Donkey's Years; Is There Room At the Top For Democrats?

THE bands are primed to play "Happy Days Are Here Again" as the Democratic Party assembles in convention in New York this weekend. But that upbeat anthem, as evocative of the hopes of the New Deal as F.D.R.'s upturned cigarette holder, rings hollow in the party's time of torment.

Democrats still win more than their share of local contests and maintain big majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives. But the party has lost five of the last six races for the office that counts most, the Presidency, and its only victor in more than a quarter-century, Jimmy Carter, is just now beginning to emerge from the profound unpopularity that he earned during his term.

In Lyndon B. Johnson's year of triumph, 1964, 52 per cent of the respondents to a University of Michigan poll identified themselves as Democrats. They were members of what they and everyone else considered the majority party. But in no year since have as many as 50 per cent of the electorate described themselves as Democrats; the figure dropped to 44 per cent by 1970, 41 by 1980 and 35 by 1990. Last month, in a New York Times/CBS News poll, it stood at 33 per cent, exactly the same figure as the Republicans, who after their humiliating 1964 loss were saying they might never win the White House again.

There are those who say the same about the Democrats these days, though not many. Even Walter F. Mondale, the party's unsuccessful 1984 nominee, said last year that for Presidential purposes, the United States was in danger of "becoming a one-party country." On the other hand, there are cheerleaders like the party chairman, Ronald H. Brown, who likes to say that his party has for some time stood "only a few centimeters away" from reassembling a winning Presidential coalition.

But the fact is that Presidential elections have rarely been easy for the Democrats. In the 130 years since the first Republican President was elected, the Democrats have held the White House for only 48 years, barely a third of the time. Moreover, most of the important underlying political trends of the last three decades have worked against the Democrats, and only in the last few years has a significant element of the party leadership realized it. These are some of the rivers of change that have eroded the party's base:

* The suburbanization of America, which has made the voter in the bungalow or the ranch house the dominant figure in the nation's politics, in the same way the Jeffersonian farmer and the urban tenement-dweller used to be. This year, a majority of the electorate is likely to be suburban -- mostly blue-collar people who have made good their escape from urban turmoil.

* The tremendous increase in the size of the middle class and the concomitant shrinking of in the working class, the bedrock Democratic base. The have-nots are still there, and still vocal, but there are far more haves now, and many are less and less prepared to help the have-nots; they are hostile to the old Democratic goal of income redistribution.

* The increasing identification of the Democratic Party, at the very time those developments were taking place, as the party of the cities, of minorities, of high taxes, of big government, of the counterculture -- all inimical if not actually threatening to suburbanites and the middle class.

* The emergence of young people, the portion of the electorate with the most Presidential votes still to cast, as the most Republican group in the nation.

In the blue-collar outposts of Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland, in the booming counties that surround Atlanta, in the seas of suburbs that define California, a succession of issues has come between the Democratic party and its loyalists. Busing was an early one, then drugs and long hair and urban riots and welfare cheaters. Middle-class suburban voters turned against Presidential candidates who seemed to them soft on crime, unpatriotic, afraid to stand up to foreign bullies, too cozy with minorities.

Stan Greenberg, now the poll taker for the Clinton campaign, did a study in 1985 in Macomb County, north of Detroit, which for years has been the laboratory for those seeking to understand the Democrats' losses among white, mostly ethnic suburbanites. Voters, he reported, had suffered "a profound disillusionment, a loss of faith in the Democratic party," because "the Democratic party no longer responded with genuine feeling to the vulnerabilities and burdens of the average middle-class person." Delivering the South to Republicans

Much the same thing happened, wrote Thomas B. Edsell and Mary D. Edsell in their book, "Chain Reaction," among the white populists in the South. The Democratic party's commitment to civil rights for various minority groups, especially blacks, and the use of tax dollars to benefit them, transformed the soldily Democratic South into the solidly Republican South in Presidential elections, just as those policies deprived the party of the northern whites votes (once urban, now suburban) that had once helped to sustain it. President Johnson apparently anticipated that something of the sort would happen. After signing the 1964 civil rights bill, he is said to have told a young aide , "I think we delivered the South to the Republicans for the rest of your lifetime."

But it was more than that. In his study of Democratic travail, a book called "Minority Party," Peter Brown cited two statistics to dramatize the extent of the damage. Relying on news media exit polls, he reports that no Democratic candidate since 1964 has captured a majority of the white vote and that only Jimmy Carter captured 40 per cent of it; Mr. Carter was also the party's only nominee in 25 years to win a majority of the middle class. In 1988, George Bush took 55 per cent of the voters with family incomes between $20,000 and $50,000 a year, and they constituted more than half the electorate.

The Democrats' Congressional success has been based partly on candidates, especially in the South, who were able to escape identification with national party policies. In addition, the assets of incumbency have helped them, as has their considerable skill in recruiting candidates and in drawing district lines in states where their dominance gave them control of that process. Many doubt, however, that the disparity can last long, especially given the shift of population (and House seats) to the South and West from the Democrats' northeastern bastions and the growing public disillusionment with Congress, which is expected to produce a near-record turnover this November.

So the stakes are unusually high for Mr. Clinton and his party, and he has chosen a path not taken by any other recent Democratic nominee. In brief, he has decided to court the South, the suburbs and the middle class -- not only in his choice of Al Gore of Tennessee as his running mate, but in his studied refusal to bargain with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, widely taken as a distancing gesture, and in his choice of issues. He is for capital punishment (translation: he won't wimp out on crime), he and Mr. Gore supported the Persian Gulf war (he's as tough as the Republicans with tyrants), and he has specialized in education.

Mr. Jackson, former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. of California and other liberals argue that Mr. Clinton is deserting a whole wing of the party, but he remains an advocate of civil rights, if not a very vocal proponent of affirmative action, and he is a backer of abortion rights. Mr. Jackson took his time in endorsing the Clinton-Gore ticket, but another prominent black Democrat, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, praised the selection of Mr. Gore and said it showed that "Bill Clinton has what it will take to win in November."

That remains to be seen. But the old route to victory seems closed off. "If we lead with class warfare, we lose," said Mr. Clinton well before he announced his candidacy. So a new road, however perilous and untried, seems worth a try this time, especially with a three-way race in prospect.