There’s a fascinating new study out by The Pew Research Center showing a major shift in support for the two political parties. The study itself is over 100 pages long, but a lot of the most interesting findings are in the first two to three pages.
One of the more shocking results is that 50% of the country now identifies as Democratic, or Democratic-leaning, while only 35% identifies as Republican or Republican-leaning. That’s a huge shift. As recently as 2002 the two parties were balanced at 43% each.
In addition, the trends on specific issues seem to strongly favor the Democrats. Religiosity is down. Social Conservatism is up. Support for government programs to help the poor is up.
So, Dopers, how significant are these results? Are we in the middle of a great sea-change in American politics? Has the great right-wing alliance of fundamentalists and tax cutters finally run aground? Or is this just a temporary blip brought on by how loathed Bush is?
Certainly Bush has not helped his party’s popularity over the last few years. I don’t think that expains the trends in the study though, most of the pro-Dem trends appear to date back to '94 or earlier. Party identification, for example, appears to have been moving in the Dems favor for the last 13 years, with the exception of the few years after 9/11.
John Judis and Ruy Teixeira identified long-term demographic trends favoring the Dems back in 2004, in their book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. (Check out Teixeira’s blog.)
Interesting. So, in fact, the Republican victories a few years ago might have been the blip. Without the upsurge in bipartisanship right after 9-11 the slide might have happened faster.
Kevin Drum suggests that what might be going on is that the Republicans essentially made a deal with the devil in the early 90’s. By hitching their wagon to fundamentalism and tax cuts they were able to make easy short-term gains. But neither is a sustainable position in the long run – eventually you reach a point where there are no more taxes to cut, and the United States in general has been drifting in the direction of great social tolerance for most of its history. So now they’re locked into several core positions that the country as a whole is moving away from.
IIRC, one of the big trends was the growth of the Dem-leaning Hispanic population. The problem with this, at least in 2004, was that between 2000 and 2004, they shifted right a lot faster than they grew in overall numbers.
Fortunately for the Dems, the GOP’s anti-immigration wingnuts managed to sabotage a Bush-Rove attempt at a fairly rational immigration bill last year. (It looks as if Rove had a grand plan to neutralize the Dems’ advantage among Hispanics, but he was done in by his own crazies.) Now that the GOP, for all practical purposes, has a big “We Hate Wetbacks” banner on it, the GOP doesn’t look to do well among Hispanic voters for the next few elections.
I suspect that longterm trends matter less then one would initially suppose, though, since they give politicians time to plausiably change their views without seeming like hypocrits. In a few decades, for example, I’m willing to bet that the majority of Americans will support gay marriage/adoption, etc. But by that time the Republicans will have long since seen which way the wind is blowing and changed stopped pandering to the crowd.
I think that’s correct. In every national election between '94 and '02 the Dems gained seats in the senate and (in all but one) in the House.
If the Pubs hang on to power, but only by talking and acting more like we would expect Dems nowadays to talk and act – that means long-term trends do matter, doesn’t it? In terms of shifting the political center-of-gravity leftwards?
Sure, but that doesn’t mean the collapse of the Republican party, it means the collapse of religious conservatism as a reliable power base of the Republican party. The Republican party as an institution bears almost no resembalance to the northern liberal federalist anti-slavery party it once was, and 30 years from now the Republican party might not resemble today’s southern conservative religious-right big business party, but there will still be a Republican party.
malodorous: considering the thumping the Dems took in ‘94, that statement doesn’t really prove anything. Dead cat bounce.
I do believe the momentum is on the Dems’ side, but these things take time. Lots of time. It’ll be at least a decade before the Dems can change the terms of the debate to their issues. As of now, we’re still debating within the framework defined by Reagan, just as before that the entire debate occurred within the framework defined by FDR.
Remember, Clinton (possibly Clinton the First) is still the only Dem president since 1980.
No doubt after a “wave election” there will be some sort of correction as politicians who “rode the wave” in districts/states that would normally vote for the other party loose support and are ousted when they next come up for re-election (I imagine we’ll see the Dems loose some seats in the House in '08 due to this effect).
But I would only expect this to hold in the next election after '94 in which people who were elected in the “wave” came up for re-election ('96 in the case of the House, '00 in the case of the Senate). And combined with the Pew data that during this time period more people were identifing with the Dem Party, I think that at least part of this slow shift in the Congress was due to demographic changes.
Also to correct my earlier post: the Dems won all but one election in the senate and all elections in the House in the time period in question.
Quite right, I only ment that it wouldn’t matter as much in terms of which party would have more electoral success.
In light of several series of hearings going on right now on Capitol Hill, I imagine the “wave” of voter disgust with the Pubs will have more staying power than you might expect.
