(* With 10% of the country following some form of vegetarian diet, this number is based on the assumption that vegetarians break Democratic 3-1, which is a margin very similar to the LGBT community, non-Christians, and not "white non-Hispanic."
Also note: Women are also disproportionately Democratic. However, unlike all the other groups listed here, women make up a significant percentage of Republican voters, too.)
Even though there is some overlap between these categories, the vast majority of Democrats fall into at least one of these five. And by "vast majority," I mean "over 70%."
Now, of course there is still a not-insignificant straight, meat-eating, non-union, white Christian contingent within the Democratic Party rank and file. However, that group is older than the rest of the party, and as such continues to shrink as an overall percentage of Democratic voters. Non-whites, non-Christians, LGBTs and vegetarians are all disproportionately under the age of 50, which will make future incarnations of the Democratic Party even more skewed toward these groups. This process is accelerated even further by Republicans targeting their messaging, and making the vast majority of their gains, among Americans who do not fit into one of those five categories.
I write--or at least attempt to write this--in a value-neutral sense. It isn't good or bad, it is just who the Democratic Party is at this point. It is significantly not-"white non-Hispanic," and the "white non-Hispanic" segment is significantly vegetarian, non-Christian or non-straight. Among Democratic voters who fit into neither of these groups, it is significantly union. Further, demographic and political trends will only make this more so in the future. The end result will be a Democratic Party that looks much more like that Congressional Progressive Caucus, and a Republican Party that includes the Blue Dogs and Conservadems.
So, 90% of McCain's support came from whites, and 89% came from Christians, but the country is getting less white, and less Christian, and even whites and Christians are voting more and more for Democrats.
That sentence should set any Republican sweating. But here's the number that should send them crawling under the covers and whimpering: 66. 66% of those aged 18-29 voted for Obama last November. If only people this age had voted, Obama would have about 40 states and somewhere around 469 electoral votes, according to exit polls. Including Mississippi. And Arizona.
In one of the first diaries of this series, we noted that 90% of John McCain's votes came from white voters. More specifically though, 83% of John McCain's votes came from white Christian voters. As a proportion of the electorate, we saw whites are declining. But guess what? So are Christians, slowly but steadily. Here's how that looks:
What in the heck is wrong with Appalachia? I keep running into interesting correlations that tells me Appalachia should be giving far less support to Democrats at the presidential level than it actually does.
Here's the example from yesterday:
Click to enlarge.
If all of Central Appalachia behaved like the rest of the region, we'd expect to see all the points scattered near the line in the graph above. Instead, the points representing counties in parts of Appalachia go soaring off above 50%.
And Southern Appalachia does its own strange thing too. More below.
In this diary series, we've cycled through just about every ethnic group with available data. But there's one left: "Americans" - and the quotation marks are there for a reason.
In practice I am defining this group as whites who did not list an ancestry or listed American or United States as ancestry on the census form. Very few non-whites list American as an ancestry. There is also a correlation between the percent whites who list American ancestry and whites who do not list any ancestry, which is why I lumped them all together.
Who are these "Americans"? We can't tell, but there's lots of possible reasons to fall into this category: too many ancestries to list, unknown ancestry, patriotism, annoyance with labels, privacy concerns, getting bored filling out the census form, and sheer contrariness come to mind.
No matter, one thing is clear: nationwide, on average, the more whites describe themselves as "Americans" in a county, the less support for Obama among whites.
Take a look at the map below and see if you can figure out what the circled counties have in common:
Click to enlarge.
If you think these counties each had the best showing for McCain in their respective states, you're darn close, but not exactly right. Here's a hint: this diary is about the politics of European Americans - that is, those who identified a specific European ancestry in the 2000 census.
Bangor Daily News has the map of the vote percentages on Question 1 in Maine:
Snapshot... a much closer view can be found here. Pink and dark pink are good, green and dark green are bad.
I don't want to get into the official numbers by town and precinct again from election night, but to paint a broader picture.
