7 THE DEMOCRATIC ASCENDANCY
The Republican Party is in a death spiral that will mean the end of the Grand Old Party as we know it. The party will feverishly put off the end by entrenching itself in the most rural, religious, and race-conscious parts of the country and by exploiting the constitutional bias in favor of small and rural states, but the Republican Party will face shattering losses at some point. The confirmation of its death will liberate the country and progressive reformers to tackle the huge challenges and contradictions that keep America from realizing its potential. And it will allow a new generation of conservative reformers and modernizers to join the debate, win control of the Republican Party, and chart a new course—though that is for a later chapter and a later time.
The Republican Party is aligned with the oldest, most rural, most religiously observant, and mostly married white voters. Because of the intense battle over American values, big swaths of this diverse country view the Republicans as people with deep convictions about right and wrong, though also as intolerant and not open to America’s ascendant trends. The party is virtually off-limits for younger voters and Millennials, for voters in the cities and dynamic metropolitan areas, for mainstream Protestants and the secular, for the foreign-born and new immigrants, and for voters from every racial minority.
And it is worse than you think. The Republican Party is not just doomed because of the inexorability of demographic trends in the country that must reach a tipping point. It is ironically doomed by its strategies to forestall the trends. It is in a pitched fight against the New American Majority.
Fresh from the culture wars, Republicans sustained high off-year turnouts in 2010 and 2014 by constantly raising the specter of President Barack Obama and the grave risks to the country’s traditional values if Democrats hold office. They raised the stakes to build turnout among their base, and the predictable consequences played out after the GOP won control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections. The actions of the Tea Party–dominated House sent Republican poll ratings into the toilet. And after the 2014 sweep, Republican leaders have promised the base that they will block Obama on his executive action to grant legal status to the undocumented immigrants and will work to repeal Obamacare. And by the way, a large majority of the base of the party says that Congress should start impeachment proceedings against President Obama.1
So the more Republican strategies to animate and motivate their voters to win off-year elections succeed, the more they alienate the party from America’s burgeoning new electorate.
And Republicans have been able to sustain the intensifying battle for America’s values by building a conservative base in the race-conscious and religiously observant South, the Appalachian Valley, across the rural Plains states, and in the Mountain West. It wins in those twenty states by fighting ferociously against government spending for the poor, to stop uncontrolled immigration, to end abortion, and to defend traditional marriage. By winning big in what I call the GOP conservative heartland, the Republicans are able to compete for control of the U.S. Senate and are assured to govern in 40 percent of the states, even though the population of the heartland accounts for only a quarter of the nation. Unfortunately, the more Republicans succeed in solidifying their base of support in the conservative heartland, the more the rest of the country views them as out of touch and from a different era.2
Democracy Corps’ regional definitions created for the Republican Party Project.
The success of these tactics has serious and long-term consequences. They enable the Republicans to pursue a full-throated conservative agenda in the twenty states of the conservative heartland and to block major portions of any Democratic president’s agenda in the U.S. Congress. Many of their victories in the states are hard to reverse. But those successes come with a huge price tag, including ceding the presidency, the executive branch, and ultimately the judiciary to the Democrats. These “successes” also obscure the ascendant trends nationally and allow a lot of self-deception about what the Republican Party must do to win presidential elections again.
None of that changes the seismic political transformations that are playing out nationally.
THE WRONG SIDE OF AMERICA’S SOCIAL TRENDS
The Republicans’ discomfort with the country’s racial diversity and spirit of multiculturalism is translating into stunning levels of support for Democrats among Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans. Republicans were able to win 37 to 40 percent of the Hispanic presidential vote in prior elections—as with Ronald Reagan in 1984 and George W. Bush in 2004—though that has fallen precipitously. Just 31 percent of Hispanics voted for John McCain, an advocate of comprehensive immigration reform, and that dropped to 27 percent for Mitt Romney with his “self-deport” solution to undocumented immigration. The Republican priorities on race and immigration have left the GOP with a barren partisan landscape among Hispanics: only 14 percent identify with the party. That falls to just 12 percent among the Hispanic foreign-born and Millennials.3
Despite growing population, the Hispanic share of the vote did not increase in the 2014 off-year elections, likely the result of the president’s hesitation to take executive action on immigration. Still, Democrats did take 62 percent of the Hispanic congressional vote—the result of the Republicans’ continued anti-immigration agenda.4
Among African Americans, Democratic support is more deeply rooted in long-standing voter choices, and no Republican candidate has earned more than 20 percent of the black vote since 1960. Even during the antiwelfare, crime, and affirmative action campaigns of the 1980s, Republican presidential candidates won between 9 and 12 percent of the black vote, and that continued during Bill Clinton’s campaigns. But in 2004, John McCain earned only 4 percent of the black vote as 95 percent rallied to Barack Obama’s candidacy and presidency.5
What is striking is how determined blacks have become to vote in the face of persistent efforts to delegitimize Obama and even stronger attempts to limit their access to the right to vote. Blacks were more than 13 percent of the voting electorate in 2012, turning out at a higher rate than whites for the first time. They also maintained a high share of the vote and steady support for Democratic candidates in the off-year elections. In the 2014 midterm elections, they were 12 percent of the electorate and only 10 percent voted for Republicans. Similar numbers are expected in the 2016 presidential election, as Democrats won that level of support under President Clinton.6
Asian Americans are also watching Republicans, and they gave three-quarters of their votes to Obama in 2012. They became part of the diverse racial and ethnic consensus favoring Democrats that year, though they split their votes evenly in the off-year elections.7
It is certainly not cool to be Republican among the young and the Millennials. The College Republican National Committee’s own youth postmortem described the reactions from their focus groups. The first words that came to mind when young “winnable” Obama voters were asked about the Republican Party included “closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned,” and one young moderate independent woman declared, “I would say your image is all wrong” and “We have the values that we have. So you are going to have to change.”
