Since the birth of the Republican Party in 1856, the Democratic Party has largely been the odd man out. In the period from 1857 to 1933, only three Democratic candidates won the White House governing a combined 20 years out of a 76 year period (though it can argued that Samuel Tilden won the election of 1876 only to have slip away in a backroom deal). For much of this period, the Democratic Party was largely a Southern-based party though it also did well in New York. The economic crisis of the Great Depression allowed the Democratic Party to reinvent itself and modernize its electoral coalition. The success of FDR politically was creating a wide-based electoral coalition that encompassed the unions and the labor movement including the white working class with social progressives and northeastern liberals plus for the first time since Reconstruction adding blacks.
This formula carried the Democratic Party through the start of the current GOP run on the White House in 1968. Both Carter and more importantly Clinton were able to recreate that FDR coalition to capture the White House. In the two past presidential elections, however, the Democratic Party was unable to effect that magical formula. I believe that electoral success in November is predicated on finding that old FDR magic. Others beg to differ.
Of course, the FDR electoral coalition began to fray in the late 1960s under the weight of an unpopular war abroad and the impact of the Civil Rights Act / the Voting Right Acts that effectively ceded the South to the Republicans. But concurrent with these events was the ascendancy of a bicoastal largely white liberal elite who are all too often out of touch with working class values. While the Democratic Party has longed enjoyed the support of the working class, Nixon and later Reagan were able to make major inroads with working class voters, not on economic issues as much as on values.
Since FDR built the Democratic Party’s last great majority electoral coalition, the country has no doubt undergone profound demographic changes. In the post WW II period, America has become increasingly suburban and exurban, Southern and Western, Hispanic and Asian, immigrant and Spanish-speaking, and while prosperous that prosperity has been increasingly uneven as GOP economic policies have taken their toll.
Still despite failing to win the White House repeatedly, the Democratic Party was able to retain control of one or both Houses of Congress for 36 years through the mid 1990s. And under Clinton and then Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, the Democratic Party has won 250 Electoral College votes or more in the past four national elections, a feat last accomplished in the FDR era. Still in two of those elections, it was close but no cigar.
In 2008, the Democratic Party approached the Presidential election with great glee in anticipation of a historic shift, one that might usher in a sustained period of Democratic control. The legacy of the Bush Administration with its massive fiscal irresponsiblity, spiraling debt, an unpopular war, failed social policies, lax enforcement of regulations and now a general economic malaise portended a big win for whoever the Democratic nominee happened to be. However the fissures of the Democratic Party, first evident in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, are now seemingly laid bare. It in effect seems to replicate the red versus blue divide that we have talked about since 2000. That’s not really what’s going on but it is close.
Writing in 2004, David Brooks among others noted a geographical polarization:
To a large degree, polarization in America is a cultural consequence of the information age. This sort of economy demands and encourages education, and an educated electorate is a polarized electorate.
In theory, of course, education is supposed to help us think independently, to weigh evidence and make up our own minds. But that’s not how it works in the real world. Highly educated people may call themselves independents, but when it comes to voting they tend to pick a partisan side and stick with it. College-educated voters are more likely than high-school-educated voters to vote for candidates from the same party again and again.
That’s because college-educated voters are more ideological. As the Emory political scientist Alan Abramowitz has shown, a college-educated Democrat is likely to be more liberal than a high-school-educated Democrat, and a college-educated Republican is likely to be more conservative than a high-school-educated Republican. The more you crack the books, the more likely it is you’ll shoot off to the right or the left.
Once you’ve joined a side, the information age makes it easier for you to surround yourself with people like yourself. And if there is one thing we have learned over the past generation, it’s that we are really into self-validation.
We don’t only want radio programs and Web sites from members of our side — we want to live near people like ourselves. Information age workers aren’t tied down to a mine, a port or a factory. They have more opportunities to shop for a place to live, and they tend to cluster in places where people share their cultural aesthetic and, as it turns out, political values. So every place becomes more like itself, and the cultural divides between places become stark. The information age was supposed to make distance dead, but because of clustering, geography becomes more important.
