May 4, 1999

Two Parties Prepare for Biggest Battle Yet in Fight for Suburbs

By ALISON MITCHELL

WASHINGTON -- Anyone perplexed by the amount of time Vice President Al Gore has recently devoted to traffic jams and suburban sprawl should consider this: Fifty years ago fewer than a quarter of Americans lived in the suburbs; now roughly half do. Every 10 years, another 10 members of Congress represent predominantly suburban districts.

As the battle for the Presidency and control of Congress gets under way, that growth is having a more profound effect than ever before on the language and policy proposals of the parties. The focus ranges from education and child rearing, central to the family life that political consultants have identified as a suburban cornerstone, to the interest in controlling sprawl and a search for ways to appeal to the high-technology workers who populate office complexes along suburban beltways.

So Al Gore looks at suburban land-use policies. Elizabeth Dole courts suburban women by braving jeers in New Hampshire to defend the ban on assault weapons. And Representative Thomas M. Davis 3d, the new chairman of the House Republican re-election effort, looks for candidates tailored for just such fast-growing areas as his own affluent Virginia district, the 11th, in Fairfax County.

"Clearly where the rubber is hitting the road today is the suburbs," Davis said.

To show what that could mean to Democrats, whose core voters are in the cities, Al From, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, points to Illinois.

When John F. Kennedy narrowly won the state in the 1960 Presidential election, From noted in an article in the council's magazine, The New Democrat, Chicago cast 35 percent of the Illinois vote; 26 percent came from the suburbs. In 1996, when President Clinton was re-elected, the suburbs cast 40 percent of the state's vote, Chicago only 20 percent.

"The electorate of the 21st century," From told Democrats in Idaho recently, "will be more educated, more affluent, more suburban, more independent, less unionized -- unless we can turn that around -- and less urban than the electorate in the 20th century."

But the political alignment of suburban voters also seems to be shifting. Two decades ago suburbanites were considered bedrock Republicans, drawn to the party's message of lower taxes and fewer handouts. Now, as the nation's Levittowns age and events like the shootings in Littleton, Colo., demonstrate that the suburbs are not immune to violence and other problems long familiar to the cities, suburbanites have become more willing to vote Democratic.

Clinton defeated President George Bush in the suburbs in 1992 and made even stronger inroads in 1996, winning crucial suburban counties all across the industrial Midwest and the Northeast.

Suburbs vary immensely, of course, ranging from older communities near the cities to the new strip malls and subdivisions rising from more distant farm fields. But politicians use the term as collective shorthand for key groups of swing voters: married couples with children, the "soccer moms" who were so sought after in the 1996 election, affluent independent voters and the high-technology employees who work miles from any city.

Linda DiVall, the pollster for Mrs. Dole, says the crucial demographic group is parents who have children under 18 living at home.

"They are a little more Republican than Democrat," Ms. DiVall said, "and the candidate that wins this group tends to win the election."

Given all this, politicians are listening closely to voters like those in Montgomery County, a Republican stronghold outside Philadelphia that is home to densely packed brick houses and the swanky Main Line as well. The county backed Clinton twice and ousted a Republican Congressman last November in favor of Joseph M. Hoeffel, a Democratic county commissioner.

Hoeffel was sounding out constituents in supermarkets the other day when Joyce Wilson confronted him by a vegetable counter to talk of the school shootings in Colorado.

"I think this country is just kind of crazy the way it is handling guns," said Ms. Wilson, a pastor's assistant. She also deplored the growth in the area's Delaware Valley. "A lot of our town commissioners," she said, "are reluctant to stand up against the builders."

At another supermarket, Lynne Hall, a 52-year-old manager for a medical office, was evidence of how precarious the Democrats' hold on voters like her might be. "I voted for you," she shouted to Hoeffel, "but I still don't like that President!"

Issues like education, transportation and health care have long been on the national agenda, of course, and have an appeal stretching beyond the suburbs. But the focus on the suburbs -- and thus broadly on middle-class families -- has subtly changed how the issues are discussed.

"It's hard to separate class from geography," said Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster. "Think of where the health care debate has gone. It's not about insuring the uninsured. It's about H.M.O.'s. The debate is about how to treat people who already have insurance."

New this year to the national agenda , though, are issues that appeal almost entirely to suburbanites. Gore and Democrats like Hoeffel (pronounced HUFF-uhl) are talking of suburban sprawl, traffic congestion and a need to preserve open space -- matters that are already playing prominently in state and local political races.

With the Vice President at the fore, the Clinton Administration has proposed a $10 billion "livability agenda" that would provide mass transit subsidies and tax credits to support bonding authority for protecting farmland and cleaning up abandoned industrial space.

"The livability issue is huge here," Hoeffel said, using a map of the county in his district office to point out traffic trouble spots and new development. "The suburban sprawl that we're experiencing is happening all over the country, and suburban people are up in arms."

At least one Republican strategist, Christine Matthews, thinks her party is underestimating the resonance of the issue.

"You need to be empathetic to the fact that people are going a little crazy," she said. "You're going out, and all you see are these giant Wal-Marts. They are every few blocks, and it's not the kind of environment people want to live in."

For both parties, the focus on suburbanites poses challenges.

The Republicans' problem, political strategists say, is that many of these voters have been alienated by the religious right's influence on the party.

It is no coincidence that a number of the leading Republican Presidential candidates are trying to keep an abortion ban far from the top of the party's 2000 agenda.

Congressman Davis said the party should reach out to the "new economy" workers through free-trade policies and legislation sought by the high-tech industry, including a bill, blocked by Senate Democrats last week, that would limit lawsuits arising from year 2000 computer breakdowns. The measure is opposed by trial lawyers, who are among the Democrats' biggest contributors.

"Instead of putting up issues like gay rights and abortion that split our constituencies," Davis said, "let's put up issues that split labor from the high-tech sector, lawyers from high tech."

The Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to emphasize their longtime issues like Social Security and Medicare. But they too are placing special emphasis on the suburbs.

"You're talking fundamentally about a suburban voter built around a family life style," said Mark Penn, the pollster for both Clinton and Gore, "because people until they have children are much more likely to live in urban areas and then resettle once they have children."

So when Gore talks of reducing traffic, he frames road congestion as a family issue, speaking of parents "on the car phone talking to their kids, explaining why they can't get home for dinner."

Democrats battled in the last Presidential campaign over whether to stress values or economic issues, and some of them want to make sure that the emphasis on suburban voters does not eclipse the party's traditional concern for the less well off.

"I think we've got a lot of good issues to go after suburban voters," said Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, "and I think Gore is particularly well positioned to do that. But he ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

I don't see anything that makes it a mortal sin to talk about minimum wage, to talk about health care, to talk about tax fairness, loopholes and all the rest -- the stuff we used to take for granted that Democrats believed in."

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company