2020: High Voter Turnout and Yes, the White Working Class Will Still Matter

Ron Brownstein has an excellent and important new article out on the Atlantic website. And I say that not just because he uses my States of Change data and quotes me in a few places! No, it's because his analysis is spot on and he's really done his homework, digging into the data in a thorough way most political journalists never bother with.

"Signs are growing that voter turnout in 2020 could reach the highest levels in decades—if not the highest in the past century—with a surge of new voters potentially producing the most diverse electorate in American history.

But paradoxically, that surge may not dislodge the central role of the predominantly white and heavily working-class voters who tipped the three Rust Belt states that decided 2016: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Even amid a tide of new participation, those same voters could remain the tipping point of the 2020 election....

Data from States of Change show that over the past quarter-century, white voters without a college education have typically declined as a share of actual voters little by little over each four-year presidential cycle: They fell from 61 percent of voters in 1992 to 44 percent in 2016. Minority voters, meanwhile, have increased over those seven election cycles from 15 percent in 1992 to 26 percent in 2016. And college-educated whites have drifted up, from 24 percent in 1992 to 30 percent in 2016.

The 2016 election, however, was something of an anomaly for blue-collar white people. Partly because Trump inspired so many non-college-educated white voters to turn out—and partly because African American turnout skidded so badly—white working-class voters declined less than usual in 2016 as a share of the electorate, States of Change concluded. But in 2018, as turnout surged among minority and younger voters, non-college-educated whites suffered a much sharper decline: Compared with 2014, they fell by 4 to 5 percentage points as a share of the total vote, according to both Catalist’s estimates and McDonald’s analysis of census figures. That’s about double their average decline from one presidential election to the next over the past quarter-century.

Ruy Teixeira, a veteran liberal analyst and a co-founder of States of Change, believes it’s likely that in 2020 the decline in blue-collar white people’s share of the total vote could again push toward the high end of recent experience, shrinking by as much as 3 percentage points, to just over 40 percent. “I think if we do have a high-turnout election that builds on the trends we saw in 2018, you might see the white non-college share decline significantly more than it did in 2016,” Teixeira says.

Those changes pose obvious problems for Trump in winning the national popular vote. But they also present a challenge for Democrats, because these shifts are not evenly distributed among the states. The electorate is not diversifying nearly as fast in the three Rust Belt states that Trump dislodged from the Blue Wall—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those states, for years to come, will remain older and whiter than the nation overall, meaning that to win them, Democrats have to run better with older, whiter voters than they do in most places.....

Unless and until Democrats can tip some of the potential Sun Belt battlegrounds, particularly Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina, the party can’t reach 270 Electoral College votes without recapturing some of the Rust Belt states least affected by demographic change.

Teixeira is one of many Democratic strategists who say the party’s top priority must remain regaining those Rust Belt states, because it cannot yet rely enough on the Sun Belt. “How can you possibly count on these states?” he says. “Democrats haven’t won Florida for a while. Arizona, they haven’t won in a million years. Georgia, Texas—are you kidding me? These are hard states. You cannot build a strategy around having to win those states.”

Chipping into Trump’s base of non-college-educated and rural white voters isn’t the only way for Democrats to win back the Rust Belt states he took in 2016: They could also theoretically recapture them by increasing turnout among young people and minorities, and converting more suburban white people. But in a 2020 election likely to be defined by a historic surge of new voters, many Democrats are resigned to facing the same old challenge of scratching out a few more votes in mostly white union halls and country diners across the Upper Midwest."

So in 2020 we'll likely have a spectacularly large, diverse electorate, with high turnout across the board. But the white working class will still matter. A lot.

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THEATLANTIC.COM

Brace for a Voter-Turnout Tsunami

Even with a surge in overall participation, white working-class voters could still remain decisive in the 2020 election.

The Warren Surge

There's no doubt Warren has been doing better lately. It's also true that it's a fairly modest surge. The RCP rolling average has her at about 10 percent of Dem primary voters, not really different than where she was 3 weeks ago, after which she went down a bit and then up a bit. But it's reasonable to think of her as being in third place behind Sanders, who has stalled out, and Biden, who has lost a bit of altitude.

