The Last White Election?

Since the ‘gender gap’ became famous in 1980 it has often been interpreted as evidence that women are becoming more liberal, or at least more Democratic in their voting preferences. But women voters don’t have to shift their opinions at all; the gap could be entirely the result of men moving rightward, or of different rates of change in preferences amongst the two sexes. In 2012, the gap between white men and women increased substantially, but so did the Republican vote in both sexes. White women simply defected from their 2008 preferences in smaller numbers than white men (see Table 6, below). Much bigger gaps separated different categories of women voters: for example, the astonishing 38-point difference between unmarried and married women; or the 54-point abyss between the presidential preferences of African-American and white women. In contrast, young white women were only 6 per cent more likely to vote for Obama than their older sisters or mothers. The gender mean, therefore, is an averaging of such different preferences and trends that it would be misleading to talk about ‘women’ in the election without putting a racial and a generational adjective in front.

Age is another category that needs to be unbundled. As Table 7 (below) vividly illustrates, in critical states where detailed exit polling was conducted, the generation gap in the Obama vote between Millennials (18–29) and Seniors (65 and over) was more than twice the size of the gender gap (21 versus 10 per cent). In all ten swing states, including North Carolina, the President won the 45-or-younger vote and lost the over-45 electorate. A 20 per cent gap in presidential preference at the age outliers looks like generational warfare in the voting booth, as do the smaller but historically unusual differences in the recent voting patterns of seniors and of adults aged 30–64. [50] Indeed the National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein proposes that the fundamental divide in American politics is becoming ‘Brown versus Grey’: the emergent minority-majority of young Latinos, Asians and African-Americans who need good schools and college loans, competing for scarce public resources against a grey tide of retiring and over-entitled Baby Boomers. Brownstein points out that the two cohorts have precisely inverted views of the national situation: three-fifths of Greys backed Romney and tell pollsters that the government is doing too much; three-fifths of Browns voted for Obama and believe that Washington should be spending more on education and job creation.

The scarecrow of a zero-sum conflict between public investment and social security, on one hand, and private household affluence on the other goes back to the tax-revolt era of the 1970s and the election of Ronald Reagan, the first of three Republican presidents who engineered huge deficits by slashing taxes for the affluent while writing blank cheques to the Pentagon. The strategic goal was to make it structurally impossible for Democrats to introduce new spending programmes for social change without blowing up the budget. Similarly (and here Thatcherism was an interesting precedent), fiscal politics fomented generational and racial conflicts that splintered Democratic but advantaged Republican candidates.

Yet the 65-plus voting cohort, once upon a time the most reliable Democratic constituency, is not simply a group of relatively wealthy whites unwilling to pay for inner-city education, public television or universal healthcare—although this stratum exists, and its ranks have been enlarged by the provision, in both the Ryan budget and Romney platform, that exempts anyone 55 years or older from the proposed cuts or eligibility changes in Social Security and Medicare. But the elderly in far larger numbers are also the victims of incinerated home equity and the extinction of the ‘defined-benefit’ pension system. The percentage of private-sector workers covered by traditional pension plans declined from 62 per cent in 1975 to 7 per cent by 2009. The health and security of the old, in other words, depend as much as ever upon vigorous federal action and inter-generational transfers.

But Obama’s ‘grand bargain’—the trade-off between tax hikes and programme cuts that the White House pursued all last year with Speaker Boehner—proposed sacrifices from Social Security and Medicare, hitherto inviolable New Deal legacies. Geriatric voters at the same time have been alarmed by health-reform legislation that few understand and most misconstrue. In the absence of a White House campaign to explain the reforms, the lurid Republican misrepresentations of the Affordable Care Act that so damaged Democrats during the 2010 by-election still reign in public opinion. A Kaiser Poll conducted last October found that fully 60 per cent of older people believe in the existence of the Federal ‘death panels’ that Sarah Palin claimed would ration mortality to the terminally ill. In addition ‘two in three seniors say the law cuts benefits for people in the traditional Medicare programme’—a misconception that harmonizes with the core Tea Party doctrine that Washington is redistributing the hard-earned wealth of older white America to the Democratic Party’s grassroots, in this case from seniors to the previously uninsured.

