People here just called it “The Plant.” It was where fathers went to work, for good jobs at steady wages, union and white-collar, making parts for General Motors.
Some sons hoped to follow fathers to the plant after high school. For others, the plant provided money to ensure college, giving children a shot at a higher rung in the middle class than their parents.
The plant made a lot of things possible: a house, a car, health care and a pension, the balance wheels of middle-class life.
But for years, General Motors has been hollowing out its Anderson presence, closing plants and spinning off operations. Employment rolls have fallen in the last generation from nearly 25,000 to roughly 8,000. Those who remain live with a lingering anxiety about whether their job will be the next to go.
With the unwelcome change in lifestyle has come a change in political loyalty.
On the local level, people still often vote Democratic, but they harbor a profound skepticism about Democrats seeking national office. It suggests that the contract between the working-class/middle-class voter and the national Democratic Party is breaking down.
The Democratic Party cannot afford such a breach. In the 1994 elections, Democrats lost heavily among lower-income workers, particularly men, and it desperately needs to regain their loyalty before 1996.
The profound change in the economy-small and large retailers have flocked to Anderson along with other service jobs-has created a labor pool in which many people feel they are working harder and longer for less money. Statistics on wages in the area validate their beliefs. Manufacturing jobs pay an annual average wage of $45,000; retail jobs pay about $11,500.
Within a couple of miles of the plants, about 35 miles northeast of Indianapolis, there are nearly two dozen fast food outlets, five strip malls and a couple of discount superstores. The jobs they provide have kept unemployment down, but that number masks the downward economic mobility of the area.
“We are now in a period of upturn but in a decidedly different kind of economy,” said Dennis Goodwin, a local labor market analyst and a Democrat. “People have become resigned to their insecurity.”
Employment is high, and people don’t feel an immediate threat of losing their jobs. But they also know that two paychecks don’t stretch as far as one used to. Nobody has any time. And people question their allegiances to unions, companies and schools.
Those Anderson voters who often provided a margin of victory for Democratic candidates are actively questioning their allegiance to the party. Where has it gotten them? Has loyalty to Democrats improved their lives? What about all those people on welfare unwilling to work? What about affirmative action programs that helped somebody else? Why was everyone a victim but them?
They feel like they are losing the race, whether in home ownership, leisure time or the ability to pay for a college education for their children. All those things seem less attainable.
“The sense is the Democrats speak to everyone’s interest but theirs,” said Democratic pollster Alan Secrest. “They are a politically incorrect group with no one fighting their fight in Washington. Bad news rolls downhill with respect to their lives.”
When President Clinton ran in 1992, he offered his candidacy as a clarion for the “forgotten middle class.” But it’s hard to find someone in Anderson today with much good to say about him.
Because people feel they have little control over their economic lives, they turn their concerns, and sometimes their politics, to other matters that trouble them. They focus on the more elusive notion of middle-class values. There, too, they feel the Democrats in Washington don’t think a lot like them.
It’s true in places like Anderson, and it’s true in many pockets of the country.
“It’s an immense issue,” said Stanley Greenberg, one of Clinton’s pollsters. “The ability of the Democratic Party to be viable and competitive hangs on (its) ability to address the issue of economic anxiety. It is first and foremost the stagnation of living standards and growing financial pressure on people.”
The old party bromides no longer resonate. “The New Deal is dated,” Greenberg said. “No one believes you are going to create jobs through government. . . . Democrats are left with a very limited toolbox.”
If the Democratic Party is to rebound from its devastating defeat in 1994, it must reconnect with these middle-class voters, especially the rising number of self-described independents. In 1994, many voters who had been Democrats simply stayed home because the party generated no excitement.
There are opportunities for the Democrats to win back some of these voters, particularly older voters because of the Medicare issue, but many people here still aren’t hearing anything to make them think the national party got the message of 1994.
In last year’s election, according to research by Democratic pollsters, the party lost heavily among lower-income voters, Catholics and seniors-a dramatic swing from the 1992 presidential election. The conservative majority was formed by an unlikely alliance of upper-income and lower-income voters.
The lower-income voters were particularly convinced that Republicans were the party of family values, and that the Democrats were represented by an encrusted, possibly corrupt, group of politicians who had remained in Washington far too long to relate to them.
“Voters are watching to see whether Clinton and his administration will create something that middle-class America can believe in or whether they will fail and breed yet more feelings of disappointment and betrayal,” Greenberg wrote in his new book, “Middle Class Dreams.”
