By Sean
Trende
With a cloture vote on
the Senate’s immigration reform bill expected next week, countless
commentators have expressed the view that if Republicans don’t sign on
for reform, the party is doomed at the presidential level for a
generation.
This is the first in a two-part series explaining why this
conventional wisdom is incorrect. Signing on to a comprehensive
immigration package is probably part of one way for Republicans to form a
winning coalition at the presidential level, but it isn’t the only way
(for more, I’ve written a book about
this, as well as countless articles here at RCP). Today I’ll re-examine
what was really the most salient demographic change in 2012: The
drop-off in white voters. Next time, we’ll confront some of the
assumptions embedded in the “GOP has to do this” argument head-on.
I should re-emphasize at the outset that I think that embracing some
sort of immigration reform probably helps with Republicans’ outreach
efforts to Hispanics, and the idea that there is a treasure-trove of
votes to be had for Democrats here is almost certainly overstated.
I should also re-emphasize that from a “pure policy” standpoint, I find
quite a bit to like in the basic “Gang of Eight” framework. But
regardless of whether Republicans could or should back the bill, it
simply isn’t necessary for them to do so and remain a viable political
force.
1. The most salient demographic change from 2008 to 2012 was the drop in white voters.
Let’s start with the basics: Just what were the demographic changes in that four-year span? I did some preliminary work in
November 2012 suggesting that the largest change came from white voters
dropping out. Now, with more complete data, we can re-assess this in a
more precise manner.
Using the most commonly accepted exit-poll numbers about the 2008
electorate*, we can roughly calculate the number of voters of each
racial group who cast ballots that year. Using census estimates, we can
also conclude that all of these categories should have increased naturally from 2008 to 2012, due to population growth.
From mid-2008 to mid-2012, the census estimates that the number of
whites of voting age increased by 3 million. If we assume that these
“new” voters would vote at a 55 percent rate, we calculate that the
total number of white votes cast should have increased by about 1.6
million between 2008 and 2012.
The following table summarizes these estimates for all racial groups, and compares the results to actual turnout.
Now, the raw exit-poll data haven’t come out yet, so we can’t
calculate the 2012 data to tenths: The white vote for 2012 could have
been anywhere between 71.5 percent of the vote or 72.4 percent (with
26,000 respondents, analysis to tenths is very meaningful). So the final
answer is that there were 6.1 million fewer white voters in 2012 than
we’d have expected, give or take a million.**
The Current Population Survey data roughly confirm this. As I noted earlier,
if you correct the CPS data to account for over-response bias, it shows
there were likely 5 million fewer whites in 2012 than in 2008. When you
account for expected growth, we’d find 6.5 million fewer whites than a
population projection would anticipate.
This is the real ballgame regarding demographic change in 2012. If
these white voters had decided to vote, the racial breakdown of the
electorate would have been 73.6 percent white, 12.5 percent black, 9.5
percent Hispanic and 2.4 percent Asian -- almost identical to the 2008
numbers.
2. These voters were largely downscale, Northern, rural whites. In other words, H. Ross Perot voters.
Those totals are a bit more precise and certain (and lower) than my
estimates from November of last year. With more complete data, we can
now get a better handle regarding just who these missing white voters
were.
Below is a map of change in turnout by county, from 2008 to 2012.
Each shade of blue means that turnout was progressively lower in a
county, although I stopped coding at -10 percent. Similarly, every shade
of red means that turnout was progressively higher, to a maximum of +10
percent.
The drop in turnout occurs in a rough diagonal, stretching from
northern Maine, across upstate New York (perhaps surprisingly, turnout
in post-Sandy New York City dropped off relatively little), and down
into New Mexico. Michigan and the non-swing state, non-Mormon Mountain
West also stand out. Note also that turnout is surprisingly stable in
the Deep South; Romney’s problem was not with the Republican base or
evangelicals (who constituted a larger share of the electorate than they
did in 2004).
