When the New York Times' John Harwood reported that a top Obama adviser told him that progressives "need to take off the pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult," it was a rejoinder that expressed far more than Village disdain for grassroots pressure and activism. It represented a deeper assertion, pervasive in political circles, that says we all must be patient with the Obama White House because we're only 10 months into the new administration. "Governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult" is a euphemism for both "stop pushing so hard," "don't expect so much change so fast," "he's trying to do too much too fast" and every other similar dollop of conventional wisdom.
David took aim at the counsel for patience, pointing out how quickly Reagan moved in his nine months in office. But what about the claim of a "closely divided country?" Does this look "closely divided"?
If you're not pre-hypnotized, the above charts look none too "closely divided". But, you might wonder, how do the current House and Senate look in historical comparison? Since popular election of Senators started in 1914, we've had 48 Congresses. The current Senate is tied for the 13th most lopsided majority, in the top 1/3 of the size of Senate majorities (more in the extended entry):
Frequent church-goers were the only demographic subgroup to show no decline in GOP allegiance from 2001 to 2009, according to a new survey brief from Gallup. Declines among conservatives and those 65 and older were also minimal--the only bright spots reported for the GOP....
Democrats gained most from further consolidating support in their strongest demographic groups, rather than winning over Republican core groups, a shift that goes contrary to President Obama's repeated overtures to the GOP base....
The chart below (which adds a fourth column to the one released by Gallup) shows a loss of at least one in five GOP supporters among eight of the nine groups where the GOP lost eight or more percent support among the population at large. For example, the nine percent loss among moderates in general, from 37% to 28%, translated into a loss of 24% of GOP moderates--just shy of one in five. Combined with a 47% loss of GOP liberals and a 0% loss of GOP conservatives, this is yet another indication that the GOP is becoming more extreme as it shrinks
The logic here seemed incredibly obvious and straight-forward to me: If GOP losses were minimal among their core conservative demographics, and heavy elsewhere, then the party as a whole was becoming more extreme, and hence more unreachable via bi-partisan gestures, directly contrary to the basic logic behind Obama's repeated stress of a commitment to bi-partisan "pragmatism": if the pragmatists are fleeing the GOP in droves, then who's there left to be bi-partisanly pragmatic with?
The utter lack of any serious policy proposals from the GOP since Obama came to office would only seem to underscore the obviousness of the point I was making. But instead, I got a range of counter-arguments, plus several folks who claimed to not understand what I was saying. Obviously, it wasn't as obvious as I thought it was. Hence, this diary.
The two driving trends here appear to be the decline of Democratic dominance in the South, which appears to have come to an end, and the increase in the Democratic advantage among younger voters, which is growing increaingly strong. Put this together with almost year-old data from Pew, that has long-term trend comparisons behind it (on the flip), and the case for rising Dem identification is increasingly strong.
On Thursday, Kos posted a diary listing the states that fell into three categories of shift in voting margin for president from 2004 to 2008: those that had shifted to the GOP, those that showed no shift, and those that shifted to the Dems by 10 or more points. I took those states and compared them to the Gallup Party ID shifts from 2002 to 2008, and this is what I came up with:
There were 12 other states which also shifted Democratic by 10 or more points in party ID from 2002 to 2008. This is the strongest indication that the partisan vote shift over 6 years significantly exceeded the presidential vote shift from 2005 to 2008.
This is a followup to my diary last weekend, "Gallup Data Says: A Center-Right Nation No More". Since it seems that Barack Obama and the DC Democratic establishment have completely forgotten what happened last November, I'll just remind them: they won. And I I'll start off with this visually reminder of the party ID shift over the last 6 years that fueled that victory:
Now, the main point of this diary is to add in what was left out of the first installment, an examination of the shifts that includes state populations. Fun and games on the flip.
This week, Gallup released a report on the partisan makeup of the states, based on all its interviews during 2008. I diaried about it hurriedly here, and promised a more comprehensive diary on the weekend. Voila! That promise is hereby kept.