“Frankly, the citizenry has lived with decades of disappointment and finds it hard to imagine any other outcome. That cynicism makes it much more difficult for Democrats to succeed.”
Tod Higbee recalls a youth marked by the stability of nightly family dinners that were timed each day for the end of his father’s shift at General Motors, where he worked for 42 years.
By the time Higbee finished college, the plant wasn’t an option. He is currently the branch manager of a national finance company chain and finds himself working more than 60 hours a week.
“The times for the car workers are done,” said Higbee, 30, whose wife commutes 35 miles to Indianapolis to work each day. “Now you just have to fight like hell to keep things how they are.
“Dad always said he would put us through college so we didn’t have to go to the factory, and now I say, `Dad, I wish I could make what you made at the factory.’ “
He considers himself an independent who leans toward Republicans, especially on the national level.
“The Democrats are the party of big spenders and big government,” he said. “People are tired of that, tired of people who are taking a check for nothing. There are no incentives on making life better.”
The local paper, the Herald-Bulletin, ran a series last week about teenage pregnancy that drew a fiery response from readers who thought the paper had glorified unwed motherhood. Readers were particularly incensed about an account of a 19-year-old girl who boasted of her three children and the fact that the government had subsidized all her expenses.
Publisher Henry Byrd said readers eventually understood that the series was a broadly based exploration of the issue, but nonetheless had thought it represented a set of values completely foreign to them.
“This is essentially a Democratic town politically, but it is very conservative on community morals,” Byrd said.
Because the auto parts plants have been in a steady decline, many people are resigned to living a reverse of the American dream that spurred their parents: They don’t believe they will do as well as their parents. So they focus on other social issues, which in elections tend to supplant some economic concerns because they don’t believe government can help them with their jobs.
Connie Clark recently was laid off from Mayflower, the moving company, when the firm was bought out. She decided to start a small restaurant and antique shop.
Although such dislocation caused by corporate restructuring would seem to provide, in theory, an opening for Democrats, she usually votes Republican.
“I realized no job was secure these days, so I thought if I am going to be insecure, I want to have some control over it,” she said.
Values are something people do feel they have some control over. And that caused a clear majority in the recent congressional election to choose David McIntosh, an untested and relatively unknown former aide to former Vice President Dan Quayle, over the Democratic nominee, Joe Hoggsett, a polished, well-funded candidate. Before that, voters had sent a durable liberal Democrat, Phil Sharp, to Congress for 20 years.
And some remain strong Democrats. Richard Vannatta, former president of United Auto Workers Local 662, continues to believe in the old-time Democratic religion about protecting workers. Even though he calls himself strongly pro-life, he believes the overall Democratic agenda is far better for him and other workers.
At the same time, he sees significant splits within the union’s ranks. Some, because they work hundreds of hours of overtime a year, earn enough that they have become interested in matters like the GOP’s proposed capital gains tax cut. Their relative prosperity, Vannatta said, has turned them into Republicans.
Cathy Bond, 38, a single parent with two children, calls herself a “Demopublican.” She was recently hired at one of the General Motors spinoff operations for $12 an hour. But not long ago, she was on welfare. She said pride propelled her to leave the health-care benefits provided by public aid, to seek work. She worked several part-time jobs and pursued additional education, and she believes many on public aid don’t try hard enough.
She hasn’t voted recently, always thinking that politics were too remote from her life. Now, she said, she sees how legislation such as the North America Free Trade Agreement can have a direct relationship to her job. She’s not sure which party she supports.
Pat Hill is 23, with a college degree in journalism, another hire at the GM spinoff. Like Bond, he feels little job security and little political fealty.
“The Democratic Party is in a faltering stage,” Hill said. “I don’t think they are ready to take back what they have lost. They still seem divided on what they want to do and the direction. They need to promote American people, home policies.”
Vannatta believes the party suffers from a marketing problem, an inability to convey to workers how lawmakers in Washington have made workers’ lives better. Instead, he said, the party has allowed Republicans to seize the debate over values.
The issues of economic anxiety and values have become intertwined, and so far the Democrats have failed to offer a reason for any of their faithful to return. Advisers to Clinton, like Greenberg and media consultant Frank Greer, believe that will change as the campaign gets under way, with Clinton talking about passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, the earned income tax credit and raising the minimum wage.
But that message will have to be far sharper than it has been since he was elected on the promise of restoring hope to the middle class.
“The Democrats need to take 1994 seriously or 1996 will be worse,” Vannatta said. “If they don’t handle it right, 1996 will be a major catastrophe.”