For those with long
memories, this stands out as the heart of the “Perot coalition.” That
coalition was strongest with secular, blue-collar, often rural voters
who were turned off by Bill Clinton’s perceived liberalism and George
H.W. Bush’s elitism. They were largely concentrated in the North and
Mountain West: Perot’s worst 10 national showings occurred in Southern
and border states. His best showings? Maine, Alaska, Utah, Idaho,
Kansas, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon and Minnesota.
We can flesh this out a bit more by running a regression analysis,
which enables us to isolate the effects of particular variables while
holding other variables constant.*** We’ll use county-level data, which
is granular enough that we can feel more comfortable that we avoided ecological fallacy problems. You can see the overall results here. Almost all of the variables are significant; only the population density variable is of no value.****
For those who didn’t click over to the chart, we’re pretty confident
that the voters were more likely to stay home if they resided in states
that were hit by Hurricane Sandy, that were targeted by a campaign in
2008, that had higher foreign-born populations, and that had more
Hispanic residents. The latter result probably suggests a drop-off in
rural Hispanic voters, who are overrepresented in an analysis such as
this one.
We’re also pretty confident that the voters were more likely to turn
out if they resided in counties with higher median household incomes,
high population growth, a competitive Senate race in 2012, or that were a
target state in 2012. Counties with higher populations of Mormons,
African-Americans, and older voters also had higher turnout, all other
things being equal. None of this is all that surprising.
Perhaps most intriguingly, even after all of these controls are in
place, the county’s vote for Ross Perot in 1992 comes back statistically
significant, and suggests that a higher vote for Perot in a county did,
in fact, correlate with a drop-off in voter turnout in 2012.
What does that tell us about these voters? As I noted, they tended to
be downscale, blue-collar whites. They weren’t evangelicals; Ross Perot
was pro-choice, in favor of gay rights, and in favor of some gun
control. You probably didn’t know that, though, and neither did most
voters, because that’s not what his campaign was about.
His campaign was focused on his fiercely populist stance on
economics. He was a deficit hawk, favoring tax hikes on the rich to help
balance the budget. He was staunchly opposed to illegal immigration as
well as to free trade (and especially the North American Free Trade
Agreement). He advocated more spending on education, and even
Medicare-for-all. Given the overall demographic and political
orientation of these voters, one can see why they would stay home rather
than vote for an urban liberal like President Obama or a severely
pro-business venture capitalist like Mitt Romney.
3. These voters were not enough to cost Romney the election, standing alone.
But while this was the most salient demographic change, it was
probably not, standing alone, enough to swing the election to Obama.
After all, he won the election by almost exactly 5 million votes. If we
assume there were 6.5 million “missing” white voters, than means that
Romney would have had to win almost 90 percent of their votes to win the
election.
Give that whites overall broke roughly 60-40 for Romney, this seems
unlikely. In fact, if these voters had shown up and voted like whites
overall voted, the president’s margin would have shrunk, but he still
would have won by a healthy 2.7 percent margin.
At the same time, if you buy the analysis above, it’s likely that
these voters weren’t a representative subsample of white voters. There
were probably very few outright liberal voters (though there were
certainly some), and they were probably less favorably disposed toward
Obama than whites as a whole. Given that people who disapprove of the
president rarely vote for him (Obama’s vote share exceeded his favorable
ratings in only four states in 2012), my sense is that, if these voters
were somehow forced to show up and vote, they’d have broken more along
the lines of 70-30 for Romney.
This still only shrinks the president’s margin to 1.8 percent, but
now we’re in the ballpark of being able to see a GOP path to victory
(we’re also more in line with what the national polls were showing). In
fact, if the African-American share of the electorate drops back to its
recent average of 11 percent of the electorate and the GOP wins 10
percent of the black vote rather than 6 percent (there are good
arguments both for and against this occurring; I am agnostic on the
question), the next Republican would win narrowly if he or she can
motivate these “missing whites,” even without moving the Hispanic (or
Asian) vote.