The Republican targeting of Federal insurance and transfer programmes for the future elderly is immensely destabilizing, striking at the heart of the most successful anti-poverty policies in American history and opening huge breaches between the lowest quintile of the aged, who depend upon Social Security for 83 per cent of their income, and the upper quintile, for whom it constitutes only 18 per cent—as well as between current recipients of benefits and those 55-and-unders whom the Republicans propose to disinherit. As Baby Boomers swell and eventually double the cohort that they first officially began to enter in 2012, and as Millennials are forced to assume more of the burden of support for their elders, both the social meaning and politics of ageing will become increasingly contested. [53] The Obama administration, having conceded the priority of deficit reduction from the very beginning, then enshrining the Bush tax cuts for all but the very wealthiest, has undermined the Democrats’ ability to make a case for social spending on education and public employment for younger Americans as the key to preserving New Deal entitlements for the elderly.

Millennial voters are easier to bring into focus than seniors. Thanks to CIRCLE, the Tufts University centre for research on youth voting and political participation, Edison Research exit-poll data for the 19 per cent of voters aged 18 to 29 was rapidly analysed and published (see Table 8, below). When Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000, three-quarters of the youth cohort identified as non-Hispanic whites; this time around, the white component was only 58 per cent, and the Latino share for the first time exceeded the African-American. (By 2018 non-whites are predicted to be the majority of the youth electorate.) [54]

Although the President’s 60 per cent of the 18–29 age cohort was crucial to his victory, it was not a coherent ‘youth vote’ across racial and gender categories like that of 2008. Indeed Obama’s advantage amongst younger white men (52 per cent in 2008) completely disappeared (40 per cent in 2012), a defection that conforms with polling which shows younger white males to be most pessimistic about the economy, the most disappointed with Obama’s economic policies, and the least supportive of amnesty for undocumented immigrants. More startling were the considerable inroads made by the Romney campaign amongst young black men, whose support for Obama declined sharply from 94 per cent in 2008 to 80 per cent last November, probably for similar reasons. Economic anxiety amongst men, young and old, remains acute and politically volatile. In 2008 Obama received 70 per cent of the vote of those who told exit pollsters that their economic situation was ‘worse than four years previously’. This time around he won barely 20 per cent. It will be interesting to see if future research makes any connection between voting behaviour and the persistence of an unprecedented male disadvantage or ‘gender gap’ in employment markets. (Obama’s share of the young male Hispanic vote, however, remained virtually the same as in 2008: 63 versus 64 per cent.)

Young white women, the largest segment of the cohort, almost evenly split a vote that was weighted with an unusually high share of evangelical Christians (38 per cent) and thus may disguise a more pro-Democratic trend. Young women of colour, three times as likely as their white sisters to be working mothers, constitute the heart and soul of ‘Generation Obama’, even if more black women prefer to call themselves ‘moderate’ than ‘liberal’ Democrats. Young Latinas, on their side, are twice as likely as their mothers to identify as Democrats (65 per cent) and have become the most self-consciously and dynamically ‘liberal’ group (45 per cent) amongst active voters.

Republican cartography

Despite the turbulence within voter ranks and the perils of reifying categories like gender and age, all the demographic weather vanes—as Republicans fear—point toward a future with many Democratic presidents. Surely it follows, then, that the House of Representatives, as the Senate already has, will realign itself accordingly in the 2014 or 2016 elections? Surprisingly, that is not a safe bet; indeed the prospect of a Democratic straight flush is widely regarded by political analysts on both sides as highly dubious. National Journal writers understate the scale of the problem when they observe that ‘changing demography is reshaping the Congressional battlefield more slowly than the presidential landscape.’ [58]

Although the Senate is notoriously undemocratic because it distributes power according to states rather than population (284,000 Wyoming voters, for instance, have the same representation as 18,671,000 California voters), the net effect across the political spectrum is capricious, as demonstrated by the senior senator from tiny Vermont, a self-professed socialist. [59] In contrast, the House is reapportioned on the basis of population after each new Census; but the process of redrawing districts in most states is shaped by partisan legislatures and governors, and can produce grotesque distortions of the ‘one person, one vote’ principle. Thus the Democrats won the national House vote in November 2012 by 1,363,148 ballots but gained only eight seats, while Republicans preserved their third largest majority of seats since World War Two. [60] In six key states that Obama decisively won (Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan), Republicans nonetheless formed a majority of each state’s congressional delegation: in total, the Democrats’ statewide majorities earned only 30 House seats while the Republicans won 54. [61] How do these Democratic popular majorities get lost in the translation? The answer, which is key to understanding how the Republicans have fortified their House majority, has three parts: the ‘drop-off’ effect in midterm elections, the gerrymander and the advantages of incumbency.

The 2010 midterm elections occurred under all the wrong astrological signs. One of the fiercest defenders of Obama’s stimulus package, former Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald, concedes that ‘polls have found that most Americans see the stimulus as a giveaway to bankers, confusing it with the $700 billion financial bailout that passed before Obama was elected.’ [62] Seniors, meanwhile, were outraged at what they perceived as a betrayal of Medicare; gays and immigrants were alienated by the President’s failure to end ‘Don’t ask’ or to push for amnesty; environmentalists felt betrayed by White House cuddling with the energy industry as well as its wretched performance in Copenhagen; the anti-war public was furious at the new ‘surge’ in Afghanistan; homeowners who were promised relief saw only foreclosure notices; and economic populists wrote off the administration as a lost cause when Obama wimped out in his White House meeting with bank CEOs, the authors of the new Depression.

The 2010 party primaries were a grim warning to the White House: Democratic turnout sunk to its lowest level in history while Republican participation was the highest since 1970. [63] As David Corn emphasizes in another otherwise admiring portrait of Obama’s first biennium, the President ‘did not tap into the anger of the voting public’ or even campaign on the ground for endangered Democratic congressional candidates. One campaign strategist told Corn:

There was no jobs message. The voters, rightly or not, saw debt as a contributing factor to the bad economy, and we were talking about who was spending what money in politics. We had an election driven by the enemy. Their message was simple: the Dems are spending too much and it’s hurting the economy. There was no economic narrative coming out of the White House.

As a result, 30 million Obama voters—nearly half of his 2008 support—stayed home in November 2010, and the Democrats were crushed. In 2006 the Democratic margin of victory in House elections had been 6.5 million votes; in 2008, more than 13 million; in 2010 the GOP cashed in a 5.7 million winning margin for 63 new House seats and 6 new Senate seats. It was the biggest reshuffling of the House since 1948.

It was also an extreme example of the usual midterm drop-off of presidential-majority voters, which produces ‘smaller voting populations that are older and less racially diverse than the population at-large’. [66] Almost 80 per cent of the 2010 voters were white, nearly two-thirds middle-aged or elderly, and two-fifths described themselves as supporters of the Tea Party protests. This alternative demographic also powered the largest Republican victory in state governments of the last forty years. The GOP gained 680 legislative seats across the country, took over power in 22 additional state chambers, and unseated eleven Democratic governors. The immediate payoff was control over redistricting in states electing 40 per cent of the House, while the Democrats retained only 10 per cent; the remainder of seats were redrawn by divided state governments or commissions.

Redistricting is a power of great awe and, thanks to a friendly Supreme Court, the GOP governors and legislatures had scope for creative cartography. In the second of a stunning trilogy of biased partisan landmarks, [69] a majority of the Supremes in 2004 found in the case of Vieth v Jubelirer that a Republican legislature and governor in Pennsylvania had not violated the Constitution by an egregious gerrymander of the state’s 19 congressional districts which, according to one of the petitioners, ‘guaranteed itself [the Republican Party] a majority of the congressional seats for the rest of the decade—even if it did not win a majority of votes’. [70] Thanks to state-of-the-art computer modelling and an inherent bias in electoral geography (Democratic voters are more concentrated than the GOP’s), the Republicans’ new maps were masterpieces, giving the national party—according to a Brookings study—‘a structural advantage estimated at 5 percentage points’. (This estimate has been challenged by another analysis that claims the Democrats actually require more than a 7 per cent margin in the popular vote to take back the House.) ‘What the House success demonstrates’, wrote the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, ‘is that Republicans can do well when they choose the voters rather than vice versa.’

A good gerrymander is also an insurance policy on the partisan incumbency of a district, even if in the Republican case (thanks to the Tea Party) it now protects the party rather than the individual. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, according to Nate Silver, more than one hundred House members came from swing districts where the local margin of victory was within 5 per cent of the national vote, while 123 members were elected from ‘landslide districts’ protected by partisan advantages of 20 points or more. Today a considerable majority of the House (242 of 435 members) live within landslide-margin gated suburbs. A mere 35 members forage for survival within the narrow margins of a Presidential vote. And the once common postwar practice of ticket-splitting (Democrats voting for Eisenhower or Republicans for Clinton) has been supplanted by a Gilded Era allegiance to the party list. Fewer and fewer congressional districts vote against their ‘presidential lean’. [74] Even November 2012’s Democratic gains in the House confirmed the success of the Republicans in engineering maximum racial polarization in congressional geography. ‘Despite their losses’, report the authors of a National Journal survey,

Republicans increased their share of districts that are whiter than the national average; the Democratic gains came entirely from districts that lean toward minorities . . . After this reshuffling, the parties glare across a deep racial chasm in the House. That’s evident most visibly in the composition of each party in the 113th Congress. White men will still constitute 88 per cent of House Republicans, while, for the first time ever, they will represent a minority of the House Democratic Caucus, in which women and minority members are now the majority. [75]

Obama vs the Democrats

The last election cycle (2008–2010–2012) has left more than the usual number of dead canines on Southern roadways, as well as sending the Republican counterparts of the Girondists to the guillotine. Consider the fate of the once famous ‘Blue Dogs’. Organized as a conservative Democratic caucus in 1994 to carry on the tradition of the so-called ‘Boll Weevils’ of the Reagan era, they became powerful thanks to then-Representative Rahm Emanuel (5th District of Illinois) who, as the chair of the 2005–07 Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, made his priority the recruitment of candidates willing to run as Democrats in majority white, Republican-leaning districts, regardless of their conservative views. This promiscuous strategy was a short-run success, leading to a 31-seat Democratic House majority in the 2006 midterm election that was expanded by 21 additional seats in 2008. Arguably, Obama’s Affordable Care Act would not have passed in 2009 without Blue Dog support; nor would it have been so far to the right of the original Hillary Clinton health plan of 1993. But the 54-member caucus was also a powerful lobby within the Democratic Party in favour of the Republican framing of national priorities as the reduction of deficits and taxation by slashing social spending.

In the 2010 election, however, the Blue Dogs were virtually annihilated in the Tea Party blitzkrieg. On the eve of the election, Democrats represented 77 districts with Republican presidential leanings; after the election, only 17. In 2012 only a single candidate endorsed by the caucus won, and the second-term Blue Dogs can barely muster 15 members. As a consequence the Progressive Caucus, with 76 members, including one Senator (Bernie Sanders), became the largest programmatic bloc in the House minority, followed by 54 or so members of the New Democrat Coalition—an off-shoot of the Democratic Leadership Council and the ‘triangulated’ centrism of the Clinton administration which focuses mainly on promotion of technology industries and their exports. The Progressive Caucus is the most robustly left-liberal group in Congress in more than sixty years, and its members have certainly ‘talked the talk’. With the support of major unions and equal-rights groups, the Caucus has produced its own People’s Budget, which would cure the deficit by reducing Pentagon spending, and on several occasions has made a stand against the President’s pathological centrism. In 2009, for example, it threatened to vote against healthcare reform unless it included ‘a robust public option’; last Fall, the Caucus chair, Rep. Keith Ellison of Minneapolis, vowed that its members would reject any deficit deal ‘that cuts benefits for families and seniors who rely on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to put food on the table or cover their health costs’.

