BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : AUGUST 7, 2000 ISSUE
COVER STORY For a New Economy, a New Kind of Voter Until recently, Nanticia McKinney's resume was about as New Economy as a push broom: The 21-year-old's work experience consisted of stints on the night shift at a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a wash-and-fold gig at a coin laundry in a rough-and-tumble section of Indianapolis. With two kids to take care of--and a husband doing time on drug charges--she soon found herself on welfare and food stamps, stuck, as she says, in a ''hood-bound area, seeing the same thing and not learning much.'' Now she's learning plenty--about the strike prices on her stock options, the value of her 401(k) plan, her health insurance, and profit sharing. In April, 1998, a welfare-to-work program gave her the chance to get a high school general equivalency degree. Soon, she also had a wardrobe of donated business suits and enough computer skills to enter a Xerox Corp. job-training program. And moving at Internet speed, McKinney has already been given her first promotion, to account associate for document processing. ''With these stock options,'' she says, ''maybe my kids will be going on to college.'' GREAT DIVIDE. Before this wave of good fortune, McKinney was worrying about empty cupboards and a husband who was ''running the streets like his head was cut off.'' There wasn't a lot of room left in her own head to think about politics. But two months ago, for the first time in her life, she started tuning in to politics and registered to vote as an independent. ''For me, it's not a Democratic or Republican thing,'' she says, echoing the increasingly nonideological bent of New Economy voters who now make up 33% of the electorate. McKinney is sandwiched between disaffected independents who have been largely bypassed by the economic boom and prosperity independents reaping windfalls--like Silicon Valley CEO Scott A. Martin of diCarta Inc., an online contract processor. McKinney and Martin don't have a lot in common. She drives a 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass--''when it works''--and lives in an apartment in the projects; he tools around in a Jaguar and lives in a modern 4,000-square-foot house with panoramic views of the Valley. Her biggest concern is having Social Security go bankrupt by the time she's retired; he has already made enough to live on for life. But the New Economy has voters like Martin thinking a lot more about people like McKinney. Although Martin is a longtime Gore backer, he's leery of any new entitlements that would create cash-hemorrhaging bureaucracies. And he thinks that ''tax cuts are completely unnecessary in today's economy.'' Still, Martin and his wife, Christie, a Republican, share a belief in equipping low-wage Old Economy workers such as McKinney with higher-paying New Economy skills. ''Hundreds of thousands of Americans are taking minimum-wage jobs at Burger King while we bring in people from India to take high-tech jobs,'' says Martin. ''As Americans, we've done a poor job of educating our own workforce to retool so they can take advantage of this dramatic shift.'' McKinney couldn't agree more. A substantial tax cut would help her enormously but she would rather see the money spent on bootstrap programs. ''If I hadn't had the career development center program, I would just be working another $5.25-an-hour job,'' she says. Nanticia McKinney, Scott and Christie Martin, and more and more New Economy voters have one other thing in common: They are thinking as pragmatic centrists, surfing the election debate to pick and choose among the issues like finicky e-commerce shoppers. And right now, their message is this: Neither contender has closed the sale with this crucial constituency. By Michelle Conlin in New York _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					RELATED ITEMS The Politics of Prosperity COVER IMAGE: The Politics of Prosperity CHART: Ballooning Surpluses... CHART: ...But More Spending TABLE: The New Economy Voter TABLE: The Issues TABLE: How the Top Issues Have Changed Voters: Optimistic, Yet Skeptical For a New Economy, a New Kind of Voter INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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