As I said above, it’s a matter of the percentage of the group which actually votes, not the raw numbers of the group. As this pdf report from 2012 states, 58% of the actual voting population in 2008 were working class and they made up an even higher percentage in the swing states. Millennial turnout in 2014 was 21.3%, not much of a rise from 2012.
Those percentages overlap so a direct comparison can’t be made, but millennials are still a smaller part of the overall voting block.
If a larger percentage votes as they age - the historic norm - than their current pattern of favoring Democrats will be decisive. That’s a major reason I criticized the Judis article for not considering this. Nobody knows if millennials will ever match current high senior percentages, especially in non-presidential years, but it’s such a game changer that any good analysis has to include the possibility.
East Coast Republicans tended to fall into the Wall Street category. But remember that Javits became a Republican because he was tired of the corruption of the New York Democrats, and that Richard Nixon, for example, was also a Wall Street Republican, despite trying to portray himself as a “middle American.”
I did not know that about Javits but I did know that was also the reason why another liberal Republican, Fiorello La Guardia, joined the GOP instead of the Democrats. In any case, it is a bit interesting that many of the more liberal East Coast Republicans would fall under the Wall Street category since that wing of the party was established by Teddy Roosevelt who had a bit of an antagonistic relationship with the Wall Street powerbrokers.
I still can’t locate evidence for this claim. I guess I’ll toss it aside.
As conveyed here, there’s no conflict between “Democratic Majority” and “Republican Advantage”. The first says that long term demographics favor the Democrats. Plausible. The second says that “Gerrymandering, the Voting Rights Act, and the clustering of liberals in urban areas”, enhances the chances of the Republicans taking the House, Senate and Presidency simultaneously. Also plausible. I’ll add that the economy is yet another variable, as is incumbency.
Eh, I’ve noted before that liberals tend to live in more concentrated, more homogeneous areas. In any first past the post, single member district system like ours this gives you a disadvantage because even without gerrymandering you essentially self-gerrymander in a way not easily corrected in fact it cannot be correct by simple district drawing, and could only be corrected with wholly alien concepts like multi-member districts or proportional voting schemes. [Note: there are some State legislatures that have used multi-member districts, but it’s rare.]
For venues like the U.S. House, this has an advantage for Republicans, whose voters often tend to live in the suburbs and rural districts. In rural districts the Republicans tend to enjoy large majorities–although often still far less than some of the 80/20 or even 85-90/15-10 majorities Democrats get in some of the highly urban districts, and in the suburbs the Republicans often enjoy 60-40 type majorities. This allows the Republicans to spread themselves in a more electorally-efficient manner. This isn’t of course an intentional strategy, but just a reflection of the make-up of your typical Republican versus your typical Democrat (contrasting with political gerrymandering which is an intentional strategy, albeit not one as important as some make out.)
For the Senate, districts are States, and because there are no population standards for being a State, you end up with the well known “great red middle” of states with low populations, and lifestyles, jobs, and etc that lean heavily Republican. Wyoming gets two Senate seats just like California, and this does favor the Republicans structurally.
However several of the important states where geographic reality favors the Republicans in House elections, statewide demographics do not favor the Republicans in an electoral college election. Ohio sends 12/16 House members as Republicans. Pennsylvania sends 13/18 as Republicans. Florida sends 17/27 as Republicans. But all three states Romney lost in 2012, and I don’t see any Republican candidate winning in 2016. That’s essentially game over, there is no electoral math that works for a Republican that loses all of those states. You can lose one (Bush never won in Pennsylvania, for example) but you can’t lose more than that. The math just doesn’t work. The only real outlier might be John Kasich, who got over 60% of the popular vote running for Governor including enough of the black vote that he’d probably win Ohio in a Presidential. Kasich won like 26% of the black vote in Ohio, I think Romney won like 4%, if not less. Blacks are obviously a minority in Ohio, but winning a quarter of their vote while heavily carrying the whites makes you almost unbeatable in that state versus being unelectable (ala Romney) if you are going to struggle to win more than 2-3% of them. Kasich would still likely lose Florida and Pennsylvania, though. Even if Kasich wins Florida and Ohio (assuming he keeps all that Romney won, but gains no others aside from FL and OH), he still loses 285-253.
