Over in KarlGauss’s pit thread about Carson, Measure for Measure said:
Is that true? I would have thought that in the era of big-tent parties with overlapping ideologies, the Democrats and Republicans both would have had supporters amongst professionals, particularly the Democrats in the southern states?
[I’m just curious, and didn’t want to derail the sanctity of a Pit thread with a factual inquiry, but since it’s politics I’ll put it here rather than in GQ.]
In this book the authors speculate that demographic trends will favor the democratic party. One of the groups they feel will do this is working professionals, people with bachelor or higher degrees who work in knowledge heavy field and who are turned off by the GOPs war on science and women.
I don’t know if the GOP had a ‘lock’ on them, but I think there has been roughly a 20 point shift from being 60-40 GOP several decades ago to now being closer to 60-40 democrat among the group.
Back in 1960, the South didn’t count for generalizations.
That’s flip but also true. The South was a unique homogeneous unit that mostly didn’t count for much of anything. The vast majority of power and influence were in the Northeast and Midwest. When people talked about “the country,” that’s what they talked about.
I’m not reading an unlinked pit thread to find the original context for the line so I can’t be sure that’s what Measure for Measure meant. I’d limit my agreement to saying that it has a high degree of truth for most historic purposes on a message board. My cite is season one of Mad Men.
If you click on the little arrow in the Quote box by Measure for Measure’s name, it takes you straight to his full post and the thread.
at least with physicians, they once did. However, with them that is not the case.
The abstract of this journal article:
Actually, another big example of how Bill Clinton changed the electoral calculus in a radical direction (because it says between 1991 and 2012, and Clinton came in 1992)
Back in 1960, Republicans came in two flavors – Wall Street and Main Street.
Main Street Republicans included your basic bankers, lawyers, doctors in private practice – aka “professionals.” These were people who worked hard, made a pretty good living, and didn’t want government to rock the boat.
Remember that back in the 1960s, the American Medical Association vigorously opposed Medicare.
It depends somewhat on what you mean by “lock.” If you mean could count on getting a majority of professional in every election, then perhaps. If you mean they were getting essentially all the professionals’ votes, than I doubt that. Stevenson, for example, was very popular among the professionals in my parents’ circle.
Yeah, but that group is less attached to the Democrats than most, and has shown signs of moving back to the GOP fold since 2008, and that comes straight out of the mouth(or the computer keyboard) of the guy who wrote “The Emerging Democratic Majority”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2015/02/02/the_emerging_republican_advantage_350437.html
This would depend on geographic location, wouldn’t it? I remember when Texas was a solid Democratic state, as was all the South. Of course, there was a reason the southern Dems were called Dixiecrats. They had their own flavor, which was largely indistinguishable from today’s Republicans.
Not really. All things being equal, the South likes federal spending for their benefit. The South tends to be a problem for whichever team they are on, and right now the South plays hell with the Republicans’ desires to cut spending and eliminate pork.
Not necessarily, Dixiecrats included bog-standard right-wingers like Thurmond and Helms who needed little persuasion to switch over the GOP but also populists like George Wallace who were only really right-wing on racial issues and even some genuine liberals like Ralph Yarborough and Estes Kefauver.
Yeah, the ideas come from that author, via the New Republic.
There are three things to remember about the professional class.
It’s growing. In the 1950s it was 7% of the workforce. In 2002 it was 15%. Consider computer programmers for example.
It’s trending Democratic. John B. Judis, 2002: [INDENT]…professionals once saw themselves as proof of the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism. They disdained unions and opposed the New Deal and “big government.” In the 1960 presidential election, professionals supported Nixon over Kennedy 61 percent to 38 percent. Since then, however, their views have changed dramatically. In the last four presidential elections, professionals have supported the Democratic candidate by an average of 52 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, counties disproportionately populated by professionals–such as New Jersey’s Bergen County, the Philadelphia suburb of Montgomery County, and California’s Santa Clara County–have gone from Republican to Democratic. [/INDENT] The professional class has, well, professionalism. Attacks on science turn them off, as do corporate constraints on the quality of their work.
2007 update by Judis: http://prospect.org/article/back-future
Higher income groups vote more. Professionals are further up the ladder than average. So they punch above their weight in the voting booth. Vox has a graph with voter turnout vs. income: One big reason Congress ignores the poor: they don't vote | Vox
Does a 61 percent to 38 percent advantage in 1960 count as a Republican lock on the professional class? Yes: because that phrase rolls off the tongue really well.
Judis himself though has pointed out that professionals are coming back to the GOP.
Cite? I didn’t know that. A vague recollection would be ok.
Google “the emerging republican advantage” - I haven’t been able to read the full article because it appears to be behind a paywall (or at least a registration wall), but from the summaries it sounds like a huge extrapolation based on the trend between the historic 2008 election through the only subsequent data point we have.
The Wall Street Journal has a summary that’s not behind a wall.
From what I see there, Judis said several things I believe to be true. The Democrats have lost their hold on working class men, once solidly for them. The loss of the union movement along with manufacturing jobs has had a huge effect. Additionally, Red states have turned solidly Red while most of the close states were Blue under Obama, which means they are endangered. As I pointed out in another thread, the number of votes the Republicans need to swing in relatively few states is frightening small to Democratic eyes.
On the other side, Judis apparently puts weight on the Presidency switching every eight years theory. I’ve been accused on doing so here, but I’ve tried to emphasize that the historic swings - or lack of them - have good explanatory power but not good predictive power. It is a result rather than a cause.
One of the major things that future elections will turn on is demographics, which, not at all surprisingly, a partisan outlet like the WSJ has to entire ignore to make its article palatable. The Republican party has been - bizarrely, from a histoical perspective - actively and deliberately alienating every demographic group which is scheduled to grow in the near future while simultaneously putting all its chips on groups that are in precipitous decline. Those old white factory workers are dying off faster than any Republican group is replacing them.
What the Republicans must count on is that the voting population is not the same as the general population. Their base votes in higher percentages and turns out more reliably. Turnout in the few swing states becomes extremely and disproportionately critical. Those states will be driven insane by ads while the rest of the country will wonder whether an election’s taking place at all.
I think I agree with everything you just wrote. My earlier comments were specific to claims around the professional class, not to Judis’s article as a whole.
That looks like an interesting article but it is behind a paywall, is there a free version somewhere? I’d like to see his views on how there may be a realignment.
There are many articles discussing it. The ones I’ve read have all made pretty much the same points so I believe they get the gist.
The problem is that they’re all on right-wing sites and so naturally leap upon the premise with open arms. Nobody was refuting or even disputing it. If anyone can find a good summary on the left I’d like to see how they rebut it.
Here is some more in depth discussion of Judis’s ideas including how it is easier for the GOP to win the house, senate & presidency than the dems.
They don’t mention millennials. Millennials pretty much carried Obama in 2008 and 2012 I believe, and they will make 40% of the electorate in 2020. I assume they will stay more democratic, but I don’t know for sure.
I’m surprised the white working class is big enough to neutralize the democratic advantages among millennials, non-whites and cultural minorities.