America Ascendant

by Stanley B Greenberg

  The number of Americans identifying as “conservative” has dropped 5 points in surveys for Democracy Corps and the NBC/Wall Street Journal in 2015. According to an analysis by the Republican pollster Bill McInturff, conservatives have lost ground with women, young people, Hispanics, the best educated, and voters in the West and the cities. That sounds all too familiar.

  The Republican Party has reached this desperate state primarily because of its lead role in the conservative counterrevolution against America’s modernizing trends. The country has gotten more polarized and the Republicans more despised, however, because of the party’s heated mobilization in off-year elections to keep evil at bay.

  “SHELLACKING, THE SEQUEL”

  The 2010 and 2014 off-year elections produced nearly identical shellackings for Democrats, though as Ron Brownstein observes, that tells you nothing about what will actually happen in the subsequent presidential election. For Brownstein, these off-year routs were produced by the Democrats’ “boom-and-bust coalition of young people and minorities” and unmarried women, and thus they just need to do better with older and working-class voters if Democrats are to win the Congress. That is pretty much right as far as the Democrats go. The party needs to do better with the white working class for sure (and that is discussed below), and they also need their boom-and-bust coalition to be more consistent.25

  One should keep in mind that the coalition of minorities, young people, and unmarried women was in full bloom and did show up to vote in the 2006 off-year elections, motivated by their deep hostility to President George W. Bush and opposition to the Iraq war. They are not just laggards. Those voters need a compelling reason to vote and defend government, and indeed, they were dispirited thinking about President Obama: more than 40 percent of the Democrats’ base voters in 2014 disapproved of how he was doing as president.26

  What Brownstein fails to ask is why Republicans voted in such large numbers in 2010 and 2014. In an election year when voters just hated Washington, the partisan gridlock and the influence of big-money special interests, and in elections where the low turnout was only matched by the off-year election during World War II, Republicans were motivated to vote. The explanation is crucially important if you want to understand the party’s deteriorating brand and diminished presidential prospects.

  As we have seen, these elections were just the next battle in the counterrevolution whose urgency only grows, made more vivid by the prospect of President Barack Obama and subservient Democrats being free to implement Obamacare and give amnesty to illegal immigrants. Republican voters view Democrats ever more negatively and think their governance threatens the future of the country. The trends that are changing the electorate are the reason why the Republican base reacts so strongly and why their motivation to vote in election after election grows. Every election is national.

  In 2010, Republicans won the House in an unexpected landslide, netting sixty-three House seats and winning the national vote by an 8-point margin, nearly replicating the 6-point margin that allowed them to expand their House majority in 2014. What groups voted and in what proportion looked almost identical.27

  So, how did the 2010 election story turn out? Within four months of the Republicans taking control of the Congress, the Republican Party’s image plummeted, led down by the Tea Party Republicans in the House. Fully two-thirds of the country quickly came to disapprove of how the Republicans were handling their job in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives; 48 percent strongly disapproved at the high point. The Republicans’ congressional brand never recovered, and it contaminated the brand of the whole party.28

  In the 2010 off-year landslide, the Republicans took control of the governors’ mansions and state legislatures in the blue states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Pennsylvania, yet none of those states was even competitive in 2012—except perhaps in Mitt Romney’s own campaign polling.

  What do we think will be the tone of the House Republicans and the great majority of Republican U.S. senators after finally winning control of the U.S. Congress? We know from Democracy Corps polling that the great majority of Evangelical and Tea Party Republicans want to start an impeachment inquiry against the president. We know that 64 percent of Republicans hold very negative views about undocumented immigrants and that they are intent on blocking funding for Obama’s efforts to legalize the immigrant “DREAMers.” They are still determined to repeal Obamacare before it is too late.29

  How is the story turning out in 2015? The image of the Republicans in Congress and their leaders has already moved deeply into negative territory. By the time we conducted our first national survey in 2015, Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader McConnell had quickly displaced every other leader in the race for unpopularity. Twice as many voters view them negatively as positively, and the Democratic Party has quickly moved into a 15-point image advantage with the presidential electorate. By June, Democracy Corps polls showed the two Republican congressional leaders at their lowest point since 2008.30

  National survey of 950 likely 2016 voters conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps, January 7–11, 2015.

  In Democracy Corps’ focus groups for Women’s Voices Women’s Vote held in Florida in the spring of 2015, these swing voters were reading the “Republican Congress” very clearly: “They’ll let the country burn to hell if it’s good for the cause”; “I feel they don’t care about the middle class, they only care about the rich”; “If anything, they seem completely closed off, not open minded whatsoever”; “Just the rich getting richer and one-sided agenda.… I’m not in the Republicans’ top demographic.”