Kasich also isn’t likely to be the nominee, but instead someone who will be far less competitive in any of those swing states. I don’t think Trump actually wins, but someone who can establish himself as “more professional but still almost as crazy” might, and that candidate may set records for voter turnout and margin of victory in Alabama and Kentucky, but he’ll lose in an electoral landslide.
That being said, it’s worth noting that the Republicans didn’t really “choose” to double down on demographics that are aging away. A political party is like a train going downhill on a steep grade with no brakes. Sometimes you can choose between staying on the current track or throwing a switch up ahead and going a different path, but you tend to be locked into those decisions for a long time. The GOP built a coalition in the late 70s early 80s and elements of it that are going to slowly make the GOP more and more unelectable aren’t any more willing to jump off the train or let the train roll over them than the establishment GOP are. They’re all on the train together, and it’ll be several election cycles before the GOP gets a chance to try and rebuild a new coalition to reflect the political realities of the 2020s and 2030s. Those suburban districts for example, often populated by the professional classes, are going to slowly turn from being pink to purple, then to blue. It’ll take longer than it’s taken for the GOP to be disadvantaged in the electoral college (I think this has already happened, and I was saying as far back as Romney that present realities make a White House win impossible for the GOP except in a few select cases) for the GOP to be disadvantaged in the House, but it’s coming.
Martin Hyde: I understand that during the last election, Democrats won more votes in the House of Representatives than Republicans. You are correct that this is not just a matter of Gerrymandering though.
I don’t agree with your rolling train analogy. From the 1970s-1980s Republicans regularly tossed raw meat to rabid dogs during election years, but prided themselves in being adults when they governed. Though the embrace of supply side economics was admittedly not reality based at all, support for it was divided during that era (Reagan for it, Bush and Nixon not so much).
I think the real factor binding the Republicans to the crazy train is the conservative electronic media and monied support for primarying Republican legislators who are insufficiently doctrinaire. Also, recessions are still sufficient to undermine the demographic advantages of the Dems or the structural advantages of the Republicans, depending upon who holds the Presidency.
Right…there are no elections decided by aggregate popular votes in the nationwide House contest, in district-by-district elections Democrats are far too concentrated for their own political good. At least as long as Republicans enjoy suburban majorities in many areas, but my speculation is in a decade or so that won’t be the case, and they’ll start losing a lot of these districts. There are some districts they’ll never lose, but that won’t be enough to hold onto the House.
I think it’s pretty apt–much like a train going downhill at some points on the journey things may look really good, but because you’re limited in your ability to slow the train down or to stop the train or to alter the train’s course, you can quickly get things out of control. The establishment Republicans that decided to ally with the Falwell types assumed they’d be beholden to them while generating votes. By the time the establishment realized they were now beholden to the nutters, the point in time in which they could’ve done anything about it was miles and miles back on the track. More than just using them to win elections they’ve actually empowered the far right and actually made them a much bigger force in American politics than they would otherwise be.
That’s a symptom of where we’re at though, and why there isn’t an easy way to change it now that things have gone to a place where the establishment didn’t want it to go.
I think most of your analysis is acute, Martin. I disagree with some of the details and probably put more emphasis than you on the effect of gerrymandering. Republicans will almost certainly retain power in 2020 and 2022 in most of the states they currently control and so enormous battles over redistricting will take place for 2024. I’m an advocate of non-partisan districting as some states already have. That will be a growing issue over the next eight years.
This is where I strongly disagree:
Yes, they most certainly did. It was a deliberate policy going back to Nixon and the southern strategy. It is the single most successful political move of the century and cannot be easily handwaved away. It continues today, as seen recently in Kim Davis proclaiming herself a new-born Republican. In the very early days the Establishment may have thought they could control the crazies, but they became indistinguishable by Reagan’s era. Bush 1 showed how impossible it was for two wings to co-exist in the party. Currently, the Republican Establishment is desperately trying to hold onto their one power center, the nomination for the Presidency. I think they can still pull this off, mostly because the non-establishment is, for obvious reasons, not as centrally organized. Either way, that has immense implications for the future of the party.
I’m in favor of a British boundary commission type system–but I do think the impact of gerrymandering has been minimal. The Washington Post did a very in depth article about how gerrymandering does not explain the Republican majority in the House. I think it’s a black eye on the democratic process, but it hasn’t been the deciding factor in control of the House as of yet.
