November 10, 2006
The 2006 Election III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:45 PM EST With respect to Josh Zeitz’s remarks on voting and income, the data I quoted on income and voting was broken down by region; in some areas, particularly the Northeast and the West Coast, Republicans now do a deal worse among high income voters than intuition and conventional wisdom say they should. Carefully controlling for race and other factors is worth doing, and I haven’t yet looked at data which does that. We do know that Republicans did much worse among Hispanic voters than they had hoped to do and had recently done, and were hopeless with African-American voters, as has been the case for a very long time (the Democrats took 89 percent of the African-American vote). The Democrats did very well among Jews, taking 88 percent of the Jewish vote. If the Democrats did well with African-American and Hispanic voters, who tend to have lower incomes, in some significant part because of issues relating to race and ethnicity, and did well with Jews, despite the generally higher income of Jewish voters, all three outcomes would tend to diminish the relative importance of income rather than other factors in explaining political outcomes. If income groups behave differently in different regions, that, too, weakens the explanatory power of income-group membership in explaining voting. Income group sometimes explains a lot of political choices; one question that interests me is when and why and how much.
If lower-income members of different racial and ethnic groups vote significantly differently, what is happening? Intuition and some evidence suggests that African-American voters suspect the Republicans of pandering to racism, and that Hispanic voters suspect the Republicans of pandering to nativism. Intuition is silent on why African-American and Hispanic religious voters were this year indifferent to appeals to culture-war politicking when voting for the House and Senate, although not necessarily when voting on other things (Webb won Virginia; a culture-war initiative also won in Virginia, and bigger than Webb did). If the war mattered a lot, and I am sure that it did, how did that affect Hispanic votes? Hispanics are over-represented in the military. In Virginia, at least, veterans voted quite disproportionately for Allen, who was prowar but never served in one, and against Webb, who was antiwar but served with distinction. Until very strong evidence shows up, I am not going to assume that Hispanic voters were moved back to the Democratic party by antiwar sentiment—but a lot of voters clearly were. My guess is that a significant percentage of the people so moved were richer white voters, but that is just a guess.
If Jews vote Democratic despite all income predictors, why do they? General liberalism is the conventional wisdom, and the conventional wisdom is usually right, which is why it becomes conventional. If Jewish liberalism explains Jewish voting, why should not African-American and Hispanic illiberalism on some questions—for example, gay rights, and church-state separation—explain their voting? This year, it did not, but Bush’s long-term electoral strategy assumed that it would. If the Republicans persist in that strategy, it may someday pay off. The poor do not always vote left. To pick an example from France: Ex-Communist white working-class voters moved over to Le Pen, over cultural and racial issues. Similar things happened in Britain. Why do Southern whites now vote Republican in such overwhelming numbers? Why do some people I know in the former coal and steel towns of Western Pennsylvania? People vote their perceived economic interests, except when they don’t, which is very often, and the left has no inevitable ability to persuade poor people that the left speaks for their economic interests.
Some other interesting things about the election: Republican moderates lost, and lost big. The Democrats picked up some seats in relatively conservative districts, but more in liberal districts. In regional terms, the Democrats did best in the Northeast and Midwest—10 seats apiece—and worse in the West and South—3 and 5 seats. Come January, the party that holds the South will not hold Congress, which will be a big change. For 48 out of the last 50 years, the party that held the South did hold Congress. One interpretation of the last 40 years is that the Republicans, shaping policy and rhetoric to gratify their now solid South, have been too pro-Southern for their own good, and they now look set to stay too pro-Southern. Here’s why:
In British politics, when you win big, you often pick up seats held by your own lunatic fringe, the ones most likely to run in such inhospitable terrain, so victory can make you crazier. That can happen in American politics, too, but this year it didn’t. The Democrats picked up some Midwestern seats where they will have to be moderate if they want to keep them, and an equal number in more liberal districts, where they may feel less pressure to be moderate, but those pressures may balance each other. The Republicans lost big, but contrary to the British pattern described above, risk becoming more rigid in defeat. The Republicans are (to some degree) peeled back to the seats held by their harder-line candidates. Such people risk nothing by refusing to moderate their language, other than a chance at a congressional majority, which is a lot, but their own jobs are not at risk if they play to the home constituency. The Republicans now have to explain defeat, the Democrats victory. The surviving Republicans will be tempted to explain defeat by the war, which has to end sometime, or to perceived corruption, or by their alleged failure to be conservative enough in cultural terms. I am betting on a strong temptation to the last choice. If they make it, I think they are going to be very sorry. The Democrats will also be tempted to explain victory by reference to the war. Depending on what they do with that interpretation, they, too, may be asking for trouble.
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