¡No Pasarán! Unfortunately, the Progressive Caucus always surrenders Madrid. As left Democrat Norman Solomon acidly observes, ‘you can almost hear the laughter from the West Wing when the Progressive Caucus vows to stand firm.’ In 2009, every member ‘wilted under pressure and voted for a healthcare bill with no public option at all’. Likewise at the New Year only seven Caucus members—not including Ellison—voted against the President’s fiscal compromise with the Republicans in which he gave away the $250,000 income threshold that he had vowed was non-negotiable. ‘What we have witnessed so far’, writes Solomon, ‘is surrender in stages—a chronic confluence of conformity and undue party loyalty, with brave talk from caucus members habitually followed by contrary votes.’

The Progressives have been faced with the question of how to work with a President whose ‘post-partisanship’ keeps a warm spot for the aristocratic Senate, to which his administration is umbilically bound by Joe Biden, while often expressing a strange disdain toward liberal House Democrats and their supporters (because they are his guilty conscience?). Mutual distrust has existed since the 2008 nomination when, in order to avoid a messy battle with Hillary about credentials, Obama ‘cast his lot with the Clinton crowd’, asking John Podesta, President Clinton’s former chief of staff, ‘to lead a secret “shadow transition”’. As Michael Grunwald continues the story, ‘Obama loyalists feared that while they were working around the clock to beat McCain, Podesta would be building the architecture for a new quasi-Clinton administration.’ [78] But Obama’s first four years may have been shaped as much by the Stockholm syndrome as by wily Clintonian tactical calculations. By all accounts he was stunned by congressional Republicans’ decision to destroy his administration by fiscal blackmail, calumny and non-cooperation. According to a top advisor, Obama simply had no ‘strategy to counteract [Republican] extremism’. [79] At the beginning of 2011, he brought in hostage negotiators: William Daley, Hizzoner’s other son and Midwestern chair of JP Morgan Chase, as new chief of staff, along with General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt as chair of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Congressional progressives were rightly appalled, not just by Obama’s nominations, but by his opening a second line of negotiations with big business via Immelt, while leaving much of his own base in the dark.

In early 2011 Obama offered the opposition $1 trillion in budget cuts, much of it from lifeline Federal programmes, but Jeff Sessions, the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, scoffed that it was ‘insignificant’. A few months later he proposed his ‘grand bargain’ of cutting federal expenditure by $4 trillion over 12 years if Republicans would likewise bump high-bracket income taxes back to their 1999 level. Rebuffed again and with the fiscal ceiling collapsing on the economy’s head, the President made progressive nightmares vividly real in August by accepting $2.4 trillion in future cuts simply to postpone the ‘fiscal cliff’ until after the election. As David Corn despaired, ‘the president had been forced to cut important programmes beyond what he believed prudent, yet he was now embracing what he had been opposing.’ [80] In fact Obama was beginning to sound like a stunned and plaintive Rodney King: ‘why can’t we just get along?’

Despite its hypothetically greater influence in the wake of the great Blue Dog massacre, in 2012 the left wing of the Democratic Party had no influence on a campaign agenda that was so deliberately minimalist that it might be compared to a Frank Stella or John Cage masterpiece. Repealing Bush’s tax cuts for the rich (and thus leaving them still infinitely less taxed than during the socialist dictatorship of Dwight Eisenhower, when the top marginal rate was 92 per cent) served as the campaign’s populist trick pony while the President attempted to slip, but never to counter, Romney’s often well-aimed punches about a jobless recovery. Obama promised sunshine and fairness, but was seldom more specific than his ‘we’ll work that out later’ opponent. Poverty, hunger, urban decay, the defence of public education, union rights, corporate crimes, totalitarian surveillance, home foreclosures, amnesty for drug-war prisoners, Palestinian statehood and all the other issues that constitute a progressive agenda were buried deeper than in any election in memory. Although the Jersey shore was now Tuvalu and the Mississippi was turning into a bathtub ring, climate change was never mentioned in the presidential debates nor in the hundreds of thousands of campaign ads. And the ‘second stimulus’—the President’s 2011 jobs bill, including its crucial provision of $35 billion in emergency aid to save the jobs of school teachers and firefighters (defeated in the Senate, thanks to three renegade Democrats)—was left in the attic.