4. The GOP faces a tough choice.
Of course, it isn’t that easy. Obama won’t be on the ticket in 2016,
and the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, could have a greater
appeal to these voters (current polling suggests that she does). But
there are always tradeoffs, and Clinton’s greater appeal to blue-collar
whites, to the extent it holds through 2016, could be offset by a less
visceral attachment with young voters, college-educated whites and to
nonwhites than the president enjoys.
But the GOP still has something of a choice to make. One option is to
go after these downscale whites. As I’ll show in Part 2, it can
probably build a fairly strong coalition this way. Doing so would likely
mean nominating a candidate who is more Bush-like in personality, and
to some degree on policy. This doesn’t mean embracing “big government”
economics or redistribution full bore; suspicion of government is a
strain in American populism dating back at least to Andrew Jackson. It
means abandoning some of its more pro-corporate stances. This GOP would
have to be more "America first" on trade, immigration and foreign
policy; less pro-Wall Street and big business in its rhetoric; more Main
Street/populist on economics.
For now, the GOP seems to be taking a different route, trying to
appeal to Hispanics through immigration reform and to upscale whites by
relaxing its stance on some social issues. I think this is a tricky road
to travel, and the GOP has rarely been successful at the national level
with this approach. It certainly has to do more than Mitt Romney did,
who at times seemed to think that he could win the election just by
corralling the small business vote. That said, with the right candidate
it could be doable. It’s certainly the route that most pundits and
journalists are encouraging the GOP to travel, although that might tell
us more about the socioeconomic standing and background of pundits and
journalists than anything else.
Of course, the most successful Republican politicians have been those
who can thread a needle between these stances: Richard Nixon, Ronald
Reagan and (to a lesser degree) Bush 43 have all been able to talk about
conservative economic stances without horrifying downscale voters.
These politicians are rarities, however, and the GOP will most likely
have to make a choice the next few cycles about which road it wants to
travel.
---
* Ruy Teixeira has mostly convinced me that the correct final exit
numbers for 2008 were 74.3 percent white, 12.6 percent black, 8.5
percent Hispanic, 2 percent Asian and 2.6 percent “other.”
**I also note that Hispanic participation probably exceeded
projections when you consider that a disproportionate chunk of the
Latino population growth consists of non-citizens who are therefore
ineligible to vote. Also note the disproportionately large drop-off in
“other”; I suspect this is mostly a function of the “rounding issue” I
describe above.
***As my independent variable, I used the percentage change in
turnout in each county from 2008 to 2012. Since we have over 3,000
observations using this technique, we can run a large number of
variables. I went with 13. Five of them were meant to control for basic
external effects: population growth, whether the county was in a state
targeted in 2008 or 2012, whether it was in a state affected by
Hurricane Sandy, whether there was a competitive Senate race in 2012
(the states that had competitive Senate races in 2008 were almost all
swing states).
I ran a variety of demographic controls: the percentage of the county
that was above age 65, that was African-American, that was
foreign-born, and that was Mormon. I also included population density
and median household income.
Finally, I included the percentage of the vote cast for Ross Perot in 1992.
**** The r-square is a bit low at 0.3, but we’re trying to explain a
vast amount of data that probably relied on thousands of variables
(local weather, differing amounts of money spent, other statewide
contests). Moreover, a lot of these counties are so small that “quantum
effects” -- random individual decisions -- can start to skew things. An
extended family afflicted with food poisoning at Sunday dinner can
materially affect turnout in some counties in western Kansas. If you
exclude the 29 worst outliers (in geek speak, the ones whose
standardized residuals exceed 3), the r-square jumps to 0.4.
1 comment:
Going with your article is, while I can't remember the exact numbers, what a MD state Senator said recently; O'Malley won reelection as governor by some 200,000 votes with over 300,000 Republicans not voting. This follows the claim by a MD senator that of the anti gun control bill E-mails received, when the names where checked 40% were not registered to vote. Not scientific, but . . . I have two neighbors who are educated and conservative but will not register to vote and serving on a jury is not the cause. I have yet to receive an explanation why.
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