The paper is filled with
interesting findings, but the major one is an attempt to resolve a paradox.
Measured by self-identification, partisanship is actually declining - growing
numbers of Americans describe themselves as "independent" rather than
loyal to one of the parties. But measured by actual voting behavior, the
opposite is happening: Straight ticket voting continues to grow. This matches
what operatives like Dan Pfeiffer have seen, and what Karl Rove saw a decade before - the swing voter had nearly
vanished.
One common explanation
is that it has become increasingly vogue, especially among college-educated
voters, to describe yourself as independent, which implies that you form
educated judgments about politics rather than blindly following the dictates of
a party. Abramowitz and Webster add to this by introducing a phenomenon they
call negative partisanship. That is to say, voters form strong loyalties
based more on loathing for the opposing party than on the old kind of tribal
loyalty ("My daddy was a Democrat, his daddy was a Democrat ...")
that used to prevail. The party system has split along racial, cultural, and
religious lines, creating a kind of tribal system where each party's supports
regard the other side with incomprehension and loathing.
Measuring how this new,
negative partisanship has changed presidential politics is hard because only a
handful of presidential elections have taken place in the polarized era. It's
easier to measure the impact at the Congressional level, though, since the data
set is much larger. And the impact is absolutely transformative.
As split ticket voting
has disappeared, House races have become almost perfect reflections of their
districts' presidential votes. As Abramowitz and Webster write, "the
correlation between the Democratic share of the House vote and the Democratic
share of the presidential vote in districts with contested races averaged .54
between 1972 and 1980, .65 between 1982 and 1990, .78 between 1992 and 2000,
.83 between 2002 and 2010 and .94 in 2012-2014."
The effect on the Senate
has been even deeper. "The average correlation between the Democratic
share of the presidential vote and the Democratic share of the Senate vote in
states with contested races has risen from .16 between 1972 and 1980 to .25 between
1982 and 1990 to .42 between 1992 and 2000 to .66 between 2002 and 2010 and to
.84 in 2012-2014," they write. "This means that, in terms of shared
variance, the relationship is now more than four times stronger than it was
during the 1990s and more than 27 times stronger than it was during the
1970s."
In this trench-warfare
atmosphere, the fact that the bloc of voters loyal to the Democrats is growing
steadily would seem to loom large. It is surely true that eventually, the
alignment of the two parties will change, either because the Republicans move
to the center or the Democrats move away from it. It is also probably true that
the Democratic advantage is narrow enough that a major short-term event, like a
recession or a huge scandal, could disrupt it. But the understandable reliance
on the models of the past, and the assumption that nothing ever changes, may be
missing the fact that something very important has.
Racial, cultural and
economic attitudes have contributed to the political separation of the
population. Republicans are more conservative than they were in the past while
Democrats are more liberal. The result, Abramowitz and Webster write, is that
there has been "a very large increase in the ideological distance between
supporters of the two parties" - more than a doubling in the past four
decades.
The larger this gap has
become, the more that partisans on each side see important differences between
the major parties. And seemingly, the more they see those differences, the less
they are likely to vote for a candidate from the other party - despite a rise
in the percentage of people who call themselves independent or who register
with no party affiliation.
Presidentially,
Democrats enjoy an advantage in the electoral college arithmetic. Their
electoral foundation, based on the past half-dozen elections, is bigger than that
of the Republicans - although certainly not insurmountable.
Democratic-leaning states are more likely to
elect Democratic Senate candidates than they once were, and Republican-leaning
states are more likely to elect Republican Senate candidates. Last November,
according to the authors, the "advantaged party" won 33 of 36 Senate
races.
Source:
Georgia Pundit 4/30/15
Comments
The
ideological polarization between the parties has existed for a long time. It
peaked with FDR in the 1930s to the horror of conservatives and again with
Reagan in 1980 to the horror of liberals and again with Obama in 2008 to the
horror of conservatives. The establishment media began to withhold news during
World War II for good reasons, but continued to withhold the news due to
liberal infiltration. Talk radio in the 1980s and the internet in the 1990s
replaced the establishment media to the benefit of conservatives.
The
Left took advantage of Bush I and Bush II and managed to set the mortgaged-back
securities meltdown in 2008, giving the Democrats the edge in the 2008 election
of Obama. There is not good answer for why Republicans failed to retake the
Whitehouse in 2012, except for Romney’s bad campaign and voter fraud.
Sub-grouping
has enabled Democrats to bring what we now call RINOs to vote with them when
Democrat “hawks” pair up with RINO “hawks: to push military spending, foreign
aid and deployment. Neither are fiscal “hawks”, so they spend whatever they can
and horse trade with other Democrats to sell votes for welfare increases in
exchange for Democrat support.
The
pendulum swing back to the Right occurred in the 2010 and 2014 Congressional
elections, but Liberal Republicans are in charge, so the votes look like the
Democrats are still in charge. The only answer to why this is happening is
MONEY. For some reason the MONEY groups
want these bills to continue to support UN Agenda 21 implementation including
excessive immigration, suicidal federal spending and high real unemployment at
40% with 93 million working-age US citizens without jobs. To make things worse,
it looks like they also want Iran to have THE BOMB, sovereign suicide with the
PPT and a halt to whatever real Republicans campaigned that they would do.
Voters can trump MONEY, but they have to do the research and get out to vote.
Hopefully, this will happen in 2016.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment