The Lost Majority Part III: Prognostications

If you’re going to delve deep into voting data, you kind of expect that you’ll some hint about what’s going to happen in the future. However, while the data from past elections may be exact, predictions are still dependent on whether or not the data, combined with everything you can know about people’s reasons for their votes, can still be something like meteorology: we look up the forecast, but we’re not surprised when it’s wrong.

Sean Trende’s book, The Lost Majority, isn’t a predictor about the upcoming election; it is a discussion of what has happened, with just a few basic themes:

·        There’s no such thing as a permanent majority—and Obama’s election was certainly not an indicator of a permanent progressive majority.

·        Emerging majorities described by overexcited commentators on both sides are wrong; neither party is headed toward extinction or marginalization.

·        The very idea of cyclical long-term direction changes is a wrong reading of history, which shows alternating victories by either party as more normal than exceptional.

So, his point that 2008 did not indicate a mandate for transformation to “progressive,” rather than “constitutional” government , is encouraging—and was borne out by the outcry against such an assumption in 2010. But the book was written too early (by early 2011, well before a GOP candidate was known) to say anything certain about November 2012.

But there are some pieces of information that can be useful. Much of today we’ll be looking at the limits of Obama’s narrow but deep coalition.

Obama’s coalition consists of:

·         Minorities: blacks, Hispanics, Asians

·         Labor unions

·         Youth (18-29-year-old voters)

·         Welfare recipients

That wasn’t enough to elect him in 2008. That year he received support from many disgruntled Republicans and independents who liked the idea of voting for a black and having racism forever off the table as an issue, many of whom were unhappy with the length of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the suddenly collapsing housing, automobile, and banking industries. They were willing to trust that someone who offered “hope” and “change” meant something remotely close to what they hoped would change.

What we can surmise from current polling data, if we can’t yet guess outcomes, is that essentially no one who voted for McCain in 2008 will vote for Obama in 2012. The question is simply, will Obama maintain enough support from his base to be reelected? He received (conflicting reports of) 90-97% of the black vote in 2008. If he loses 8% of that vote, either from changing their vote to the opponent or staying away (and they had turned out in unprecedented numbers in 2008), that could make a critical difference.

He also had the youth vote that lacks enthusiasm this time. I don’t know the numbers, but the insupportably high unemployment rate for young people, including college graduates returning home to live with parents, is going to have a dampening effect.

Unions still support Obama, but the actual workers, what you might refer to as white non-college educated, didn’t go strongly for Obama even in the primary, and became to him “bitter clingers,” were written off before election, so he’s not getting them back after four years of sustained high unemployment. He still retains a fairly strong following among whites with post-graduate degrees (the elites who assume they will be part of the ruling class), but support for him has collapsed among college-educated whites.

Stanley Kurtz has been talking about Obama’s attacks on this group in a recent book (Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities), and articles about the attempts to transfer wealth from suburbs to urban areas, which Obama believe is the more moral, authentic place to live. In other words, if you’re a middle-class family person who lives in a house, Obama has written you off.

Hispanics are an interesting demographic for prognosticators. There’s an assumption that, as the Hispanic population grows, support for Democrats grows with it. And while it’s true that Hispanics do lean Democrat, as they integrate into American culture and move into the middle class, they become more conservative. Here is Trende’s summary:

But what of Latinos? If they vote like African Americans, it seems that Republicans would be in very deep demographic trouble. However, if they vote like Anglos, it suggests that as more and more Latinos become wealthier and, presumably, more conservative, they will also become more Republican (see figure 8.7).

            As it turns out, the Latino vote looks a lot more like the non-Hispanic white vote than the African American vote. Latino voters in each group are roughly 10 points more Democratic than white voters, while Latino conservatives are about 50 points more Republican than conservative African Americans. The critical distinction is that there are more Latino liberals than there are white liberals and fewer conservatives (pp. 146-147).

So the question is still out there about the effect of a growing Hispanic population. But here in Texas, on the ground, in Tea Party meetings and political conventions, Hispanics have a very strong and very welcome presence. I know this is anecdotal evidence only, but I still believe it’s just a matter of speaking the message of lower taxes, greater opportunity, and freedom, supported by strong religion and personal responsibility. The message resonates.

Many Hispanics vote Democrat for the same reason as many other Democrats: their parents did, their friends do. They haven’t even thought through ideological reasons; they just do what is expected. If they can be led to think it through, they are very likely to recognize how much the conservative message resonates with their personal values of hard work, strong families, and a desire to improve life for themselves and the next generation.