Young voters under thirty years old gave the Democratic presidential candidate 54 percent of their votes in 2004 and 66 percent in 2008. The youth Democratic vote dropped to 60 percent in 2012 when Millennials struggled with the economy, unemployment, and smothering student debt. Still, the Republicans are increasingly shunned by the Millennials: the proportion identifying as Republican fell from 24 percent in 2004 to only 17 percent in 2014 and 13 percent in 2015.
Young voters, as expected, formed 11 percent of the 2010 and 13 percent of the 2014 off-year electorate, though the larger group of Millennials was 21 percent of the electorate in 2012 and will grow to more than a quarter by 2016. Millennials will be 40 percent of eligible voters by 2020, according to exit poll and census projections. And critically, we now know the younger Millennials give
the Democrats the same advantage in party identification (+ 15 points) as the older (+ 17 points). That answers the question of whether these younger voters had become disaffected with the weak economy under President Obama. And it means that the Millennials’ growing proportion in the electorate will tilt the playing field even more Democratic.8
Unmarried households are now a majority in the country (51 percent), though two-thirds of the Republican base is married, and conservatives are making marriage more and more central to their values and public policy agenda. Unmarried women have given the majority of their votes to the Democrats in every presidential election since 1988, though in the past two, more than two-thirds voted for Barack Obama.
At the same time, the unmarried women proportion of the presidential electorate has been growing and will reach nearly a quarter in 2016. Yet a very large proportion of them are drop-off voters who take a pass on the midterm elections. Their proportion of the 2014 electorate edged up to 22 percent, though that is still short of the 25 percent expected in the presidential election in 2016.9
Less than a quarter of unmarried women identify themselves as Republicans. They feel increasingly disconnected from the Republican Party because of its views of women and families. Unmarried women are overwhelmingly pro-choice on abortion and open to the diversity of family types, including gay marriage. But single women are also literally on their own and find Republican views on the social safety net and government dependency unhelpful. They are the strongest supporters of Medicare and Social Security, equal pay for women, helping working mothers with child care, paid sick days and paid leave, and policies to make college affordable.10
The growing secularization of the country and the Evangelical-led battle over American values have upended traditional voting patterns. The new kid on the block is the secular voter or those with no religion. One in five voters does not identify with any religious denomination, and they have emerged as one of the groups with the strongest identification with the Democrats. Seven in ten voted for Obama in 2012, and they were as solid for the Democrats in the midterm elections.11
The Episcopalians and Presbyterians dominated the Protestant religious establishment for a century, and they were once the backbone of the Republican Party. Their loyalties are now suspect, however, and just 55 percent voted for Romney in 2012. White Evangelicals have become the largest bloc in the Republican base, as we shall see in the next chapter, and they cast 76 percent of their vote for Romney in 2012. In the 2014 off-year elections, they matched that number for Republican congressional candidates. White observant Catholics gave Obama just 38 percent of their votes, which is well down from previous elections.12
The Democrats are deepening their support with the groups that are growing in social and political significance. The rising American electorate of African Americans, Hispanics, Millennials, and unmarried women will constitute 54 percent of the electorate in 2016. If you also include the seculars with no religious affiliation, this rising share of the electorate will increase to 63 percent. Each of these groups is steadily growing and, as of early 2015, two-thirds of them intend to vote for Hillary Clinton, assuming she is the nominee.13
The metropolitan areas are indeed cauldrons for these economic and cultural revolutions, making the metropolitan revolution a political one too. A majority of the country now lives in large metropolitan areas, and Obama won 56 percent of the voters in the large metro areas in 2012, including 77 percent of the voters in the urban core and 62 percent in the inner suburbs.14
In 2012, Obama won twenty-six of the thirty most populous cities. In the megacities of New York City and Los Angeles, Obama took 82 and 69 percent of the vote, respectively. He won almost all of the big cities outside of the South and the Mountain West, including winning respectably in Sun Belt cities. Romney carried only four of the thirty most populous cities—Phoenix, Jacksonville City, Fort Worth, and Oklahoma City.15
The story is even more revealing when one looks at the metropolitan areas with the highest GDP—the engines of the U.S. economy today. Obama won eleven of the fifteen metropolitan statistical areas with the highest total GDP and nine of the ten with the highest GDP per capita. That economic progress will be fueled by population growth, immigration, rising college-educated populations, and higher concentrations of professional, creative, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) occupations—and those demographic changes will shift those metro areas even farther toward Democrats. This is a pretty foreign place for Republican candidates now.16
Ruy Teixeira, “Why Democrats Win the Presidency But Lose The House,” Think Progress, May 29, 2013.