She's also not running that much better than she has been against Trump in trial heats; Biden continues to lap the field in this regard. In the latest Quinnipiac poll, Biden crushes Trump by 13 points, including, astonishingly almost tying Trump among white voters. Warren beats Trump by about half of Biden's margin, with about twice Biden's deficit among white noncollege voters. How she would fare among this demographic in a general election continues to worry me.

(Below Warren is the brown line, when you click thru to the full picture)

The Denmark Lesson

The Danish social democrats ran in the recent Denmark national elections on a left, anti-austerity program on economics and a fairly tough stance on immigration--described by the party's leader, Mette Frederiksen, as both "realistic and fair". The result: her center-left "red bloc" took the majority of the seats in the Danish parliament, meaning that Frederiksen should be the next prime minister. The far right populists, on the other hand, lost badly.

This excellent result contrasts rather starkly with the dreadful performance of many other European social democratic parties recently. This is generating considerable debate in European social democratic circles about whether Denmark is demonstrating a road forward out of the current mire. And well it should; the situation of European social democracy is dire and in urgent need of correction.

Paul Collier argues the case for the relevance of the Denmark social democratic path in a challenging piece in the New Statesman. His concern is to show that Frederiksen and her party are trying to recapture something vital about social democracy that has been lost in recent times. Their stance on immigration is not just political expediency but about re-establishing something very fundamental about social democracy's commitment to the common good and common purpose.

"Following her success in the Danish elections, Mette Frederiksen is set to return the Social Democrats to power. This contrasts starkly with such parties’ fate elsewhere in Europe: the long melancholy roar of an ebb tide. Mette’s explanation for that decline, pitched at working class voters, has been “you didn’t leave us; we left you”. She has won not by ditching core values but by returning to them. To grasp that, we need a larger picture than post-millennium Denmark....

The essence of social democracy was to recognise both the value and the grim limitations of market capitalism, building a belief system among citizens whereby the anxieties that it kept generating could be addressed. Political leaders communicated a sense of common purpose to achieve a forward-looking agenda, matched by inculcating a sense of mutual obligations to deliver it. People learnt that they had duties to each other: not just to their families, but to the entire society. Gradually, the society wove a dense web of reciprocal obligations: trapping people in it by the gentle pressure of self-respect and peer esteem. The economy grew, and the benefits were shared.....

Like other social democratic parties, that in Denmark had always been based on an alliance between the provincial working class and the young metropolitan educated. But the change in the belief system of the metropolitans faced the party with a choice. The metropolitans held the advantage: unions were in decline, while they were on the rise. As they took over the party, the working class gradually drifted off, and disdainful metropolitans accused them of being “deplorable”, by which they meant “fascist”....

Depicting [shared identity and reciprocal obligations] as quasi-fascist was the theatrical conceit of those keen to ditch their obligations. The domain of reciprocity has to be national for the simple reason that the nation is the entity within which the tax revenues needed to meet those obligations can be raised. First and foremost, the key obligations are on skilled metropolitans to hand over more of the high productivity now generated by agglomeration, and which they wrongly attribute entirely to their own abilities.

Mette Frederiksen recognized the need for shared belonging. She is rebuilding common purpose around a forward-looking pragmatic agenda of addressing the new anxieties that global capitalism has thrust on the working class. But after years of neglect, working class voters no longer trusted the party. To re-establish credibility, she needed a “signalling action”: something that, had she been a metropolitan trying to bullshit them, she would not have done....

In tandem with her core focus on returning to the party’s roots in addressing the anxieties faced by working people, Frederiksen is paying serious attention to how integration can best be achieved. All citizens need to absorb the belief system of reciprocal obligations and mutual regard that underpins Denmark’s social miracle: that is the condition under which immigration from different cultures is sustainable. The acceptance of shared identity by immigrants does not preclude retaining some other identities. But it has to be sufficiently manifest to generate the common knowledge that they have embraced the identity, the common purpose, and the obligations that come with them....

Frederiksen is pioneering the renewal of European social democracy: at its core is the rebuilding of shared identity, common purpose, and mutual obligations that eludes the metropolitans."

Very interesting analysis. We shall see how the debate within European social democracy evolves from here.