Obama has made some assumptions about keeping retirees, but he’s been losing that argument in Florida, where retired whites in overwhelming numbers are abandoning the president who “borrowed” $700 Billion from Medicare to fund an extremely unpopular government medical takeover.

He has claimed the women’s vote, and tried to frame that as a GOP war on women, but since there’s no such war, sometimes the arguments just look silly (remember Stephanopoulos’s debate question out of the blue on limiting birth control?) This question comes down to women looking completely incapable of paying for basic care that is available and affordable, up against major religions standing strong for their right not to be forced to fund behaviors against their religious tenants. The only way Obama keeps the female vote is by assuming women are totally reliant on government, and are non-religious—and against living in suburban homes with their families. I wouldn’t count on that. He will probably keep single, post-graduate-educated women and poor non-taxpaying single-mothers.

So he has written off whites, except for a portion of elites and the non-taxpaying largesse recipients. His enthusiastic youth vote (much of which was combined with temporary increase in minority voters) has been deflated. His minority support, while still strong, is less enthusiastic and less monolithic.

As Trende says, “There is nothing inherently wrong with a narrow, deep coalition….  But the real threat with a narrow, deep coalition is that there is not much room for error. The party cannot afford for another portion of the coalition to become dissatisfied with the direction it is taking” (p. 105).

In order to win, he must win all major urban areas—with enough leeway to overcome opposing votes in the non-urban areas in many states. There’s still reason for concern, but it doesn’t look likely. And we have the advantage of a very capable, very appealing alternative.

The Lost Majority Part II: Political Leanings

Part I about Sean Trende's book The Lost Majority, is here, called "Future Up for Grabs."

To talk about some of the technical data behind recent elections, it will help to know some terminology.

Partisan Voting Index (PVI): This is the term referring to an area’s “lean” toward one party or another. Sean Trende uses the term throughout his book The Lost Majority. He says, “When the book refers to the “lean” of a state, county, or demographic group, it is referring to the PVI. In other words, a state or county that is said to “regularly lean Democrat” in a given set of years is one that regularly has a Democratic PVI.” There will be a number attached. D+6.7, for example, would mean that the designated area voted 6.7 percentage points more Democratic than the nation as a whole.

DW-NOMINATE: This is a term used for measuring the ideology of a legislator. Trende quotes Jay Cost’s description: “DW-Nominate is a very complex methodology that produces a very simple result. Legislators are given an ideological score that ranges from -1.0 to 1.0—with -1.0 being extremely liberal, 0.0 being moderate, and 1.0 being extremely conservative (p. xxx).” The range isn’t usually at the extremes. Trende says that 3.0, for example, is considered quite conservative. Hardly anyone scores beyond 0.5 or -0.5, so that’s where you might find the most extreme legislators. Scores are relative; that is, they are in comparison to other legislators in the same congress, not comparing to particular stands on particular issues.

So, with these two concepts in mind, it might be helpful to look at what went on in 2008 and 2010. This is from the introduction (p. xix):

Democrats who celebrated electing arguably the most liberal president in American history in 2008 frequently overlooked that Barack Obama was running amid two unpopular wars, a nasty recession, and a full-blown financial panic that was consuming 401(k)s and housing equity—not to mention that his opponent was a disorganized, gaffe-prone candidate. In a year when political science models suggested double-digit Democratic wins, and when every conceivable intangible suggested that the Democratic wins should be on the high side of those models’ error margins, Obama won by only seven points and was actually trailing in the polls after the convention season closed. As the Democratic Party enjoyed more success, its elites had pulled it leftward, and in doing so had exposed their right flank. The leftward shift didn’t exact immediately obvious costs in 2008, but the price was steep in 2010.

Trende goes into more detail on this situation in the middle of the book. While Clinton’s coalition had been broad, had been able to turn back some of the coalition components that had turned Republican with the Eisenhower coalition, Obama lost back those areas. Obama’s coalition was “narrow but deep.” And none of it was new. Very little PVI change came with Obama’s election:

Between 2004 and 2008, only three states saw their partisan lean, or PVI, switch. Colorado had leaned one point toward the Republicans in 2004; it leaned one-quarter of one point toward the Democrats in 2008. Nevada had leaned six-hundredths of a point toward Republicans in 2004; it leaned two points toward the Democrats in 2008. And Ohio had leaned two-tenths of a point toward the Democrats in 2004; it leaned two points toward the Republicans in 2008. Only seven states saw their PVI shift more than five points in either direction: Hawaii moved 13 points toward Obama, while Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alaska, and West Virginia all moved toward the Republicans. If realignments do exist, this was not it. It did not resemble 1932, when Roosevelt completely remade the political map and 16 states leaned in a different direction than they had in 1928. Nor was it like 1952, when 13 states changed their partisan orientation. To put it differently, the average change in PVI from 1928 to 1932 was eight points, and from 1948 to 1952 it was six points. From 2004 to 2008 it was three (p. 92).