  That is before the full cast of Republican presidential candidates joined the debate and began airing their full-throated disdain for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And that is before the Republican presidential primary voters will have their say, as they did in the aftermath of the 2010 midterms. The Republican leaders and the party’s base voters are fully part of a much bigger battle that will play out over the next year.

  And the presidential electorate knows it. On the night of the 2014 midterm elections, we began simultaneous polls with the off-year and presidential-year voters, and the stark results remind you: have some perspective. The bigger dynamics are undiminished. Yes, in the off-year electorate that produced the Republican sweep, Republicans had a 2-point advantage in party identification. But the Democrats enjoyed a 6-point margin in the presidential electorate (48 to 42 percent), and that is everything in this polarized country. The Republicans won the congressional vote by 6 points, but in the presidential electorate, the vote for the House would have been fought to a draw.

  When we asked about a theoretical presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, she trailed him by a point in the off-year electorate that just voted. However, in the presidential electorate that matters for the future, she was winning by 7 points—almost twice Obama’s healthy margin in 2012. And when Democracy Corps conducted its first national survey of likely presidential voters in January 2016, she was beating Romney by about the same margin, though in a theoretical race against Jeb Bush, she extended her winning margin to 12 points (52 to 40 percent). She continued to hold about an 8-point lead in Democracy Corps’ June survey against either Scott Walker or Marco Rubio. Does that qualify as a “shellacking”?31

  National survey of 950 likely 2016 voters conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps, January 7–11, 2015.

  There is every likelihood that this midterm story will turn out with the same ending. The 2014 midterm sweep neither changes the national electorate nor puts the Republican Party on a different trajectory. If anything, it makes this bigger story and battle more vivid.

  BATTLING FROM THE NEW GOP CONSERVATIVE HEARTLAND

  From their base in the South and the Mountain West, conservatives have fervently joined the culture war to reassert endangered values and to oppose new waves of government spending on the social safety net that promises idleness and dependence. A
merica’s civil rights, women’s, immigrant, and gay rights revolutions have fundamentally changed the country, yet they are also still contested and unfinished because of the resilience of Republican leaders and the party battling on from the GOP conservative heartland.

  The Republicans’ political resilience is possible because race and racial identity are a special and enduring force in the South and the Deep South and because of the heightened religious observance of Evangelicals concentrated in border states and the Deep South and among Mormons and others in the Rocky Mountain West. Impressive recent academic research shows the persistence of heightened conservative politics in the previously slaveholding counties of the Black Belt across the Deep South and, as Jonathan Chait underscores in his writing on the Obama presidency, race continues to infuse many contemporary issues, from Obamacare to education spending to unemployment benefits.32

  With race and religion the dominant dynamics in the GOP conservative heartland, virtually all of the other usual demographic lines get blurred. For example, whites in the South—men and women, college and non-college, young and old—all gave President Obama a meager 24 to 30 percent of their votes. That result in the GOP base region reflects their continued battle against the racial and religious trends in the country.33

  The rest of the country is divided by substantial racial, gender, class, and generational gaps. Obama ran 10 points better with white working-class women than with white working-class men nationally, yet there is no gender gap among the white working class in the Republican South: non-college men gave Obama 24 percent of their votes; the women gave him a grudging 26 percent. Obama ran between 12 and 15 points better among white Millennials than among whites of the silent generation in the Northeast and West Coast states and ran 8 points better among white Millennials in the Midwest.

  Self-reported 2012 Presidential vote and 2-3-2 Party ID among white voters, based on 6,054 interviews conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps, July 2013–November 2014.

  Yet white college-educated men and white Millennials across the South and Mountain West gave just 30 percent of their vote to Obama—right at the norm for the white Democratic vote in the GOP conservative heartland. While Millennials nationally continue to surprise everyone with breathtaking changes in attitudes and politics, in the Mountain West, white Millennials gave Obama just 30 percent of their votes, and in the South, they gave Obama even less support.34

  There are cracks in the GOP conservative heartland—led by the modest defection of college-educated white women in the South, who gave Obama 6 points more than the college-educated white men, as well as the college-educated white women in the Mountain West, who gave Obama 12 points more support than the college-educated white men.

  College-educated white women have probably played a role in the growing Democratic support in the growing metropolitan centers at the fringes of the South—in northern Virginia, in Atlanta and Tampa in the Deep South, and in Denver in the heart of the Mountain West. In these cities, and in contrast with the GOP conservative heartland as a whole, there is broad receptivity to racial diversity, immigration, multiculturalism, the pluralism of family types, and the independence of women.35

  In the meantime, the Republicans deepening their support in the most rural and least dense parts of the country and the Democrats growing theirs in the most urban and dense metropolitan areas give the Republican Party a lifeline. That contrast allows them to be overrepresented, even as Republicans lose popularity nationally.

