Sound the Death-Knell for Dixie (Part One)

Media are speculating about whether or not Barack Obama's electoral landslide represents a reconfiguration of voting alliances and the redrawing of the national political map. Is Obama's victory the end of the era of Culture War-besotted politics ushered in by Nixon's appeals to "the silent majority" (i.e. racists)? Have electoral demographics shifted such that we are putting behind us the politics of fear, hate and neo-McCarthyism behind?

Much has been made of the swift rise in populations within the ranks of the cosmopolitan, professional class in the large cities and suburbs in the Southeast and West. This population boom, combined with Obama's unprecedentedly robust ground game, are said in varying degrees to account for Obama's victories in formerly Republican-voting states like Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, New Mexico, and even in states in which Obama failed to prevail, yet was surprisingly competitive, like South Carolina and Georgia.

(Map credit: FiveThirtyEight.com [updated 11/8/08])

To be sure, there are innumerable other factors, including strong turnouts -- and strong support for Obama -- among young voters, first-time registrants and, of course, voters of color. In the latter group, we mustn't neglect to include Hispanic populations, which voted to an unprecedented extent overwhelmingly Dem. (The GOP repelled these voters with its shrill anti-immigrant turn...a hard line to which McCain eventually -- and famously -- caved.) And no doubt high turnout among black voters helped Obama pull off the feat of prevailing in the state of Indiana: something that no Democratic presidential candidate had done previously.....that is, since Lyndon Baines Johnson's resounding defeat of Barry "Crazy, Nuke-loving Cracker" Goldwater in 1964.

We'll continue discussing LBJ in Part Two of this post. But first, let's return to the demographics of Obama's victory. Crucially, Obama outperformed preceding Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and Al Gore in his support from among white male voters. Politico:

Obama performed slightly worse with white women, 39 percent of voters, than Al Gore did in 2000. McCain won the votes of white women, 53 to 46 percent, perhaps an indication of the historical [sic] candidacy of his running mate, Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska.

Obama compensated for the drop-off in white female support with the strong 41 percent support from white men. No Democrat since Carter had until Tuesday’s election earned more than 38 percent of the white male vote.

In 2000, white women split between the two parties while Republicans won white men by 24 percentage points. That white male gap was dramatically narrowed Tuesday to 16 points, a trend that began with the financial crisis, and one that allowed Obama to split the male vote overall. (Rest of the article.)

In other words, fears expressed among many in the chattering caste of the "Bradley effect" -- wherein there exists a disparity between how voters said they would vote and how they in fact did vote -- appear not only to have been misplaced, but at times reflected the reverse of what ended up occurring. In fact, in Ohio and Pennsylvania -- Obama was much more successful at capturing the white vote than any polls had indicated. Overall,

Mr. Obama lost white voters by 12 points, but that is the same margin Al Gore lost them by in 2000 and better than the 17-point margin John Kerry lost them by in 2004. (New York Times; here's the full article.)

And remember, we're talking about percentages here, not raw numbers. The expansion in nationwide participation that characterized the 2004 election, and again the 2008 election, means that by definition, the head count of Obama's support among these voters exceeds Gore's.

Where and who are these white men that are switching to the Dems? Well, the speculation to which my opening paragraph refers is in fact mostly correct. The Republicans are losing suburban and, as it were, 'ex'-urban (far-out suburbs [not 'far-out' in the psychedelic sense, but rather in the boondocky one-way-ticket-on-the-bridge-to-nowhere sense]). This trend is striking both in the newly blue states I mentioned above and in historically Democratic-yet-conservative states like Pennsylvania and Ohio.

This Washington Post piece is worth quoting at length:

Nothing demonstrates this reversal as clearly as the Democrats' ascendance in the suburbs and among the moderate, college-educated voters who dominate them. Obama won 50 percent of suburban voters, three points higher than Sen. John F. Kerry's showing in 2004 and the most by a Democrat since exit polling began in 1972, swelling his margins in a number of battleground states.

In Virginia, Obama offset losses in the rural parts of the state by not only winning Fairfax County, as Kerry did, but also the big outer suburbs of Prince William and Loudoun counties, home to many high-tech workers and government contractors. Obama visited Prince William County, which has been hit hard by the real estate bust, on the first day of his general-election campaign and the last, as well as in between. He also easily won the big Richmond suburb of Henrico County, a largely white community that Republicans had sewed up for years.

In Pennsylvania, Obama fared worse than Kerry in many steel towns around Pittsburgh. But he ran up such big margins in the formerly Republican suburbs of Philadelphia that he was able to run away with the state, by more than 10 points.