My line of thought doesn’t extend that far back, though when I’m talking about whether or not there has been a decision to “double down.” I’m talking more in the present tense. It’s honestly fairly obvious to anyone with a brain that bashing women and minorities is not a way to electoral success, at least in the electoral college, in 2016. I think that even true believers like Huckabee have to realize that their positions make them incapable of winning election to the White House. I think Trump is probably savvy enough to know this as well. For the establishment Republican in 2015, there’s obviously a desire on a host of issues to moderate the message.
Traditionally the GOP had no strong position on abortion ofrbirth control, instead it was one that politicians were allowed to decide on their own within the party. Thus Northeastern Republicans were frequently pro-Choice while Southerners were pro-Life. That is no longer possible, you cannot win a Republican primary if you support even reasonable policies on which most people agree, like access to the morning after pill or insurance coverage of birth control. I think gay marriage is also an issue on which establishment Republicans would be more than happy to bend to public will. Establishment Republicans have usually not staked out strong positions on social issues. Social issues are one of the things that most make the party unattractive to young people. But here in 2015 the establishment GOP doesn’t have the option of becoming socially liberal. Instead they have the option of doubling down on far right social issues or being primaried out of existence. So my point was they haven’t “decided” to double down on these issues, the far right, largely fundamentalist Christian wing of the party has made that decision and the establishment has had no choice but to go along with it.
Now if you go back to the 70s I guess you could make the argument that the GOP shouldn’t have tried to win Southern white votes, but I don’t really know that it was obvious in the 70s this would result in them being locked into a virulently far right demographic that was aging out of relevance. That speaks of 20-20 hindsight, I think there was other possibilities, for example maybe the Southern whites that have basically been out of step with the rest of the country for about 239 years now in response to increased immigration from North to South and higher standards of living down there would get more educated, less backwards, more progressive etc.
That has actually happened to some degree, but not enough to remove the ones who are still backwards from political relevance. In a game plan that ran more to the benefit of the establishment they’d have milked the backwards types and then as the South gradually became more progressive the party could shift its positions along with it. Instead what happened is this part of the base became so powerful they forced the national party to become ultra-conservative, making it unelectable in many states where the GOP had usually been able to craft a local message that while not always a winner at least kept them in races.
But at least in this cycle I don’t think there has been an establishment decision to double down on far right positions, I think the establishment doesn’t have that power to make those decisions any longer. To the point maybe we need a different word for them than establishment Republicans. Given where the reins of power seem to be it may be the far righties are the establishment now.
I think I’m going to -err- backtrack a little. I guess my point is that there are independent forces involved. They are the rise of the conservative electronic media and the newish ability to use the Republican Presidential primary as a platform for future enrichment. Trump, Carson and Huckabee have little at stake in the Republican brand and it shows.
I dug up some stats on gerrymandering vs. geographic sorting: 538: [INDENT]A variety of academic analyses of redistricting have found that this geographic self-sorting accounts for much — probably most — of the “skew” of Congressional districts against Democrats. Gerrymandering and other partisan efforts at redistricting do play a role, but it is mostly around the margin. A study by John Sides and Eric McGhee found that redistricting after the 2010 Census, which was controlled by Republicans in many key states, produced a net swing of only about seven House seats toward Republicans.
In this context, the legal requirements of the Voting Rights Act might also have a relatively minor effect on the number of majority-minority districts, most of which arise as a result of the geographic distribution of minority voters. [/INDENT] So figure it’s a 7 seat swing plus maybe a few more due to the neutering of the Voting Rights Act. That’s decidedly nontrivial, though I hasten to add that at 247-188 it would take a 30 seat flip to award the House to the Dems.
As for evidence of my claim about professionals, the article is now behind a paywall, but I posted some excerpts in this thread when it was generally available:
I think it was clear the Republican Establishment worked hard to ensure that Mitt Romney would get the nomination in 2012. I think it’s clear that Jeb Bush has that position in this cycle, and that means we’ll see ever-increasing background support from the Establishment now that they see that their assumption that the non-politicians would talk themselves out of the race has proved utterly mistaken.
I maintain that politics has not changed so much that organization, feet on the ground, and local commitment are not still crucial to a presidential campaign. There’s been some talk that Trump has begun to create such an apparatus in Iowa, but that’s not the same as doing so across the country. Bush is in a better position nationally, because he can draw upon the structure and the long memories that his father and brother, um, established.
