Fact In: Middle Class Clobbered Gore

• It took losing the election for Democrats to acknowledge what we figured out a long time ago -- their liberal, big-government platform alienated the key bloc of voters.

Al Gore lost to President Bush because Democrats failed to attract enough of the white male vote, according to the Demo cratic Leadership Council, which styles itself "moderate" and was once led by Bill Clinton.

To win in the future, "Democrats will have to cut the gender gap in order to forge a new majority," the DLC said in a report, Why Gore Lost, which was released in Washington on Jan. 24.

"Our gender problem is men -- we don't win enough of them," the report said. "We must build a multiracial coalition by winning more white voters."

Democrats "cannot afford to get clobbered among white voters for the simple reason that there are eight times as many white voters as there are black voters and four times as many white voters as all minorities combined," the report said.

"Because there are many more conservatives than liberals in America, a new progressive majority will also require Democrats to win moderates by a substantial margin," it said.

"Gore failed to forge such a coalition," the DLC said. "Gore won spectacularly among self-identified Democrats and among liberals -- better even than Bill Clinton did in 1996. But at the same time he lost key categories of swing voters that Clinton won."

Gore won big among blacks, Hispanics, women, self-identified working-class voters and "every category of voters" with annual family incomes of less than $50,000, the report said.

"The problem is that the number of voters in those categories has declined significantly during the past four years," it said. "Gore lost every category of voters earning more than $50,000 a year -- the most rapidly growing part of the electorate."

Gore won at the far ends of the education spectrum -- high school dropouts and voters with postgraduate degrees, the report said.

"But he lost every other group: high school graduates, voters with some college and college graduates -- leaving him with the have-nots and elites, hardly a sustainable coalition," the DLC said.

"Gore lost white voters by 12 points, white men by a whopping 24 points and even lost white women by one point -- though because of his position in favor of choice he won upper-income white wo men," the report said.

Gore's "pro-government message resulted in his being viewed as a liberal advocate of big government," the report said.

Gore was also hurt badly because of his support for gun laws, the DLC report found. On the gun issue, Bush led Gore 73 percent to 16 percent.

Nor did efforts by Democrats, in collaboration with the mainstream media, succeed in trying to make such tragedies as school shootings part of the "gun issue," the report found.

Voters who chose "juvenile violence/ school shootings" as an issue of con cern were statistically tied in their choice for president: 51 percent for Gore and 49 percent for Bush.

To state the obvious, Gore lost this election because most educated males oppose both expanding the liberal agenda and big, centralized government.