Barack Obama was no better a candidate than Michael Dukakis.
That sentence sounds absurd, right? Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries, and went on to win the highest Democratic vote percentage since 1964. Dukakis, by contrast, barely emerged from a primary field of--at least when their 1988 political statures are compared to Clinton's in 2008--relative minnows, and then went on to squander an enormous polling advantage in the general election. Surely, Obama and Dukakis are not comparable in terms of their ability as campaigners.
However, as I discuss in the extended entry, virtually all of Obama's, and really all of the Democratic Party's, improvement on Dukakis's performance over the past twenty years is not the result of superior candidates, superior campaigning, or even really a superior political environment. Instead, it is primarily the result of three major cultural shifts that have taken place over the past twenty years: the rise of the network neutral Internet, the increasing number of non-Christians in America, and ethnic / "racial" shifts toward a less white America. Without these trends, Obama would have suffered the same electoral fate as Dukakis, and Democrats would be experiencing the 1994 midterms the same way that Bill Murray experienced Groundhog Day. While many people did excellent work this year, in order to secure long-term victory, we need to maintain and foster these trends rather than believing our recent successes have been the work of a small group of wunderkinds.
More in the extended entry.
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Consider three major cultural trends in America that have largely taken place over the past twenty years:
- Internet Rising: Over the past twenty years, the rise of the network neutral Internet has been, by a long way, the biggest change to the national media landscape. Fully 55% Americans are not just online, but have high-speed connections, and the Internet is now the #2 source of news in the country, trailing only television. Twenty years ago, virtually no one was online, and the world wide web wasn't even created.
- The Rise of Non-Christian America. The number of self-identified non-Christians has slightly more than doubled since 1990 and now totals 21.6% of the population.
- The Rise of a Non-White America: While the Census does not measure ethnic / racial statistics the same way every ten years, thus making long-term trends somewhat difficult to pin down, twenty years ago non-whites formed 15% of the electorate, much lower than the 26% in the 2008 election. That is an increase of about one-half percent every year for the past twenty years.
Now ask yourself a question: is there any possible way that Barack Obama wins this election without these three social cultural trends? It doesn't take much research to show the answer is clearly no. In fact, without these trends, given the same demographic playing field Dukakis faced twenty years ago, Obama would have lost by a margin very similar to McCain and Dukakis. To show this, I took the results of the 2008 exit poll crosstabs for "Religion Among Whites," and recalibrated each of the demographics in that crosstab to account for an electorate that was only 11% non-Christian (as studies at the time suggested), and only 15% non-white (as per the 1988 exit poll). You can view the results here:
2008 Election results with 1988 electorate percentages
According to this estimation, McCain would have won the election by about 5.9% if the religious and ethnic demographics were the same percentages of the overall electorate as they were twenty years ago. Given that Dukakis lost by 7.7%, this strongly suggests that Obama did not make up much ground among white Christians compared to Dukakis. Instead, the vast majority of Obama's improvement on the Democratic performance from 1988--a campaign performance that has been roundly mocked over the last two decades--came from non-whites and / or non-Christians replacing white Christians within the electorate. While this is only an estimation, it is doubtful that the margin for error in this estimation would entirely erase McCain's projected 5.9% advantage, much less Obama's actual 6.5% advantage.
The Democratic improvement comes not just demographic shifts, but also from media related shifts. Specifically, the rise of the Internet has helped create a far more activist Democratic grassroots base that now surpasses the conservative grassroots activist base:. Check out these late October numbers from Pew on the relationship between campaign activism and Internet social media participation:
Now, these numbers are influenced not just by strong progressive infrastructure online, but also by effective organizing on the part of the Obama campaign, and conservative depression in a bad political environment for Republicans. Still, it should go without saying that the rapid increase of progressive grassroots activism of late would simply not have been as possible, or at least as easy, without the development of progressive social media on the Internet. The Obama campaign did not invent progressive online organizing, but rather did an excellent job of taking advantage of well-established progressive organizing within online social media. Without the decade of work that came beforehand, the Obama campaign would have been able to cull far fewer resources from the Internet. Further, had conservatives been at an equal level of online organizing entering the 2008 campaign, McCain would have moved closer to overall resource parity with Obama.
These three broad social trends--the network neutral Internet, the increasing number of non-Christians in America, and the increasing number of non-whites in America (mainly Latinos)--were more responsible for the 2008 Democratic victories than any other factor. This includes the relative strengths of the two major candidates, the performance and strategic decisions of the campaigns, and even the pro-Democratic political environment caused by widespread disaffection with Republican governance. These demographic and media trends are the main reason non-southern Democratic nominees have once again become competitive in Presidential elections. Without them, all of our nominees who are not "good ol' boys" would end up suffering the same fate as Dukakis.
This article is not meant to denigrate the tremendous efforts of the millions of people who worked on behalf of the Obama campaign, or to argue that the result of the election was a demographic foregone conclusion. Rather, it is to argue that broad social and cultural trends are typically at the foundation of any election. Dukakis had a lot of smart people working for him, but the demographic and media landscapre of the country was very different. As such, we shouldn't get either too down on our past defeats, such as 1988, or too high on our current victories, such as 2008. We win or lose because of our position relative to these long-term trends, as much as any other reason.
When looking to build long-term progressive change, it is absolutely essential to identify and capitalize on these trends. No matter how smart and strategic we were, no matter how hard we worked, and no matter how charismatic our candidates were, Democrats would not be where they are today without 3-1 support among non-whites and non-Christians, or without the vast progressive advantage on the network neutral Internet. Given that all three of these social trends continue apace, we need to continue our advantages in these areas. In fact, now that Democrats are the governing party in D.C., we need to actually go one step further and pass legislation that will itself help continue these trends. While there isn't much we can, or should, do on the religion front (not the sort of business the government should be involved with), this does mean comprehensive, progressive immigration and media reform. This is why I have regularly identified these two areas of legislation as "positive feedback loops," in that they are not policies in need of progressive reform, but that progressive reform in those areas would actually make the country more progressive. This is exactly the sort of legislation that I intend to focus on during the upcoming Democratic trifecta, because it is the sort of positive change that will itself cause more positive change in the future. |
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