As you look at the map, our numbers got worse as the population got smaller, excluding the heavily Catholic Lewiston-Auburn area, one of the largest metropolitan areas in Maine, which voted 59% and 54% respectively against marriage equality. Mike Lux asked me what the campaign did to organize in small towns. Mike, as many of you know, did VISTA organizing in rural Nebraska and worked in smaller areas all over Iowa, so he really has a bead on these things. In truth the campaign did a great deal to organize in smaller towns, but there is one tactic no political campaign can fully execute with money or resources or organizing. Part of the reason these small towns are so hardcore against marriage equality, Mike noted, is because in many of these communities, there are no gay people, or if there are, they are usually closeted. To some extent, no amount of TV advertising or direct mail or surrogate work will work as well as person-to-person communication with gay people in your community. The other item that helps, too, is religious outreach, which is where I saw a lot of external organizing going on- not just in liberal areas like Portland, but all over the state.
But I'm most interested in the gay neighbor aspect. In 1978, Harvey Milk played a major role in defeating the Briggs Initiative in California, which would have banned gays and lesbians from working in public schools. What he used as perhaps his most central organizing tactic was getting people to come out of the closet, to demonstrate that this gay person is your beloved schoolteacher or principal or aide, and thus move voters in a very personal way to vote no. This was also what made the Elephant Walk Bar at the corner of 18th and Castro so revolutionary- it was one of the first bars to have broad, open windows where passers-by could look in on the patrons, in 1974, where most or all of the bars had no windows and patrons went in secret. If you wanted to go, you had to essentially commit to being more out of the closet to the community.
We won that campaign with 58% of the vote, and a famous speech Milk gave during it is instructive today:
On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country ... We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets ... We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I'm going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives.
The same tactic Milk used for school employees everywhere must continue to be used in these communities. We have to encourage people in these towns to come out of the closet and say they want the right to marry. State Representative Mike Carey, who represents heavily Catholic downtown Lewiston and voted in favor of marriage equality in the legislature, pointed out to me that in these kinds of votes, the default vote is for fear, and it is a huge barrier to reach one's conscience if they have no personal knowledge of the issue. For all the "gay marriage will be taught in schools" ads our opponents ran in Maine and will run in other states that tap that fear element, we have to counter with people who can give voters that kind of personal touch on the issue.
When Reagan was first elected, only one percent of voters (and six percent of the population) were Hispanic. Just five years previously, jurisdictions with Hispanic voters had been added to the list of areas covered by the Voting Rights Act.
In 2008, after a rapid increase in participation, the Latino proportion of the electorate had increased almost tenfold (in part because of immigration) to 9% (compared to 15% of the population). Here's a comparison of 2004 and 2008:
Click to enlarge.
The most striking feature of the map is the increase in the Latino electorate in the South and other areas outside the Southwest.
Alaska: Land Without Counties. You may have noticed every election results website (that I saw) showed you results by county for every state except Alaska. That's because their vote is tallied by State House district instead, and it takes a bit of effort to reorganize the data for different geographic units - of which the closest equivalent to counties are boroughs and census areas. Here's the map of the 2008 election results by State House district:
Click to enlarge.
Each district had somewhere between about 5000 and 12000 votes cast. Democratic strength is centered in Anchorage and Juneau, while Republican strength is in the South Central region (outside of Anchorage) and Fairbanks.
So what about the Native Alaskan vote, about 10% of the total voters?
Hawaii, of course, is a state. And there's 600,000 Pacific Islanders on the mainland, along with 3.4 million Puerto Ricans, 1.2 million Cubans, 0.8 million Dominicans, and 1.7 million from the West Indies. So there's actually a large number of Pacific Islanders and Caribbean Americans who, if citizens, can vote in the United States federal elections and do have representation.
But Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands are all United States Territories, and they do not have voting representatives in Washington DC, nor can they participate in the electoral college. (Additional US Territories have populations ranging from none to a handful.)
Apache County, Arizona is home to portions of the Fort Apache and Navajo communities, and was estimated to be 73% Native American in 2007. The Voting Rights Act and its subsequent amendments have had quite an impact in this county. Below, we see a crude measure of turnout - number of voters divided by total population (estimated between census years).
