Why Gore will win

So what if the suburbs go for Bush? Dozens of big-city strongholds give Gore a huge head start in collecting electoral votes.

by Robert David Sullivan

Al Gore has one advantage going into this year's presidential election: he leads George W. Bush in the number of neighborhoods where he could walk into a crowded McDonald's, fire an automatic weapon in every direction, and not hit a single person who has ever given a moment's thought to voting for his opponent. I suppose I could have come up with a nicer way of making this point, but with Bush raising so much money from the National Rifle Association and Gore raking in donations from the producers of violent movies, bullets and ballots seem to go together like burgers and fries.

For a variety of reasons, there are cities and towns all over the United States where voting Republican is about as popular as pulling out your own teeth. The Democrats are certainly unpopular in some spots, but even in deepest Utah a significant number of people support the party of tree-hugging and same-sex loving. The most recent Almanac of American Politics, which breaks down the vote in the last presidential election by congressional district, reveals how far the Republicans have fallen behind in creating areas of total, bone-crushing domination.

In 1996, Bill Clinton's worst district was the 19th in Texas, which includes Amarillo and Lubbock and happens to be the district where George W. Bush first ran for office (losing a congressional seat to a conservative Democrat in 1978). Clinton got 26 percent of the vote there, or 51,996 out of approximately 197,716 votes cast (the Almanac doesn't include votes for minor candidates in their totals). Incidentally, the Almanac notes that "President George

Bush always liked to refer to [this area] as a bellwether of public opinion." Of course. Everybody knows that Amarillo, Texas, is a trendsetter of American culture. For example, the term "hip-hop" was first uttered in Amarillo a good four days before it made an appearance in Kennebunkport, Maine. It was this keen grasp of the national Zeitgeist that allowed President Bush to display genuine awe at a supermarket checkout scanner during the 1992 campaign.

But even in the most rabidly anti-Clinton part of a country full of Clinton-haters, more than one out of four voters cast a ballot for him. And I don't think that all the Clinton votes came from women silently punishing their husbands for making them live in Amarillo.

Republican nominee Bob Dole's worst district was in the Bronx, New York, where he got four percent of the vote -- a measly 4825 out of approximately 124,311. That's one out of 25 voters in a district where most people don't bother to cast a ballot. (Consider that the Texas 19th is about the same size as the district that includes the Bronx; about 73,000 fewer voters went to the polls that year from the Bronx.) In other words, as befit his personality, Dole was limited to the crank vote (which may or may not have been dominated by people who remember hand-cranked automobiles).

The Bronx did not stand alone. There were 21 other districts where Dole failed to receive 15 percent of the vote (the benchmark that the Commission on Presidential Debates uses to define a "serious" candidate): one in Oakland, California; four in Los Angeles and its immediate suburbs; one in Miami; four in and around Chicago; two in Detroit; one in Newark; six more in New York City; and two in Philadelphia. And the Republican ticket in 1996 seemed more sensitive to inner-city needs than most GOP candidates: vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp spent much of his time in Congress advocating tax-free enterprise zones in distressed urban areas, and Dole looked like someone familiar with the term "mean streets" (the first half, anyway).

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Robert David Sullivan is a frequent contributor to the Phoenix. He can be reached at Robt555@aol.com.