Mitt Romney carried the small cities with 55 percent of the vote. He dominated the small and medium-size cities in the Sun Belt, getting about 90 percent of the vote in Provo and above 75 percent in Amarillo, Midland, Abilene, and Wichita Falls. Romney performed well in the smaller, old industrial metropolitan areas. For example, he got about 55 percent of the vote in Dayton, Wheeling, Johnstown, and the Cincinnati metro area. All of those are in the Appalachian, Ohio River, and mining areas on the end of the Border South.17
In the suburbs, Obama won just over half of the vote compared to Romney’s 42 percent, which is a pretty big turn from earlier decades. The transformation of the suburbs is produced by growing diversity as well as the partisan shift toward the Democrats among college-educated white women and professionals.18
The growing metropolitan areas—home to the ascendant trends of America—play a big role in the Democrats’ new national majority. “The average Obama metro was twice as dense as the average Romney metro,” Richard Florida writes, and density is now the highest vote correlation in his model. Another study found that voters living in communities with more than eight hundred people per square mile had a two-thirds chance of voting for Obama, but below that they had a two-thirds chance of voting for Romney. Cities with more college graduates are also more Democratic, but particularly those with concentrations of people working in science and technology, business, health care, education, arts, and entertainment. Obama won more than two-thirds of the vote in the country’s two high-tech centers, the Silicon Valley area and Seattle.19
Presidential election results by county, 2012; U.S. Census Bureau metro statistical areas; “Urban World: Cities and the Rise of the Consuming Class,” McKinsey Global Institute, June 2012.
On the other hand, Romney won 80 percent of those cities with the largest proportions of working-class voters.20
The revolutionary changes captured in the large metro areas are moving states out of their traditional Electoral College column and restricting the national Republican Party. The Washington, D.C.-Arlington-Alexandria metro area gave Obama 64 percent of its votes and also put Democrats in a position to win all of the statewide offices. With the Greater Denver metropolitan area giving Obama 60 percent of the vote and the Greater Las Vegas area 56 percent, both Colorado and Nevada moved into the Democratic column. Colorado’s new residents are twice as likely to hail from blue as red states, and these “blue state expats now make up 12 percent of the population,” according to an Upshot analysis. Blue-state migration is shaping North Carolina at four times the rate of migration from red states, and those blue-state expats now form 16 percent of the state’s population. The metropolitan areas surrounding Charlotte and Atlanta gave Obama 48 percent of the vote, and with high African American turnout, North Carolina has emerged as the surprising front line in the presidential battleground, and Georgia may not be far behind.21
The close U.S. Senate races in Virginia and North Carolina and the not-so-close one in Georgia in 2014 are part of another story I will describe below. The metropolitan revolution will continue to disrupt the political landscape.
THE DAMAGED BRAND
The Republican Party has emerged with a very damaged brand, defined by its reaction to the ascendant trends and the struggle over American values. Almost seven in ten Americans think the Republican Party has “strong views on right and
wrong,” and 45 percent say it “shares [their] values.” Yet only about 40 percent think the GOP is “open to different kinds of Americans,” and less than 30 percent believe it is “open to change.” Solid majorities say the party is “out of touch,” “too extreme in their views,” “force[s] their moral beliefs onto others,” and “divide[s] the country.”22
America has watched the national dysfunction and lack of attention to the country’s problems, and they have thrown up their hands, incredulous that anything can happen to make progress in the world of politics. But if one looks at the line representing the thermometer ratings about the parties and their leaders over the past four years, it is hard not to be stunned by the dramatic fall in feelings for the Republican Party, led by distaste for the Republicans in Congress. They have both hit low points for our modern political parties.
The brand deteriorated soon after the Tea Party Republicans took control of the Congress, and over the past two years the Republican Party and the Republicans in Congress have reached a nadir with the public. And as the party begins a new presidential election cycle, just 42 percent view the party favorably. Even fewer, 40 percent, have warm feelings for the Republicans in Congress and only 33 percent say they identify as Republicans.23
National survey of 950 respondents and an oversample of 760 Republicans, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Democracy Corps’ Republican Party Project, July 10-15, 2013.
As the country watched the new Republican Congress at work and an unending wave of Republican presidential prospects announced their candidacies, the country became even more settled in their contempt for the Republicans and the Democrats’ advantage only grew. In the April 2015 Bloomberg Politics poll, just 38 percent expressed a favorable view of the Republican Party—with negative judgments far outdistancing the positive by 15 points. At the same time, a near majority of 48 percent offered a positive view of the Democrats. The regard for “Republicans in Congress” had hit historic lows. And by the summer, Democrats had settled into a 9- or 10-point advantage in party identification, which they have largely held since 2010.24
America Ascendant Page 23