Even the Boehner debacle shows nothing more than that the ultra-right wing are a minority within the party, though they are large enough and sufficiently unified to block the less one note majority. It comes down to whether a politician or non-politician wins the nomination. I can’t believe that a non-politician can win out in the end. And if a politician does, the Establishment will be decisive in his choice.
Thanks for the cite. I was able to bypass the paywall by providing a mailinator email addy.
The article was demographic heavy, contrary to what a surmised in post 25. It emphasized that erosion of support among college educated folks earning between $50,000 and $100,000 per year would become a challenge for the Democrats.
Not emphasized in the article, but mentioned, was the continuing lock the Democrats have on the professional class. From Judas, the Emerging Republican Advantage, 2015: [INDENT]Meanwhile, the success of the Democrats in the 1990s and in 2006 and 2008 was based on the growth of the minority vote (from 13 percent of the electorate in 1992 to 26 percent in 2008); the continuing movement of women, particularly single women, into the Democratic column; and the support of professionals, who were once the most Republican of occupational groupings. (Professionals range from nurses and teachers to doctors and architects; in exit polls, they can be identified roughly as voters who possess postgraduate degrees.)
…
In presidential elections, the Democratic coalition remains formidable, and the ranks of minorities and professionals both Democratic constituencies continue to swell. [/INDENT] So according to his 2015 working definition, Professionals are those with a post-graduate degree. And they continue to trend Democrat, in contrast with their 1960 behavior.
I’ve never seen “professional” defined as someone with a post-grad degree, but if that’s what he’s referring to, yes, that group is trending sharply Democratic, mainly due to Republicans becoming a religious party.
Yeah, I think a big part of how the establishment ended up somewhere they didn’t want to be was in part because they hadn’t properly predicted the explosion of far right talk radio, which birthed essentially Fox News (at least their commentary shows like the O’Reilly Factor or Hannity’s show or etc), and also birthed online regurgitations of t he same content, essentially.
I don’t want to white knight the establishment, by the way, they’ve got their problems and also have dirty hands from their involvement with these people. But they are also the Republicans who used to be able to cut deals with Democrats, dating back to basically the end of the bloody-shirt era (when after the Civil War the GOP won most elections by just “waving the bloody shirt” of the war by blaming the Democrats for it) and they started sharing power with Democrats on the reg. I just find it unfortunate that in a system always likely to have two parties we’re looking at probably by my reckoning a 10-15 year period still to come where very little gets done by government to address a host of serious problems.
Maybe trivial isn’t the right word, but rather “not decisive” since I don’t believe the 2010 gerrymandering directly caused the current Republican house majority–but certainly contributed to it.
Like I said, gerrymandering is a black mark on our democracy but I often find it unproductive to even wade into it. It’s a matter of State law, there is little chance of resolution of the problem anytime soon or maybe ever.
With professionals defined as those with a post-graduate degree, that puts a different spin on 1960 than we may perhaps be used to. Less than 10% of the population had a bachelor’s degree. I can’t find good data on graduate degrees but let’s assume half went on, which is the proportion today. So the professional class was 4% of the population. That’s a very small group, although influential. Business interests were probably more influential, though. I would have put large numbers of business professionals in with professionals, no matter that few would have had graduate degrees in that era.
One other topic I need to comment on. Gerrymandering is not limited to congressional districts. It also happens in state legislative districts and those have helped Republicans increase the number of legislatures it controls. I do not intend to claim that the Red state advantage is entirely due to gerrymandering. That’s not true, and the numbers just aren’t there. Democrats also play the game. Republicans do play it better and have succeeded in scratching out victories at a time when every advantage counts. I want to stop the nonsense on both sides and do so out into a future that is ideologically unforeseeable.
FWIW my personal understanding of “professional” was that it wasn’t just a white collar type job whose holder typically has a bachelor’s degree. But instead a specialized skilled white collar “trade” that has an accrediting body and professional certification process for being accepted into the “profession.” So essentially your doctors, lawyers, engineers, CPAs, architects, and maybe a few I’m forgetting. But a manager at a Fortune 500 wouldn’t necessarily count, albeit he may be compensated similarly.
That was my understanding, too: fields that required postgraduate study. Or the “learned professions” as they are sometimes described.
The Republicans never had a lock on the bar. Lawyers have always been a sold Democratic base, and are probably now the largest non-corporate donors to the party.