Click to enlarge.
There has been a steady increase in crude turnout in Apache County as one barrier to voting after another has been removed. At the same time, the share of the votes won by Democrats has generally increased.
Here's a picture of Republicans shooting themselves in the foot:
Click to enlarge.
This shows the dramatic change in support from the Arabic-speaking community in Dearborn, Michigan. In 2000, Bush won with around 70%; in 2008, the community voted nearly 100% for Obama. I found no other community with change this stunning. This is what happens when you demonize a group of people: they stop voting for you. Quickly.
Of course, for those of you who read the previous diaries in this series, you know what I'm going to say next: we are not all of us alike. The Arab-American vote is not as monolithic nationwide as it is in Dearborn. We'll also explore communities with ties to other parts of Western and Central Asia below the fold.
The national exit polls showed nearly two-thirds of those identifying themselves as Asian voted for Obama, a strong majority. Let's use the census data to find some neighborhoods with heavy concentrations of Asian Americans and examine the election results.
Here's a promising place to start:
Click to enlarge.
This map shows percent Asian by precinct; there is a nice variation from none (yellow) up to about three-quarters (dark blue).
We should see a corresponding pattern in the precinct results then - here, dark blue shows strong support for Obama:
Click to enlarge.
Oops...
There's certainly a pattern there, but not what we might have expected from the nationwide exit polls.
It's easy to shift into shorthand when looking at demographic data and start talking about how Group A or Group B 'votes for Obama' or 'is Democratic.' Generally we all know that we really mean only that a majority of said population behaves that way, but the words still leave behind a bit of the impression that all people in Group A vote the same way. Especially if we hear in the media over and over and over and over and over that, for instance, white working class voters won't vote for Democrats anymore.
Perhaps the most justified statement of this sort is "African-Americans voted for Obama." When the exit polls say 95% did, indeed, vote for Obama, that seems to be pretty safe.
I'm going to start off even more extreme though - here's a map of election results from Chicago: there were a whopping 87 precincts where Obama had exactly 100% of the vote (shown in pink). They were generally located in African-American neighborhoods.
Click to enlarge.
Follow me below if you're wondering where I'm going with this.
(One year out from the 2010 elections, this is a continuation of a two-week series dreaminonempty is conducting on the demographics of the American electorate - promoted by Chris Bowers)
In 2008, 90% of John McCain's votes came from white voters. However, while the Republican relied primarily on white voters, only 55% of them voted for him.
Coincidentally, 55% is also the percent of babies born in the US in 2008 that were non-Hispanic white, according to Census estimates.
That just doesn't bode well for Republicans.
Here's how it looks:
Click to enlarge.
On the left, results from the 2008 exit polls. On the right, the decreasing share of the US population that is non-Hispanic white. Explanations below the fold.
Using constituent data from Techpolitics and updating the membership for the 111th Congress, here are some demographic comparisons between the constituents of the Blue Dogs and the constituents of the Progressive Caucus:
Blue Dog vs. Progressive, Constituent Demographics
Demographic
Blue Dogs
Progressives
Other Dems
Median Income
$37,798
$41,405
$44,890
% in Poverty
14.02%
16.03%
12.13%
African-American
11.63%
22.35%
12.09%
Hispanic
10.41%
18.28%
14.62%
Other non-white
3.76%
7.04%
5.96%
It is worth noting that both Progressives and Blue Dogs have constituents who are, on average, poorer than the rest of the House Democratic caucus. How is it then that these two groups are on the opposite end of the Democratic Party?
One tempting conclusion is the substantial ethnic difference between the two constituencies. 47.67% of the constituents of Progressive Caucus members are non-white, while only 25.08% of the constituents of Blue Dog House members are non-white. It isn't that the Blue Dogs have wealthier constituents, just that they seem to have whiter constituents. Somehow, in and of itself, that is enough for Blue Dogs to take a more corporate, conservative policy line.