The political result is that Republican places become more Republican and Democratic places become more Democratic.
Between 1948 and 1976, most counties in the U.S. became more closely divided between Republicans and Democrats. In 1976, Gerald Ford, a Republican, could win most of New England and the entire Pacific coast, and he almost won New York.
But since then we’ve been segregating politically. As Bill Bishop of The Austin American-Statesman has found, the number of counties where one party or another has a landslide majority has doubled over the past quarter-century. Whole regions are now solidly Democratic or Republican. Nearly three-quarters of us, according to Bishop, live in counties that are becoming less competitive, and many of us find ourselves living in places that are overwhelmingly liberal or overwhelmingly conservative.
When we find ourselves in such communities, our views shift even further in the dominant direction. You get this self-reinforcement cycle going, which social scientists call ”group polarization.”
I am not sure if I agree with his premise that polarization is the result of the Information Age, however, there is a lot that intrigues me about the notion of the political polarization that seems to be occurring along geographic lines. Seattle’s The Stranger first coined the term archipelago to describe the result of the US Presidential election of 2000.
Well it is pretty evident that in certain Democratic primaries (not the caucuses as those have a low turnout reflecting their undemocratic character), the archipelago phemoneon is alive and well. It is especially evident in swing states.
Missouri is perhaps the clearest example. Here is the map by county from the Missouri Primary. Obama won but seven counties out of 111 counties and yet won the primary by a scant 1.2% margin. That in and of itself is striking but even more remarkable are the margins that both Clinton and Obama won in the counties each candidate carried. For the record, a landslide margin is considered 10 or more points.
In St Louis City, which is largely African-American (55%), Obama won by a 43.8 margin. In the affluent suburban county of St. Louis County, Obama won by a 26.8 margin. His third best performance in Missouri was a 23.5 margin in Boone County in the center of the state. An anomaly? Not quite. Boone County is where the University of Missouri is located. That’s the Obama coalition. African-Americans, affluent whites and college kids. The next best performance for Obama again fits this electoral paradigm. Obama won Jackson County where Kansas City is located. Fewer African-Americans so his margin was a still landslide margin of 12.7.
Now let’s look at the margins in the counties that Clinton won:
60 or more margin: 1 county (Dunkin)
50-59 point margin: 4 counties
40-49 point margin: 14 counties
30-39 point margin: 28 counties
20-29 point margin: 20 counties
10-19 point margin: 27 counties
9.9 or less margin: 5 counties
Here is the raw data from Electoral Geography.
The data from Missouri re-enforces both the thesis of David Brooks and The Seattle Stranger. There is both polarization and an archipelago. Obama’s archipelago of seven islands is scattered across a Clinton sea. Each winning their turf overwhelmingly. Of Missouri’s 111 counties, only 7 were not decided in a landslide margin. That’s the polarization.
Missouri is an important battleground state in the upcoming election, a role that it has played in the last four elections. It is also a great bellweather state. As Missouri goes so goes the nation. Since 1932 Missouri has only gone with the loser once in 1956 when it voted for Stevenson rather than Eisenhower. More importantly since Missouri became a state in 1850, no Democrat has won the White House without winning Missouri. The Show Me state might be better called the Pick It state. It picks winners. And in part that is because especially in the post World War era, Missouri is a microcosm of the United States. Urban on the ends and rural in the middle. Here are the Missouri demographics. 12% African-American and 14% Hispanics are about the national average (Hispanics are probably just north of 15%). So Missouri is a pretty good reflection of the nation at large.
The differences are clear in Obama and Clinton’s electoral coalitions. Obama won Missouri but barely by winning African-Americans, affluent liberals, and the under 30 age group. Clinton won everyone else. This is the chasm of the Democratic Party.
Other Information on Missouri
May 8th Obama versus McCain Poll in Missouri from Rasmussen Reports.
Missouri GOP Proof of Citizenship Initiative.
Tomorrow the Chasm in Pennsylvania.