By: Inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/ Imagining what the Founding Fathers would think about our nation today always constitutes an interesting exercise. America's strength and enduring democracy probably would have delighted many of them. On the other hand, its political parties and many foreign alliances might have raised an eyebrow or two.
In fact, if one reads George Washington's farewell address, its quite amazing how much of his advice was not followed. "Avoid...overgrown military establishments" (nope); "steer clear of permanent alliances" (nope); "preserving the Union" (the Civil War ruined that one); "avoiding...the accumulation of debt" (funny, that); "party dissension...is itself a frightful despotism" (stopped following that advice even before his death).
Because this is a politics blog, however, the question here is what political party Washington would have belonged to.
"Self-identified white conservatives versus self-identified non-whites and white liberals" is perhaps the best, one-sentence description of the demographic difference between two major political coalitions in the United States.
Earlier today, I noted that "drop off" voters (that is, people who voted in 2008 but are currently considered unlikely to voter in 2010), are actually much happier about the direction of the country, and of the Democratic Party, than are likely voters. This makes it very difficult to argue that drop-off voters are dropping out primarily due to increasing cynicism rooted in the current direction of Democratic governance.
Surely, there are some drop-off voters whose primary motivation is the Democratic failure to deliver on sweeping change. As with any large group of people (in this case, tens of millions), more than one motivation is in play. But what is the primary motivation behind drop-off voters, and what can be done to get Democratic drop-off voters to the polls in 2010?
I have a theory: nothing. There is nothing that can be done to bring the drop-off voters to the polls. The lack of participation among drop-off voters is consistent with long-term civic trends in the United States, and not specific to the current political situation. The problem is particularly pronounced for Democrats in 2010 because the Democratic coalition has become increasingly dependent upon young voters who, despite what anyone has tried since 18-year olds were first given suffrage almost 40 years ago, have always seen their participation plummet in midterm elections relative to older voters. As such, Democratic and progressive efforts to win elections in 2010 must be focused primarily, if not entirely, on voter persuasion rather than voter mobilization.
On the Meet The Press yesterday, David Brooks reminded us all just how completely loaded with bullshit most cultural criticism actually is in America:
MR. BROOKS: I always look at passionate outsiders. Who are the passionate outsiders who are going to come into the mainstream? Because the people with passion really can control the decade--the feminists in the 1970s, the evangelicals in the 1980s. And so when I look around the world at who are the real passionate outsiders, one, the people that we've already talked about, which are the, the democracy protesters in Iran. But two, and I have to say that I'm not a huge fan of them, but the tea party people. They have real passion. They're now at the outside. If they can merge with responsible leadership and become a real movement--there's real disgust at government, there's real disgust about fiscal issues--they could become maybe a destructive force in the Republican Party, maybe a positive force. But, to me, those are the people with real passion who may play a much larger role in the coming decade and so forth.
WTF does any of this actually mean? Define "passionate." Define "outsiders." For that matter, define "mainstream." And, while you are at it Mr. Brooks, please provide some justification for how any single group "controls" a decade, and what causality mechanism allows a qualitative group to do this.
Everything Brooks says here is purely bullshit masquerading as knowledge. It reminds me of why I like to ground my writing in actual facts, rather than subjective, vague, qualitative terminology that doesn't actually mean anything.
To that end, here are some things that are actually going to happen over the next decade:
1. Continuing, gradual identity changes The people of the United States are going to become:
Higher voter turnout rates (due to aging population)
Higher public spending as a % of GDP (partially due to older population, largely because that never really drops)
More tolerant (because, generally speaking, more tolerant people tend to be younger)
Equal, or greater, overall income inequality (because that has been happening for so long, and current policies will only slow the trend, not reverse it.) However, economic inequality between ethnic and gender groups will probably continue to decline.
The European Union will continue to pull away from the United States as the #1 economic region in the world. While China will not catch up to the USA, they will firmly establish themselves as a third world Superpower in this regard. These three Superpowers will dominate the world for decades.
Even as China and the EU gain on the United States economically, and even as the rest of the world gains on all three of those regions in terms of population, the Anglophone world will become an increasingly larger percentage of the wealthy world. This is because per capita income in China remains very low, and because Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom all sport population growth rates far exceeding Japan and Western Europe.
The world will get hotter.
That's all stuff that is actually going to happen. After a month of maddeningly vague and meaningless predictions of the sort quoted above, I thought this would provide a useful counterweight.
Entering an election year, the Democratic Party faces a problem with its relatively less enthusiastic voting base. However, the extent of that problem is often exaggerated, especially when compared to long-term trends. In fact, enthusiasm woes are currently costing Democrats at most 3% nationally, and possibly as little as 2%. Further, that 2-3% problem mainly appears to be caused by a lack of enthusiasm among the part of the base that votes Democratic due to economic fragility, rather than for the part of the base that votes Democratic for more ideologically oriented reasons.
A Chris Bowers Golden Oldie
From Wed Apr 16, 2008. Original HERE. Since 1968, the discursive center of conservative electoral dominance has been a backlash narrative against people of color and "liberal elites." Over the past month, as seen in both the Jeremiah Wright and "bittergate" episodes, that narrative has also been the discursive center of attacks on Barack Obama. The double implication is that Obama is too black and too elitist to become President. This, of course, was always going to be the thematic center of attacks against Obama, given that he is an African-American university professor from Hyde Park. Given that Obama is the best demographic fit for conservative attacks against Democrats that has come along, possibly ever, it is pretty hard to fathom that they would abandon their tried and tested narratives now.