For obscure reasons, the rightwing media—including Forbes, the Deseret News (owned by the Mormon church) and the Washington Times—are beguiled with the image of Obama as a North American ‘Peron’ (Michelle, of course, is Evita), building power by showering benefits on shiftless peons and public employees. [81] The comparison is not convincing, except to the extent that Obama’s obvious preference is to live outside the smoked-filled rooms of the party system in the clean air of his own charisma. He is predisposed to build and trust only proprietary networks—or, to put it more bluntly, he never offers rides to Democrats stuck in the rain. Wisconsin is the consummate example. Few elections in recent years have been more important to the American labour movement than the contest between Governor Scott Walker and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett last June. Walker, a Tea Party idol, provoked a statewide revolt in 2011 by stripping public-sector workers of their rights while simultaneously proposing tax breaks for the very rich. Democratic legislators, demonstrating a rare will to fight, fled the state to preclude a quorum on the vote while trade unionists, students and senior citizens laid siege to the state capitol. A million Wisconsinites signed petitions to recall Walker, and the issue was put to ballot in June as a choice between Walker and Barrett: construed by both sides as a referendum on the fate of public-sector unionism, not just in Wisconsin but in the entire country. Determined Republicans raised over $45 million to defend Walker, an extraordinary war chest in a Midwestern election, while Democrats scraped together $18 million on behalf of Barrett. All liberal eyes turned hopefully toward the White House: after a long wait, the President tweeted a short message of support to Barrett. That was it. Walker won resoundingly.

The President is also an awesome tightwad. Obama, Michael Barone points out, ‘attended more than 200 fundraisers for his presidential campaign, but he refrained from raising money for congressional Democrats.’ [82] When Pelosi and Reid begged the White House to share $30 million out of its enormous war chest to help the Party regain control of Congress, they were shown the door. Meanwhile his campaign was sucking money out of non-swing states like Texas (‘the only state in the union that is majority-minority but doesn’t have a Democratic statewide elected official’), where Obama had raised $11 million by August, leaving ragged ‘Democratic candidates for Texas’s open US Senate seat $500,000 in campaign contributions, compared to the $45.9 million raised by Republicans.’ As one commentator noted early in 2012, ‘President Barack Obama has a bleak message for House and Senate Democrats this year when it comes to campaign cash: You’re on your own.’

Fears that the White House is coming to regard the Party in the same way that a vampire regards its lunch only increased with the surprise announcement after the 2012 election that the Obama campaign would not disband its ground operation, but instead transform it into a mass-membership non-profit called Organizing for Action, with the mission of supporting the President’s priorities. Although no Democrat accused the President of ‘Peronism’, the announcement caused widespread consternation at the Democratic National Committee: several members of the DNC ‘expressed fear’ that ‘the new outside group’ could ‘hurt the national party’s fundraising and drain its resources.’ [84] Unlike the DNC, Organizing for Action will be able to operate in the same tax-free, unlimited-contribution environment as the Rove Crossroads PACs, but with the advantage of the most sophisticated mobilization technology in electoral history. If successful, it will rewire the power relations between the White House and local Democrats, and minimize the President’s dependence upon trade unions, equal-rights groups, and progressives to carry campaign messages door-to-door. What is heralded as an innovative strategy to get around the roadblock of the Republican House majority may simply provide the President with more road width (Avenida 9 de Julio, perhaps?) to bypass his own party.