These numbers are pretty disturbing. They remind me of the old saying: "the rich man keeps blacks and whites apart so he can steal from them both." Seems about right.
We had a pretty good discussion yesterday about the general lack of progress over the last thirty years in creating a more equitable economy. Now that was the kind of discussion that shows why the Open Left community is so great!
In the post, I argued that previous incarnations of progressive movements made more gains toward social justice in relative terms than current progressive movements, but not in absolute terms. That is, progressives of the past achieved more for their time, but not greater social justice overall. As such, we should not lionize past incarnations of progressive movements over our own, because they did not achieve more overall than we have--they just kicked the ball down the road to roughly the same point where it now stands. We are stagnating, as are pretty much all other wealthy democracies, and have been such for a long time.
Whether or not people agree with that assertion, the reasons offered in the comments for a lack of ongoing progress were fascinating. The two explanations that generated the most discussion were by bruce.dixon, who focused on wildly expanded incarceration rates over the last forty years, and by Mark Wallace, who discussed television as a means of reinforcement of the status quo.
I think there is something to be said for each of those rationales. I also think it is important to remember that no trend as broad, long lasting, and international as this almost certainly has more than one cause. As such, allow me to offer a third explanation that no one in the comments touched on: the increasing inelasticity and stagnation in social policy in wealthy democracies is partially a factor of the increasing age of the population of those countries.
America, like all other wealthy democracies, is getting older, and fast. In the last two decades alone, the median age of the United States has increased from 32.9 years, to 36.7 years. This has real political ramifications. In 1976, 32% of the electorate was under the age of 30, compared to only 18% in 2008. If the electorate last year had been as young as it was in 1976, Obama would have won by a much larger margin--55.5%--43.7%--than even the 7.27% he actually won by. Democrats in Congress would have won at least a dozen more seats. Approval ratings for the Obama administration and Democratic policies would be higher, too. Simply put, the country would be more open to progressive policy changes.
Even beyond the short-term outlook of American politics, worldwide life expectancy has increased from 31 in 2000, to about 65 now. In the wealthy democracies, it has increased from about 45 to about 80. This has resulted in a far older population pretty much everywhere, which certainly plays an important role in reinforcing the status quo. The older one becomes, the less likely s/he is to pick up new tastes in clothes, food, music, or even slang. The older one becomes, the more intertwined his or her lifestyle and livelihood becomes on established, status quo institutions for employment and / or retirement. All of these trends are undoubtedly connected to political choices as well, resulting in a reinforcement of the status quo within those institutions as well.
While certainly not everyone experiences a solidification of their politics and trends toward a reinforcement of the status quo with age, it is probably safe to say that is generally true. As such, the continuing demographic trend older populations with the first 25 OECD countries must be a contributing factor to the general stagnation in economic and social policy in those countries over the last 25 years. It isn't the only factor in the slowed rate of progress and / or stagnation we are experiencing, but it is an important one. The older our population becomes, the fewer sweeping policy changes we will probably experience.
Gallup has some polling data that should provide a bit of optimism about the state of the country. Over the past decade, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of Americans reporting that they are paying "very close" attention to the news:
Even adjusting for the peaks around Presidential elections, that is clearly an upward trend. Just guessing, but some factors involved in this increase include:
New technologies and media that make it easier to follow the news
Political and economic turbulence
An aging population
It is also worth noting that Democrats actually pay less attention to the news than do Republicans:
Reasons for this gap are largely demographic. According to Gallup, there is a correlation between high income, older age and paying close attention to the news, which favors Republicans. Also, according to Gallup's data, men (42%) pay significantly closer attention to the news than women (30%), which also favor Republicans.
The Republican advantage shows that while there is an increase in civic engagement taking place in America, that engagement does not necessarily favor progressives. More people are paying attention to the news, but not necessarily the lower-income, largely younger people who have been most severely hurt by the economy of the past decade. No matter how successful Democrats have been in wooing and increasing turnout among young people, there is still a lot of work to be done.