In The New Republic, John Judis is openly worrying that Obama is extremely vulnerable in a general election because these narratives will severely damage him among white working class voters. Meanwhile, the always helpful to Democrats Doug Schoen is urging Hillary Clinton, and really anyone running against Obama, to adopt these narratives against Obama 24-7. The basic premise in both arguments is that Obama is extremely vulnerable to these longstanding conservative narratives, and in fact using them might be the only way to defeat Obama. However, if there is one point I have tried to make in my blogging over the past three years, it is that the changing demographics of the electorate are rendering these conservative attacks increasingly ineffective, and that Democrats need no longer fear them as a result. We have reached a point where conservative backlash narratives against people of color and "liberal elites" appeal to such a small segment of the electorate, that Democrats no longer need them in order to win.
In 2004, John Kerry took 41% of the vote among whites, and lost the popular vote by 2.46%. In 1988, Michael Dukakis took 40% of the white vote, but lost the popular vote by 7.72%. With only a 1% improvement among whites, John Kerry improved 5.26% overall (source).
In 1992, whites were 87% of the electorate. In 2004, whites were 77% of the electorate, a 10% drop in just 12 years. Further, the three groups of whites among whom Democrats hold more than a 2-1 edge on Republicans, white union members, white non-Christians, and white LGBTs, are all increasing their share of the electorate and the white vote. Although not by a 2-1 margin, Democrats also do very well among white single women, who are also increasing their share of the electorate.
Who don't Democrats do well among anymore? Straight, Christian, non-union whites who are not single women, do not self-identify as liberal, and are over the age of 30. Basically, that is just about the only group where the backlash narratives will still have wide appeal. While about 90% of the punditry falls into that category, and while Republicans win this group with more than 70% of the vote, it only represents about one-third of the electorate, and decreases in size every year.
There once was a time, not long ago, when credible charges of liberal elitism would be devastating to a Democratic candidate in a Presidential election. However, the effectiveness of these charges has also decreased throughout time. In 1972, McGovern won 37.52% of the popular vote. In 1984, Mondale won 40.56% of the popular vote. In 1988, Dukakis won 45.65% of the popular vote. In 2004, John Kerry won 48.27% of the popular vote. The basic reason for this is not consistent improvement of the quality of the Democratic candidates, but the changing demographics of the electorate that these candidates more acceptable to the nation of the whole.
In 2008, we have probably reached a point where the demographic tilt of the electorate favors those candidates by 50% + 1. If this is the case, then it would represent the end of the "liberal elite" and civil right backlash narratives as an effective anti-Democratic tactic on the national level. Obama is just about the perfect demographic test-case for this theory, and he is not losing ground against either Clinton or McCain nationally during a month long wave of attacks based on these narratives. As such, I think there is compelling evidence that we have indeed reached the end of "liberal elites" and civil rights backlash as a majority position in America. Hopefully, this will result not only in Barack Obama becoming President, but also in Democrats in general starting to realize that they are beholden to a very different sort of electorate then the one that handed them numerous resounding defeats from 1968-2004.
If you change which voters Democrats believe they must attract in order to win elections, you change the Democratic Party irrevocably.
A Chris Bowers Golden Oldie
From Fri Mar 07, 2008. Original HERE.
Back in 1988, I became obsessed with a compute game called President Elect 1988, which was an early PC game that simulated a variety of historical and ahistorical presidential elections. One of the lessons I learned from the game is that it was a lot easier for Democrats to win if they nominated a southerner, and especially if another southerner was also on the ballot as vice-president. As such, four years later, when I was barely old enough to vote in the Democratic primary in New York, I liked Jerry Brown (despite his horrendous sales tax proposal) but also didn't mind if Bill Clinton won, because I figured Clinton could win some southern states and take the general election. When Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate, I was pretty happy, since my lesson from playing hundreds of games of President Elect was that there was pretty much no way such a ticket could lose during an economic downturn.
That was all well and good, and it worked well for its time. The civil rights backlash had fractured the New Deal coalition, and white, socially conservative, working class and middle class voters were turning to Republicans in droves. The vast majority of these voters lived in the south, which had once been a solid Democratic region and gave Democrats a nearly unbreakable partisan hold on power in Washington, D.C. The so-called "Republican Revolution" of the time was basically flipping conservative southern whites. These were the so-called "Reagan Democrats" who Dems became obsessed with winning back after the Mondale general election fiasco. While Clinton used them to win in 1992, in 1994, Republicans flipped these voters for good, and took control of Congress. Now, this is a group of voters that chooses Republicans in general elections by margins of more than 2-1.
While this treads into "votes that don't matter" territory, the truth is that after watching politics for more than twenty years, at this point trying to win back those "Reagan Democrats" feels like a lost cause. I've had enough of it. I'm tired of how trying to appeal to these voters basically never seems to work, but always succeeds in pushing the Democratic Party to the right. I'm tired of how it has created a perception in the Democratic Party that the progressive base don't matter, except as an ATM machine. And I'm tired of it because it has just gone on for so long at this point that we now have massive, emerging Democratic voting blocks that we should appeal to instead: non-Christian whites, the "creative class," and Latinos / Asians. While the once-Democratic and now Republican "Reagan" Dems are growing pretty darn old, the future of the country and the electorate can be found elsewhere. Why continue to chase after voting groups that are shrinking in size, that push the party to the right, and who we never seem to win anyway, when instead we can chase after far more fertile voting blocks that will push the party to the left and who represent more than 100% of the population growth in the United States?
One of the reasons is that Reagan Dems are still voting, and still on the brink of swinging not only the 2008 general election, but also the 2008 primary for the same stupid, racist reasons that they put Republicans in power back in the last quarter of the 20th century . Consider the following chart from Brendan Nyahn:
(* 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.