To summarize, in a year when Obama had supposedly remade the map, only three states switched their lean, and one of those was toward the GOP. Of the seven states that made a significant PVI shift, only one shifted toward Obama; the other six shifted toward the GOP—in the year of Obama’s “historic” win.

According to Trende, when a change of direction happens, it’s going to happen where the differences were small to begin with. And those areas, the ones most recently changed, are also the most vulnerable to being changed back. There was a fair amount of moving into typical GOP territory in 2006, and some more in 2008. Unless the direction of the country actually trended more liberal (and signs are that it didn’t), then those areas were ripe in 2010 to turn back. As Trende explains:

[W]henever a party occupies a large number of seats in the House, especially when a large percentage of those seats are occupied by freshmen and sophomores, that party is probably going to suffer in the subsequent elections. The reason is simple: as a party picks up more seats, it pushes further into marginal territory. If it picks up a huge number of seats, as Democrats had done in 2006 and 2008, it by definition extends itself into hostile territory. These members are therefore vulnerable, and the party is set up for losses (pp. 172-173).

Democrats, by gerrymandering to protect some particular urban areas from ever going Republican, have allowed for more districts to lean GOP than Democrat:

Due to gerrymandering and Democratic packing of minorities and liberals into a handful of overwhelmingly Democratic districts, the median district in the United States leans toward the Republicans by a few points. Put differently, the most Republican district in the nation leans Republican by 29 points. Democrats have created 25 districts—almost 15 percent of their caucus—that are more heavily Democratic than this. That means that Democrats cannot win a House majority without capturing a substantial number of seats that naturally favor Republicans. In 2010, Democrats occupied 73 seats that leaned toward Republicans. As expected, many of these seats were, in fact, occupied by newly elected members of Congress, who had picked up swing seats in the 2006 and 2008 elections. This is also where Democratic losses were concentrated (p. 173).

While the need for Democrats to appeal to Republicans is greater, the response by Democratic leadership is instead more polarized. Here’s where the DW-NOMINATE term comes in:

Perhaps most important, the Democratic leadership in Congress represented some of the most liberal districts in the country. This put a distinctly liberal imprint on legislation. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district leans 35 points toward the Democrats, while the chairmen of the critical districts charged with developing domestic policy—Appropriations, Education and the Workforce, Energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Judiciary, Rules, and Ways and Means—reported back to districts that leaned on average 21 points toward the Democrats. They share an average DW-NOMINATE score of -.552, substantially to the left of even this historically liberal Democratic caucus. With these members responsible for crafting most legislation, it was highly unlikely that a centrist agenda would emerge.

            Virtually every assumption regarding the nature of the Democratic Party that had given rise to the Clinton coalition was eroded in 2009 and 2010 (p. 126).  

What I’d like to say is that there is no way on earth that the Democrats can win the presidency with this incumbent, under current circumstances. Trende doesn’t go that far. But there is more data to look at, to help us in our speculation on what can happen, depending on various ifs and thens. So we’ll need a Part III for prognostication.

Future Up for Grabs

I recently read Sean Trende’s book The Lost Majority: Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs—and WhoWill Take It. Trende is the senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics.com, and I look forward to reading his pieces every time I find them.

The book was a challenge for me. I’ve mentioned before I am not a strategist. My son Political Sphere recommended the book, and had a great time reading it, and a tough time waiting for me to get through to discuss it. I marked and typed up a lot of notes and quotes, and PS told me I’d probably get a month’s worth of blog posts out of this. But, there’s so much here, and I’m not schooled in adequately explaining the strategy. So, there will be more than this post, but I’m not sure how much I can portion out without saying, “Just go read the book.”

Trende is a data guy, and he delves deep into data, including some pretty old historical data that you’re not likely to read about in basic history texts. His main thesis in the book is that the whole idea of political cycles of 32 or 36 years (or any other arbitrary number) is false—more a matter of trying to get data to fit a formula rather than getting the formula from the data. So, if you have that in mind from whatever poli-sci class you took in college, he debunks that. (I had no such handicap; never took a poli-sci class, because I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that politics is a science.) He also argues that there are no permanent majorities.