Here's the map that Gallup put out, showing just 5 red states:
I used a more nuanced division, and put it onto a map divided into census regions, producing the following:
The most obvious thing about these results is that they provide yet another form of evidence for a massive realignment-something that Versailles is still massively out of touch with. In fact, it's still quite a distinct possibility that the current Democratic dominance could fall apart precisely because they fail to give the people what the people are hungering for-a sweeping and fundamental change of direction. (See David's latest post, for example.)
A table of the underlying state-by-state data kicks off the extended diary.
As the 2008 conventions approach, the Democratic Party's advantage in party identification remains as large as it has been over the past two decades, and the Democratic Party's image remains substantially more positive than the GOP's. The Democrats have a 13-point lead in party affiliation (51% vs. 38%) among registered voters, when independents who "lean" to either party are included. Four years ago, the Democrats held only a slim 47% to 44% lead by this same measure.
Over the past four years, the Democrats' gains in party affiliation among younger voters have been particularly striking. In 2004, the Democrats had a 10-point lead among 18-29 year olds (50% to 40%); this more than doubled, to 22 points (55% to 33%), in polling conducted between January and August of 2008.
And while Democratic gains have occurred across all income and education groups, the change from 2004 is particularly notable among middleincome voters. In 2004, Americans with household incomes between $30,000 and $75,000 tilted Republican (48% Republican/lean Republican, 44% Democrat/lean Democrat). Today, the Democrats have built a substantial 14-point lead among these voters (53% to 39%).
While the news continues to be encouraging across a wide range of indicators, there is a slight fall-off between polling done this month and polling done earlier this year--indicating some spillover from Obama's declining lead of John McCain since the immediate aftermath of clinching the primary. The convention could well help to reverse that trend, however, which is relatively slight compared to the deep hole the Republicans have dug themselves into with such demonic vigor.
Paul Rosenberg has diaried here that wealthier Southern white flight to the Republican Party has been a significant driver of today's political alignments. The same theme has recently been explored by Paul Krugman at his blog. Krugman calls attention to an excellent academic article on the myth of the rich Democrat by Larry Bartells at Princeton. These things seem to run in fours. Paul Gelman at my favorite statistics website Statistical Modeling and Causal Inference has similar research on class, race, voting and between the states.
The conclusions from all four, add up to a powerfully convincing explanation. As Krugman puts it "once you take the great southern switch into account, there isn't much left to explain.... White men didn't turn against the Democrats; Southern white men turned against the Democrats. End of story." Class separation on voting has increased from 4% in the 1952-1972 period to 14% in the 1976-2004 period. RICH white southerners became Republican, while POOR white Southerners remain Democrat. Class voting differences are more dramatic in poor states than in rich states.
The piece de resistance is a wonderful graphic from Andrew Gelman that collapses this issue into three powerfully explanatory images worth a 1000 words Some cool graphs of rich states and poor states showing famous red-blue maps for Bush vs Kerry disaggregated into three income levels, poor, middle and rich (rich is above the 95th percentile, poor is up to the 37 percentile). Here are Gelman's images:
In response to my earlier diary today, several people asked about specific class data for poor whites in the South vs. middle and upper class whites.
The American National Election Studies (ANES) Cumulative Datafile doesn't contain enough data to create meaningfully-sized samples on a per-election basis for Southern Whites. However, it does have enough for most decades, so on the flip I've assembled a decade-by-decade profile from the 1950s to date.
In the decade-by-decade data, we can clearly see that there's been a transition from uniformly very high levels of Democratic Party membership in the White South to a pattern today in which Democratic Party membership declines steadily as income goes up. There can be no doubt that the white backlash in the South has been heavily mediated by class.
A little over a week ago, Chris wrote a diary, Concern Troll Demographers, taking off on an article at The Politico, Dems must woo white men to win . In response, Chris pointed out that that the "white men" being lost were actually a narrower demographic, "the white, straight, Christian, non-union male vote," which "forms about 25-30% of a shrinking percentage of the electorate." Which, of course, is quite true, as Chris has pointed out several times over the past few years. But for me, it brought to mind something else as well, the following three charts which I generated last year, which show that Democrats have basically stabilized their support outside the White South since the Bush I years, while only the Southern White conservative Republican demographic has continued to swell:
This got me to thinking about what it would look like to examine party ID by income, comparing the South to the rest of the country. Which I do on the flip...
