Affirmative Action as a Wedge Issue: Prop 209 and The 1996 Presidential Election
The Republican candidate for President in 1996, Bob Dole, publicly endorsed and campaigned for Proposition 209, the measure that sought to end all state and local government gender and racial based preferences. The purpose of the strategy was to contrast the Republican candidate's opposition to race and gender preferences with the Democratic candidates "mend it, not end it" position in order to win over swing voters and shore up support among the conservative faithful. This paper analyzes the "wedge issue" strategy from both a geopolitical and survey based perspective relying on the GIS mapping of the Statewide Database and a preelection survey that over sampled minorities in different types of neighborhood contexts. We find that although white voters overwhelmingly supported Prop 209, including independent and moderate Democrats, the issue failed to swing their vote from Clinton to Dole because it was less important than other more traditional Presidential issues such as the economy. Nonwhite and the loyal Republicans were more concerned about Prop 209 than others, but their Presidential votes were not in question.
The significance of this ultimately futile strategy is not that race suddenly mattered in 1996-- indeed, there is ample evidence that race has been a very important determinant of American politics since the 1960s (Sundquist, 1983; 382-394). The realignment of southern states out of the Democratic and into the Republican ranks, the most significant political change in the postwar period, was partly caused by southern whites rejecting the "liberal" racial policies of the Democratic party (Carmines and Stimson, 1989). Moreover, party cleavages throughout the US tend to coincide with sharp racial and ethnic divisions. A majority of African-Americans and Latinos perennially identify with and vote for the Democratic party while the Republican vote is predominantly white (Gurin et al., 1989; de la Garza et al., 1992; Tate, 1993; McClain and Stewart, 1995). Rather, Dole's Proposition 209 endorsement was a departure in the sense that it revived a tactic of direct appeal to white resentment that had been considered off limits in American politics since the George Wallace Presidential campaigns.
The purpose of this piece is to examine the evolution, logic and impact of Dole's Proposition 209 tactic in order to illustrate the intermingling of race, immigration and politics in contemporary US politics. California is the most racially and ethnically complex state in the US. Using the mapping resources of the California Statewide Database, we will illustrate the racial and political divisions of California politics and highlight the critical "swing" areas of the state that Dole had hoped to capture with his anti-affirmative action appeal. We will then examine the effectiveness of Dole's- California Prop 209 strategy using a statewide survey of 1498 respondents completed on the eve of the November 1996 election. This survey uniquely over-sampled in racial and ethnic minority neighborhoods in order to provide the most complete picture to date of how the Proposition 209 vote divided California voters along racial and ethnic lines. Our models suggest that the Prop 209 had a statistically significant impact on cross-over voting, but that the net effects were not clearly beneficial for the Dole candidacy in California.
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