The first part of this series discussed how Perot voters formed roughly two-thirds of the Republican gains in the national House popular vote from 1992 to 1994. While certainly there were multiple factors, including the 1994 health care debacle, polls strongly suggest that NAFTA was their primary source of Perot voter dissatisfaction with Democrats. While the bailout could potentially serve a similar function in 2010, we live in a more polarized era with nowhere near the same percentage of the electorate up for grabs as 1992-1994. As Such, a similar swing in 2010 is unlikely.
In the second part, we looked at how dissatisfaction with President Clinton among the American left was substantial, and led to low liberal and labor turnout in 1994. So far, the American left is significantly more satisfied with President Obama and the current incarnation of the Democratic Party. However, there are still worrying signs that Democrats will experience significant drop-offs in turnout in 2010.
This article looks at the third main piece of the puzzle for Republicans in 1994: southern whites. That year, for the first time, Republicans extended their strong performances among southern whites from the presidential level to the congressional level. Not only was this an essential in helping Republicans find enough seats to take over Congress in 1994, but it also gave their "revolution" enough stability to last for twelve years.
In terms of seats, 1994 was not dominated by the South While the current incarnation of the Republican Party is heavily associated with the South, at least in terms of seats won, the Republican wave in 1994 was not disproportionately southern.
In 1994, the eleven states that once formed the Confederacy represented 28.7% (125 of 435) of the seats in the House. That year, 29.6% of the Republican net gain in House seats (16 of 54), came from those eleven states. In the Senate, only three of the nine Republican pickups were from former Confederate states. Fueled by southern whites in the South, and Perot voters everywhere else, 1994 was a national victory for Republicans, not a regional one.
Much more, including a cool historical graph, in the extended entry.
Tom Edsall discusses how whites are the primary demographic target of conservative attacks on President Obama:
With Republican party leaders so constrained by ideological blinders that none of their positions is likely to produce gains among non-white minorities, especially Hispanics, the GOP is finding it has no real alternative but to revert to a "white voter" strategy.
To some extent, it's working. The party's opposition to President Obama's agenda -- particularly his cap-and-trade energy proposal and health care reform plan -- is resonating strongly with disaffected white Democratic voters. Republican grievances about Obama, combined with race-baiting commentary from the far-right ideologues who have become some of the most dominant voices of the modern GOP, have led to a precipitous drop in the president's approval ratings among whites.
There is much to agree with here. This is especially the case if one narrows Edsall's formulation of "white voters" to "white Christian voters," given that white non-Christians vote for Democrats by 3-1 margins that are nearly identical to non-whites.
Republicans have suffered such severe electoral losses in recent years, and become so dominated by right-wing leaders and institutions, there are few moderating voices left to suggest a less hard-line message. Further, while the electorate has become significantly more ethnically diverse (26% non-white in 2008, compared to 15% non-white in 1988), and more religiously diverse (76% of Americans self-identified as Christian in 2008, down from 86% in 1990), according to Pew the Republican Party is composed of the same percentage of white Christians as it was at the start of the decade. Republicans are thus becoming relatively less diverse compared to the rest of the country, and therefore lacks a critical mass of voices that could make them appealing to a wider range of demographic groups.
Perhaps even more basically, the ideology that dominates the Republican Party is drenched in a language of cultural supremacy (anti-immigrant, "Christian Nation," anti-Islam, Birthers, etc.) that is fundamentally at odds with even the presence of more diverse groups in the United States. Intuitively, the conservative movement isn't trying to broaden its demographic base, despite population trends indicating it would be a wise move. Their ideology is largely predicated on fighting against those very trends, not in accepting them and moving on.
However, could such a strategy actually work for Republicans in national elections in either the short-term or long-term? Can they realistically increase their share of the vote among self-identified white-Christians to the point where their deficits among non-whites and non-Christians are, ala the 70's and 80's, once again irrelevant? To put it a different way, would it be possible for the Republican Party to get the entire country voting like large sections of the South, where 70% or more of self-identified white Christians choose the GOP?
As I explain in the extended entry, while a longshot, this proposition is not entirely impossible.