In Colorado, he gained 100,000 votes over Kerry in three big suburban counties outside Denver. In Ohio, he achieved a narrow majority in part by reducing the Republicans' margins of victory in the outer suburbs of Columbus and Cincinnati.

In Florida, he won partly by improving on Kerry's numbers among suburban voters in the Interstate 4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando and in Indiana and North Carolina, his showing with suburban voters improved by about 20 points in each state, far exceeding his gain among rural voters. Obama nearly carried the most iconic Republican suburb of all, Orange County in Southern California.

And what do these Democratic inroads in the nation's suburbs add up to for the Republicans, who'd formerly relied upon these politically moderate and economically middle-class voters to shore up their "fear of terrorism" vote and their "we're afraid of taxes" vote? Remember that even four years ago, George W. Bush continued to enjoy broad support from voters in those electoral districts. Apparently, the economic meltdown and Bush's continued neocon foreign policy shenanigans finally started to piss these people off. And good for them, say I, for articulating their displeasure.

But where did that leave McCain? Toward what audience was the fractured, intellectually and ideologically barren Republican Party of John McCain to aim its mouth-breather rhetoric and robo-calls? The Post article lays it out, and the brutal facts ain't pretty:

The Democrats appear to have built a majority across a wide, and expanding, share of the electorate -- young voters, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities, and highly educated whites in growing metropolitan areas. The Republicans appear at the moment to be marginalized, hanging on to a coalition that may shrink with time -- older, working-class and rural white voters, increasingly concentrated in the Deep South, the Great Plains and Appalachia.

That McCain (and Palin) embraced demagogic tactics, race-baiting and condescending, cynical fear-mongering wasn't -- as we all know -- an accident. The traditional GOP playbook insists that the candidate must first and foremost flatter its intended audience. And you can't flatter an audience on any but that audience's terms, irrespective of its median IQ.

As sure as eggs is eggs, you can't count on their vote unless you give 'em what they want. And if that group of voters tends to be rural, uneducated, racist, and excruciatingly provincial, well Sir, ya gotta serve up some good old-fashioned deep-fried nuggets of HATE. That's when you get all of the the Bill Ayers shit. And you know, calling people socialists and terrorists and such.

I will comment on this dynamic more fully in Part Two of this post, wherein I shall explore the Republicans' ineffective stab at creating an electoral majority out of these barely conscious redneck hordes, this strategy's rhetoric, and its persisting dialectic between "cosmopolitan snobs" and "real folks." (I shall argue that this dialectic constitutes little more than a half-baked update of the rhetoric and ideology of the secessionist -- and subsequently, segregationist, and eventually "Dixiecrat" -- South.)

One last point should be made before I conclude Part One. Although Obama's white support -- and particularly white male support -- was considerably weaker in the deep segregationist South, which is and was to be expected, Obama didn't perform all that badly among rural and blue-collar voters in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio; including in areas that are known to include communities infamous for their entrenched racism.

For example, there is much encouragement to be found in the strong support among union workers enjoyed by Obama in many battleground states. The AFL-CIO provided "key support" in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and even ratcheted up its efforts to get out the union vote in Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, according to this report:

Union voters played an important role in President-elect Obama's historic victory, delivering a critical bloc of support in swing states that helped propel Obama and other working family candidates to big wins last night, election-night polling released by the AFL-CIO today showed. Calling the victory in the presidential race and the expansion of majorities in the House and Senate a working families' mandate for broad-based economic change, AFL-CIO leaders vowed to continue the large-scale mobilization to push through broad economic reform....

...AFL-CIO union members across battleground states supported Obama by a whopping 68-30 margin, according to an election night survey conducted for the AFL-CIO by Peter D. Hart Research Associates....

So, although Obama's victories in these states had their foundation partly in his newly robust support among suburbanites, we cannot discount the impact of this refreshingly effective union activity, which anecdotal reports in Ohio and Pennsylvania declare to have actually changed the hearts and minds -- and raised the political consciousness of -- many white blue-collar workers who'd not initially been of the mind to countenance the presidency of someone named Barack Hussein Obama. That's very exciting, says me. Makes my bleeding heart bleed all the more.

I conclude Part One of this discussion with a sample of data appearing in this article on the impact of union voting initiatives:

• Obama won among white men who are union members by 18 points while losing that group by 16 points in the general public;
• Obama won among union gun owners by a 12-point margin while losing that group in the general public by 25 points;
• Union veterans voted for Obama by a 25-point margin. He lost among that group in the general public by nine points;
• Working America members voted 67-30 for Obama. Working America gun owners (33% own guns) voted 23 points for Obama; general public gun owners voted 25 points for McCain;
• Sixty percent of union members identified the economy and jobs as their top issue with 84 percent saying strengthening the economy was the most important factor in their vote.....