I would like to say Trende has prognosticated in favor of my inclinations for the upcoming election. He finished writing this in early 2011, so a lot was yet unknown about this presidential campaign. So there are a lot of ifs involved. But he does cover quite a lot about the differences between 2008 and 2010.

Much of every election (ever recorded) Trende covers county by county to measure changes. And then he delves into reasons, the narrative behind the data. All of that together can get fascinating. Trende’s theory is that Reagan didn’t start a new coalition; he continued the one begun in the 1950s with Eisenhower, and that such a coalition for so many years is rare. The specifics show which constituencies joined together—constitutionalists, conservatives (in the broader sense of wanting to retain the status quo on particular issues), populists (constituencies who vote according to specific issues or groups), and geographical parts of the country. And that coalition more or less lasted until Clinton in 1992. Clinton's new coalition was formed mostly by power of personality; he was able to persuade disparate groups to hang together—iincluding more conservative constituencies when he saw the writing on the wall and took up welfare reform, the Defense of Marriage Act, and free trade, taking those things off the table for the GOP.

Clinton’s moderately centrist (in practice) coalition hung on through the Bush years; Bush was more centrist than much of the Reagan GOP would have liked, but that centrism was viewed as necessary to win elections while the Clinton coalition was prevalent. The House and Senate takeover by the Democrats in 2006 was more an assertion of the continuing Clinton coalition than a new direction. But a “coalition of everyone” is tentative at best. It pulls from areas that don’t normally lean that direction, so they tend to revert pretty regularly.

There’s a map on page 199, comparing counties where each of the two parties won at least once, from 2002 and 2010; Trende has provided similar maps on previous pages for various time frames. And then he makes this observation:

The Democrats compete everywhere, while the Republicans win everywhere but the Deep South (and even win there a few times). This is what the world looks like when parties compete, and this is “typical” American history. The oscillations of the past few election cycles are not flukes; they are normal. It is the period between 1950 and 1980 that is the fluke.

In the conclusion of the book, he talks about the problems facing an Obama reelection; his coalition is much narrower than Clinton’s was. This assessment (pp. 201-202) is enlightening:

To many, Obama is still the avatar of hope and change that he was in late 2008, the Republicans are too marginalized to win, and the Democrats have a powerful, dominant majority in the offing.  

Needless to say, these analysts are living in the past. As we’ve seen, it is not 2008 anymore. Obama’s coalition—borrowed from Bill Clinton—is in deep trouble. As president, Obama has done very little to expand his appeal past the voters who cast ballots for him in 2008; the transformational president who hoped for a new, broad majority has instead seen the Democratic coalition narrow. His approval ratings have been mired between 45 percent and 51 percent—they have fallen between those numbers on 95 percent of the days Gallup has polled since the beginning of 2010.

            Even these tepid ratings demonstrate the depth and narrowness of his coalition. His approval rating for March 2011 was 47 percent. But it was a paltry 39 percent among whites. To put this in perspective, when Bill Clinton hit a similar 34 percent approval rating among whites in June 1993, his overall approval rating was 37 percent. The difference is that Obama maintains an 85 percent approval rating among African Americans, while Clinton’s approval among that group had fallen to 61 percent in 1993. Again, this is not to say that black votes don’t count equally. It is just to observe that Obama’s approval rating owes to his unusual strength among core Democratic groups, rather than to his broad appeal.

            This presents a problem for the president going into 2012. A 51 percent approval rating—the high end of Obama’s range—is typically enough to get a president reelected. But it does not leave much room for error. And the concentration of pro-Obama voters among core Democratic constituencies poses a unique set of problems. Minority voters tend to be concentrated in a few congressional districts and even in particular states. Many of these states, such as Mississippi, have heavily racialized voting patterns, where even unanimous approval ratings among African Americans would not be enough for Obama to overcome white opposition. To put it differently, 14 states have larger minority populations than the United States as a whole, and only three of these could really be considered “swing states”: New Mexico, Nevada, and Florida. In other words, if you could challenge state lines under the Voting Rights Act, there would be one heck of a vote dilution claim.

Do you know what PVI is? The extent of leaning toward one party or another (partisan voting index)? It’s a technical term I’m just learning, but I think understanding PVI is going to give us a better understanding about who believes what, and in what areas of the country. What we saw in 2008 wasn’t what we were told we saw, and that makes a difference in the future..