  The Republicans’ overrepresentation is in part the result of the U.S. Constitution, which allots two U.S. senators to each state, regardless of its size. So while Wyomingites make up less than 0.2 percent of the U.S. population, they are afforded the same number of votes in the Senate as the one in eight Americans living in California.

  And while the U.S. Constitution requires that each member represents an equal number of people, the Democrats’ growing concentration in the cities leads to the Democrats being underrepresented in Congress. “In many states, Democrats are inefficiently concentrated in large cities and smaller industrial agglomerations,” political scientists Jowei Chen and Jonathan Rodden point out, so that “they can expect to win fewer than 50 percent of the seats when they win 50 percent of the votes.” Obama won more than 70 percent of the vote in sixty-one House seats while Mitt Romney won that same percentage in only nineteen districts—in some sense “wasting” those voters and margins.36

  Republicans brought it home by winning control of more governorships and legislatures in the 2010 off-year wave elections and by more effectively gerrymandering the drawing of new seats. Independent analysts show Republicans were particularly successful in creating additional Republican seats in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. These district maps will be redrawn in 2021 after the 2020 census though will remain in place through the 2020 presidential election.37

  Law, geography, and intrigue conspired to tilt the playing field in Washington. Democratic House candidates in 2012 received 1.17 million more votes than Republican candidates, yet Republicans held their 33-seat advantage over Democrats in the House. Republicans won 54 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives with only 49 percent of the popular vote.38

  With the stakes so high, Republican leaders did not want to leave these results to chance. Most of the states in this GOP conservative heartland passed new laws to limit voting hours and early-voting days, block voting at universities, and issue new requirements for photo IDs and proof of citizenship.

  Conscious of the stakes, Republican donors, conservative billionaires, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and energy and banking sectors poured money into these off-year and down-ballot races. Again, with the help of the Supreme Court, much of this spending was unlimited by law and unregulated. Conservative Super PACs and unregulated outside groups poured hundreds of millions of dollars of secret money into congressional, U.S. Senate, and state legislative races.39

  This biasing and rigging of the system combined with the mobilization of conservative voters to defend American values to produce electoral earthquakes. That was particularly true in the rural and GOP conservative heartland states.

  Aided by two off-year elections when motivated Republicans turned out in big numbers to fight the national trends, Republicans gained 913 state legislative seats since 2010 and control of 30 state legislative chambers.40

  While Republicans could benefit from these dynamics in any state, nearly half of the state legislatures that moved into the Republican column were in the GOP conservative heartland states.41

  When Senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Kay Hagan of North Carolina lost their seats in the 2014 off-year elections, no Democratic senator remained standing in the old South except in Virginia.

  So the GOP conservative heartland has played an outsized role in allowing Republicans to hold on to power in a lot of states and in Congress.

  Its hold could be loosened if Democrats can win in a wave presidential election in 2016 or 2020—after which new legislative lines are drawn. That could happen as part of the emerging new progressive era. Its hold could be loosened if Democrat voters have a reason to turn out and vote, which is addressed later in this book. The odds would shift if Democrats compete more effectively for white working-class votes. And finally and most important, its hold could be broken if the citizens of these GOP conservative heartland states become discontented with the Republican governing model.

  On that last point, there was plenty of evidence of a growing discontent in these states, but the evidence was scattered to the winds by the Republicans’ success in nationalizing the 2014 elections. Republican governors swept to victory in the 2010 wave and rushed to enact conservative governing programs. They aggressively cut income taxes for the richest and cut taxes on businesses, while cutting funding for public education and reducing the number of teachers. They also went after their bargaining rights while promoting vouchers and charter schools.

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sp; It turns out that the public did not love these policies or the consequences, and Democratic candidates ran competitively during the campaign, attacking the governors and Republican state leaders on their state policies. With the flood of anti-Obama advertising and the consolidation of the Republicans, who remembers? But the discontent was real.

  In Kansas, congressional Republicans had a not-surprising good day, winning their races on average by 27 points. By contrast, Governor Sam Brownback was on the same off-year ballot in this deeply red state, and he won by only 4 points. The same was true in Florida; statewide, the Republican congressional candidates won by an impressive 12 points, yet Governor Rick Scott won by just 1 point. In North Carolina, the congressional Republican candidates had a memorable day in a so-called swing state. They won their races on average by 11 points. Yet Thom Tillis, the Speaker of the House who embraced and enacted the conservative North Carolina program, only managed to squeak by Senator Kay Hagan by 2 points.42

  The doubts about the conservative governing model got lost amid the Republicans’ nationalized elections around Obama, yet the numbers do not lie. Those candidates paid a very big price, though not big enough to lose.

  CAN THE “REAGAN DEMOCRATS” SAVE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?

  Can the “Reagan Democrats” save the Republican Party, as they helped Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party regain its national standing?