People have been calling for the end of the Republican party since Nixon. And has been mentioned, there has only been one Democrat president in the last 25 plus years. I think a lot of this may be that there is Republican fatigue, especially due to some notable Bush missteps. Whether it sticks or not, only time will tell. It seems like only 6 years ago, many we taking that it was the end of the Democrat party. I think the American people, have a way of keeping the two parties are rough parity over the long term.
This is a very interesting point, and one that will be curious to watch play out in the next few election cycles. Looking back on the 2004 elections, I seem to remember that getting the Christian right base out to vote for Bush because of “gut issues” (read: wedge issues) like abortion and the gay marriage ban amendment was a top priority for the GOP, since those sort of people stayed home in droves in 2000. I’m starting to wonder not only whether this is a viable strategy in general anymore (I suspect it probably isn’t), but whether it will specifically be something the GOP tries again in 2008.
When you consider the current Republican front-runners - a New Yorker who cheated on his wife, a New England Mormon, and a self-described “maverick” who has at best conflicting views on some social issues and who has criticized Jerry Falwell in the past - it appears as if the prospects for attracting the religious right in huge numbers again are getting bleak. A dark horse candidate like Sam Brownback might attract the Fundamentalist base, but would have a hard time swinging everyone else. At any rate, I predict the next two years being EXTREMELY messy in terms of election politics, especially with the GOP, since it pretty much looks like they are going to have to start from scratch.
Political hegemony of one party is never a good thing. If only the checks and balances thing had been in action in the past five years–in other words, if Congress had prperly done its job in keeping executive power in check–the Republican’s prospects might be very different for the 2008 election. But also, yeah I agree that it seems inevitable that the deals made by Republicans in the short term with the wacko religious right are costing them big time now; add to that a disastrous occupation…it looks pretty bad.
But I don’t want to see that. I say this as someone who hasn’t voted for a Republican in years, and detests the Bush administraion.
I want to see the recovery of what Andrew Sullivan called “a coherent, freedom-loving, reality-based conservatism.” Genuine fiscal responsibility would be nice as well. I don’t say this because I want more Republicans to vote for, since I don’t see myself doing that, but because I believe the party is healthiest and a most effective long-term foil for the Democrats if it is “coherent, freedom-loving, reality-based.” Really, it’d be better for both parties, and consequently better for the nation. Healthy opposition is necessary for a democracy.
The Republican Party as it currently exists is diseased. I genuinely hope it recovers.
Wouldn’t a multiparty system be better still? Then the kind of “freedom-loving, reality-based” conservatives you’re talking about could have their party, and the neocons could have theirs (if they could get anybody but the Freepers to vote for it), and the Libertarians could have theirs, and the Buchananite paleocons could have theirs, all represented in Congress along with a wide range of left-of-center parties, and there would never be any risk of one-party dominance.
This could simply signal that it is time for the party to move further from the religious right and much more to the center of the countries politics.
This might be reflected in Rudy Giuliani’s early large lead in the polls. He is a “Liberal” Republican. Liberal in this case appears to mean he is a centrist overall.
I do not see a large clamoring for the old Democratic Liberal Ideals and heavy Union support of prior years. I believe overall the Democrats have already moved to the right gaining the middle as the Republican Party abandoned us moderates/liberals in the last 15 years.
Despite the study cited by the Op, in many polls Rudy is the leading overall candidate. If the country is really at 50% Democratic and only 35% Republican, then that is even more impressive.
So Knorf, the cure might already be occurring. Considering the Democrats brilliant strategy was to run a horrible candidate like Kerry last time, I would extend your statement to be that both parties are diseased and hopefully both are now getting better. I think Obama is very good for the Democrats. He brings some long missing excitement to the party.
I’ve always thought that the blowup over the Terri Schiavo case showed the Republican 2004 victory for what it was. The Republicans thought that the Christian Right was the way to win the election. If no gay marriage ban on the ballot in Ohio, Kerry may very well have been president.
Yet, pandering to the Christian Right damaged the Republicans during the Schiavo debacle. The news magazines were full of stories about how right wing Christians would dominate politics for years to come after Bush’s narrow win. The Schiavo case was their first chance to cash their chips in. Yet, the coverage showed the nation what nutjobs many of these people were. Bush himself interrupted one of his vacations to fly back to DC to sign the law.
Wikipedia cite:"… The bill passed the House on March 21 at 12:41 a.m. EST. President Bush flew to Washington D.C. from his vacation in Texas in order to sign the bill into law at 1:11 a.m. EST…"
Bush did not interrupt his vacation to address the 2004 tsunami which killed 300,000 people.
The Republicans followed up the Schiavo mess with continued mistakes such as the Harriet Miers appointment, the Katrina response, the Bill Frist judicial nominee falilure, Mark Foley, Tom Delay and many other mistakes.
