen, union leaders are endorsing Carter and assigning volunteers to register new voters and pound pavements. Boasts Thomas Bradley, head of the Metropolitan Baltimore Council of AFL-CIO Unions: "I haven't seen such unanimity among different unions since the Johnson-Goldwater election." This year, union help will be particularly valuable because what labor does on its own is not subject to the new federal election spending limits.

Still, Ford's campaign aides profess confidence about winning many votes among the 30 million blue-collar workers. Says John Michels, the President's New England coordinator: "You can be firmly united in giving the marching orders, but you gotta have the troops behind you to win the fight." While blue-collar voters favored Carter over Ford by 55% to 32% in the recent Yankelovich survey, 29% of the Carter supporters among them harbored doubts that he is the right man for the job; only 13% of Ford's backers had similar misgivings.

To the extent that blue-collar workers vote on the basis of Catholic or ethnic issues, Ford could benefit. In addition, he hopes to capitalize on the slowdown in inflation. But blue-collar voters seem more concerned about unemployment than inflation. Says Mike LaVelle, the Chicago Tribune's blue-collar columnist: "Jobs are really it. Carter doesn't have to do anything but keep pointing out the percentage of unemployed." Thus, the bread-and-butter worries created by the recession stand to produce more labor votes for Carter than all of the pleas of union leaders.

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