Fear and Loathing in the Electorate

Emory University Political Scientist Alan Abramowitz has written with Steven Webster an article suggesting that what they call "negative partisanship" is reshaping the attitudes of the American electorate.

 

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.

 

The Washington Post sums up the findings thusly,

 

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

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