About this website

NEWSTATESMAN.COM

Denmark has shown how to renew European social democracy

Following her success in the Danish elections, Mette Frederiksen is set to return the Social Democrats to power. This contrasts starkly with such parties’ fate elsewhere in Europe: the long melancholy roar of an ebb tide. Mette’s explanation for that decline, pitched at working class voters, has...

Why Is Joe Biden Beating Donald Trump in Texas?

I hasten to say that this is just in one poll--the latest Quinnipiac poll--and of course does not mean Biden would necessarily beat Trump in a real-world election. But it is still instructive. Here's why.

First, note that Biden is the only one of the Democratic candidates tested (Warren, Harris, O'Rourke, Buttigieg, Castro, Sanders) who beats Trump in this poll. O'Rourke, interestingly enough, loses to Trump by a margin essentially identical to his deficit to Ted Cruz in 2018.

So what's the Biden difference here? Comparing this Biden-Trump trial heat to the O'Rourke-Cruz exit poll results (an imperfect instrument I know, but that's what we've got), Biden runs about as well as O'Rourke 2018 among Hispanics, blacks and white college voters but runs a significantly smaller deficit among white noncollege voters (39 vs. 48 points). There's the difference.

Could Biden replicate that (relatively) good performance among white noncollege voters in a general election. Who knows? But whoever the nominee is, that's going to be part of the formula for really putting the state in play.

https://poll.qu.edu/images/polling/tx/tx06052019_tgye56.pdf/

Were We Just a Bit Early?

I mean about the emerging Democratic majority. David Brooks seems to think that could be the case. In his latest column, he writes about something I've written about quite a few times recently (you always see it here first!): generational turnover in the American electorate and the potentially dire implications of this for the GOP.

"In 2002, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which predicted electoral doom for the G.O.P. based on demographic data. That prediction turned out to be wrong, or at least wildly premature....

But it’s hard to look at the generational data and not see long-term disaster for Republicans. Some people think generations get more conservative as they age, but that is not borne out by the evidence. Moreover, today’s generation gap is not based just on temporary intellectual postures. It is based on concrete, lived experience that is never going to go away."

Brooks also notes:

"To put it bluntly, young adults hate [the Republican Party].

In 2018, voters under 30 supported Democratic House candidates over Republican ones by an astounding 67 percent to 32 percent. A 2018 Pew survey found that 59 percent of millennial voters identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, while only 32 percent identify as Republicans or lean Republican.

The difference is ideological. According to Pew, 57 percent of millennials call themselves consistently liberal or mostly liberal. Only 12 percent call themselves consistently conservative or mostly conservative. This is the most important statistic in American politics right now.

Recent surveys of Generation Z voters (those born after 1996) find that, if anything, they are even more liberal than millennials."

I'll just note here that the next year of my multi-institutional States of Change project will be looking at just this: the potential effects of generational shifts on American politics. Nice to see at least some pundits catching on to how important these changes may be.

About this website

NYTIMES.COM

Opinion | The Coming G.O.P. Apocalypse

Stumbling blind into the age of diversity.

Is Racism Declining?

I know we're supposed to believe that everything is getting worse and worse in this regard....but maybe not. A new study by political scientists Daniel Hopkins and Samantha Washington indicates a decline in racial prejudice among whites since Trump's election (and not much change for that matter even during Obama's second term). How can this be? As quoted in the Washington Post article on these findings:

"Hopkins told The Washington Post that the results initially surprised him. Upon reflection, however, “it’s quite conceivable that Trump has simultaneously galvanized a small number of highly prejudiced white Americans while also pushing millions more to affirm that they are not as prejudiced,” he argued.

In other words, Hopkins believes the study provides evidence that the racially incendiary rhetoric and policies issuing from Trump’s White House have pushed the majority of Americans in the opposite direction....

[T]he political scientist points to the increasing isolation of an extremist minority whose prejudices have intensified in the face of a broader shift away from the sort of opinions aired in Trump’s White House and on his Twitter feed."

The article points out however:

"The specialist in race and political behavior acknowledged that his findings speak only to professed bias and not to concrete behavior, such as whether Americans are moving into heterogeneous neighborhoods."

Ah, but more good news: they are! From a recent Times Upshot article:

"[S]ince 2000, according to an analysis of demographic and housing data, the arrival of white residents is now changing nonwhite communities in cities of all sizes, affecting about one in six predominantly African-American census tracts. The pattern, though still modest in scope, is playing out with remarkable consistency across the country — in ways that jolt the mortgage market, the architecture, the value of land itself.

In city after city, a map of racial change shows predominantly minority neighborhoods near downtown growing whiter, while suburban neighborhoods that were once largely white are experiencing an increased share of black, Hispanic and Asian-American residents....

[D]isparities in incomes and mortgage access aren't apparent in suburban neighborhoods with a growing share of Hispanic, black and Asian-American residents. Minority borrowers in those places have incomes similar to that of their new neighbors. They receive mortgages proportionate to their share of the population."

Lastly, are the Hopkins/Washington findings an outlier? Nope:

"Although he was surprised by the results, Hopkins said his discovery is not out of step with other assessments. In fact, his conclusions are in line with recent scholarship suggesting that bias, both implicit and explicit, has declined when it comes to race and sexual orientation, though prejudice has remained steady regarding people with disabilities and actually increased regarding obesity."

Kind of complicates the current narrative doesn't it?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/racial-prejudice-trump-p…/…

https://www.nytimes.com/…/diversity-housing-maps-raleigh-ge…

Social Democracy's Dead Cat Bounce (Except They Didn't Get the Bounce!)

The German SPD has looked in terminal decline for awhile, bereft of ideas and signed up for yet another stint as the junior partner in a CDU-led grand coalition. In the recent EU elections, the SPD polled a dreadful 16 percent, behind not just the CDU but also the Greens. And check out this new general election polling result, where the SPD is way, way behind the Greens, who are actually leading the poll (h/t John Judis).

The ins and outs of the sad tale are well-covered in this article on Jacobin by Loren Balhorn. Balhorn is a Die Linke (Left Party) guy but his take is quite fair (he describes his own party as being "trapped in the protest party ghetto"--also fair).

"The Social Democrats lean hard on “more Europe” as the solution to Germany’s problems, and are far more likely to praise French president Emmanuel Macron than defend the leader of their British sister party, Jeremy Corbyn. They banked on selling themselves as a stable, mildly progressive bulwark against creeping right-wing populism but seem to have lost this role to the Greens, who broke 20 percent in a nationwide election for the first time. The looks on the faces of party chairwoman Andrea Nahles and “wholeheartedly European” top candidate Katarina Barley Sunday night were ones of defeat, out of luck and bereft of ideas for what to do next.

Catastrophic as the election may have been, it was anything but unexpected. The Social Democrats have been lumbering from one defeat to the next for nearly two decades, their toxic brand of what Oliver Nachtwey calls “politics without politics” costing them hundreds of thousands of members and millions of voters. The European elections were merely the latest confirmation of a seemingly unstoppable downward spiral for what was once the proudest, strongest socialist party on earth.....

At the risk of oversimplifying things, the SPD in 2019 has a serious credibility problem. The Social Democrats have spent nine of the last fourteen years carrying water for Angela Merkel’s grand coalition in Berlin, burning through eight different leaders in the process. It seems whoever dares take up the mantle, whether party stalwart Sigmar Gabriel or the most recent disappointment Martin Schulz, puts their entire political career at risk. What’s left of the SPD’s base is sick and tired of the coalition, and anyone who associates themselves with it soon becomes a political liability to be disposed of after the next electoral defeat and superficial attempt at rebooting the party.

Despite noises from the top about internal “renewal” and restoring Social Democratic credibility on social justice issues, little changes in policy terms — and cannot change as long the SPD remains the junior partner of the Christian Democrats (CDU).....

In practical terms the SPD’s presence in government perhaps stopped the CDU from pushing the occasional spending cut, moderated its line on a few social questions, and bolstered organized labor’s position at the negotiating table during the economic crisis in 2008. But these nuances of high politics are lost on the wider electorate, which after more than a decade of Merkel wants change."

And change ain't the SPD as this point, that's for sure. So, if you're a left-leaning voter, why not take a flyer on the Greens? Perhaps Kevin Kuhnert, leader of the Jusos (SPD youth wing) and of opposition to the latest grand coalition can somehow revive the corpse. But for now things look pretty bleak for German social democracy.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/…/german-social-democrats-europe…