The Building Blocs of Victory

By Laurence I. Barrett

Fending off Michael Dukakis' belated counterattack, George Bush evoked Harry Truman's name almost as often as Ronald Reagan's. Bush was hardly coy about his reason. "My pitch here in the last days," he said in Louisville, "is to those good Democrats, the rank and file, the Silent Majority. There is a presidential candidate this year representing your vision of America."

That appeal worked just well enough to boost Bush to a respectable majority, although Dukakis did better than expected among Democrats who had voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984. According to the NBC-Wall Street Journal Election Day poll, Bush captured just 41% of that critical bloc. Voters who decided late, many of them Reagan Democrats, broke in favor of Dukakis. Outside the South, this group is heavily Roman Catholic. One of the few Democratic consolations this week was that Dukakis had eked out a narrow majority (52% vs. 48%) among Catholics, who were once a pillar of the party's coalition. Four years ago Reagan won 56% of the Catholic vote. Blacks went overwhelmingly for Dukakis, 9 to 1, roughly the same proportion as four years ago.

As Lloyd Bentsen might have put it, Bush was no Reagan in terms of vacuuming up demographic groups. In the last presidential election, voters in union households tilted only slightly toward the Democratic ticket, 53% to 47%. This year they went 59% for Dukakis. Independents leaned heavily toward Bush, 58% to 42%, but last time Reagan captured 68% of them. Reagan in 1984 seemed to lock up the political future for his party by corralling a solid 59% of voters between 18 and 24 years old. This week Dukakis carried that youngest set, 51% to 49%. The next age group, those between 25 and 34, went for Bush by a margin of 4 points.

The gender gap still yawns, though slightly less so this year. Men voted for Bush by a margin of 10 points, compared with 28 points for Reagan in 1984. Women went for Dukakis by 4 points, while four years ago they supported Reagan by 10 points. The fact that women outnumber men in the electorate helped keep Bush's overall majority of the popular vote to less than half of Reagan's 18- point margin in 1984.

The most impressive element of Bush's victory was its geographic sweep. To his solid base in the South, he added much of the Middle West, parts of the Northeast, the Mountain States and California. Though the G.O.P. carried several large states by thin margins, Bush demonstrated that there is still considerable strength in the theory of a "Republican lock" on the Electoral College. For a generation Republican presidential candidates have enjoyed an advantage in the distribution of electoral votes, and Bush exploited that benefit.

Does Bush's victory -- the fifth for a Republican in the past six elections -- signal a durable partisan realignment in American politics? Not quite. The G.O.P. lost strength below the presidential level, and Bush failed to duplicate Reagan's attraction for some voting blocs. Some analysts view the result as a triumph of political technique rather than political philosophy. Says Andrew Kohut, president of the Gallup Organization: "The Bush people are a lot better at their jobs than the Dukakis people. I don't think the election tells us much about realignment." A successful Bush Administration could lead to another Republican triumph in 1992, however, and alter the face of American politics into the next century.