PUNDITRY
Life of the Party
by Peter Beinart

James Jeffords's defection from the Republican Party has sparked an avalanche of eulogies for that noble, dying breed: the northeastern Republican moderate. As Southerners have taken over the GOP, goes the lament, the fiscally prudent, culturally tolerant Yankees who populated the party since the Civil War have headed en masse for the exits. Sure, Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee might not jump next week, and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter and Maine's Olympia Snowe may gamely hang on a few more years in a Senate Republican Caucus dominated by sunbelters. But in the long term, the trend is clear: They're headed for extinction.

No one likes to break up a funeral, but has anyone checked to see whether the statistics bear this out? Here's a quick peek. In 1990, the Northeast (the eleven states from Maine to Maryland) sent 104 representatives to the U.S. House, of whom 41 were Republicans. Today, those states send 97 (they've lost seats in redistricting), of whom 39 are Republican. So 39 percent of northeastern congressmen were Republicans a decade ago and 40 percent are today. The region elected nine Republican senators out of 22 in 1990; with Jeffords's defection, that's now down to seven. In 1990, there were five northeastern GOP governors; today there are six. Where's the dramatic decline? The Republican Party is almost exactly as well-represented in the Northeast as it was a decade ago.

Which leads me to an alternative hypothesis: Vermont is strange. Republicans may not be thriving in the rest of the Northeast, but they're holding their own. They're evaporating in Vermont because politically, the state differs from all its neighbors: It has all the liberalism of an urban state and none of the conservatism.

What do I mean? The Northeast can be divided into its metropolitan regions and its rural ones. The rural areas were almost unanimously Republican for most of the twentieth century. Today, Democrats have made some inroads, but the GOP isn't dying out; in fact, it's still clearly the majority party. Take central Pennsylvania, the nine congressional districts wholly outside the orbit of Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. Seven are Republican. Or take the eleven districts in upstate New York--Republicans control seven (and of the four Democratic seats, one is in Buffalo, one is in Rochester, one is in Albany and one encompasses the liberal college town of Ithaca). The Republicans who populate small town Pennsylvania and New York may not want a Pat Robertson-style culture war, but they're not nearly as liberal as James Jeffords. They like their government local and small, and while they may be queasy about tax cuts that lead to deficits, they certainly prefer tax cuts to more spending. Perhaps the best embodiment of this sensibility is the state of Maine. Its two Republican senators are pro-choice, but they're fiscally conservative--in fact, they were two of the Senate's biggest champions of a balanced budget amendment. And the state's governor, an Independent, is much closer to the GOP than to the Democrats on economics--he ran on a pledge to cut taxes and government, and once in office vetoed a bill raising the state's minimum wage.

Maine, in short, is suspicious of big government--that's why it was Perot's best state in 1992 and 1996 and why Bush ran close to Gore there. And Maine is what Vermont would be if Vermont wasn't overrun by people from New York City. An astounding 40 percent of Vermonters weren't born there, and politically, their presence can't be overestimated. The state's lone congressman was born in Brooklyn; its governor was born in Long Island, and last fall both his opponents were also New York-New Jersey transplants. Many of these lefty newcomers came to transform Vermont into the egalitarian, Scandinavian-style society that John Lindsey was supposed to create in New York. The result is that Vermont is the rural part of the northeast most supportive of big government. In Maine, the Almanac of American Politics notes, Clinton's health care plan was so unpopular that even one of the state's Democratic congressmen vowed to oppose it. In Vermont, James Jeffords pledged his support before it even reached the Senate.

But it's not just that Vermont is a rural state infected by urban liberalism. Vermont is actually more liberal than its urban northeastern neighbors because it doesn't have the racial conservatism that close proximity to a big city can bring. Compare Vermont to New Jersey. In the 1990s, under pressure from the courts, both states revamped their education funding systems to substantially redistribute money from wealthy school districts to poor ones. In Vermont, the new system caused some grumbling, but the state's liberal political orientation was never threatened. In New Jersey, by contrast, the suburbs revolted: Republican Christie Whitman toppled Democratic Governor James Florio, and Republicans took control of the State House and Senate. Why the different reactions? Because in New Jersey the money was being redistributed from whites to blacks; in Vermont it was being redistributed from whites to whites.

It's not that the northeastern suburbs love the GOP--they dislike Christian Right bible-thumping and they don't want to eliminate the Department of Education or cut Medicare. But they can be lured to the GOP on race--if they decide that on welfare, crime, or taxes, Democrats are selling them out in favor of the dangerous, dysfunctional cities nearby. That's how Whitman beat Florio, how George Pataki beat Mario Cuomo in New York and how Pennsylvania elected Tom Ridge as its governor and sent Rick Santorum to the U.S. Senate. There's no question that the elimination of welfare and the decline of crime have made those issues less potent today than they were a decade ago, which is why, as Jonathan Cohn showed in "Fade to Black" last year, Democrats are doing better in quintessential backlash suburbs like Long Island. But it would be naive to confidently predict that racial antagonism is dead as a political force-crime, for instance, may be inching back. And when racial politics return, the party aligned with the white South--the GOP--will win elections in the suburban Northeast once again. But it won't win elections in Vermont, because while Vermont has imported urban big-government liberalism, it hasn't imported urban racial diversity, which means there's no race card for the GOP to play.

So why does the press keep writing that northeastern moderate Republicans are dying out if they're not? Perhaps because their decline is an easy metaphor for the decline of those small town, Yankee virtues that contemporary America is convinced it's losing--honesty, frugality, modesty. Notice how many times the newspapers called Jeffords self-effacing, or plain-spoken, or commented on his unstylish dress. But those cultural laments are just that--cultural; they don't have anything to do with party politics. Maybe America is descending into a swamp of exhibitionist, profligate self-gratification? Northeastern Republicans are still alive and well.

PETER BEINART is the editor of TNR.