John Judis, co-author of the 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, now says that majority has come and gone. That’s the thesis of his important National Journal article “The Emerging Republican Advantage.” I reviewed Judis’s book, co-authored by Ruy Teixeira, when it came out in 2002 — an unfortunate moment, as I noted, for their thesis, since it was a pretty good Republican year. But I also took it seriously and in time, in the 2006 and 2008 elections, its thesis seemed vindicated. Democrats won those elections with large majorities from blacks, Hispanics (in many states), single women and members of the Millennial generation.
“These advantages remain partially in place for Democrats today,” Judis now writes, “but they are being severely undermined by two trends that have emerged in the past few elections.” One, which he considers not so surprising, is that “Democrats have continued to hemorrhage support among white working class voters” — a declining share of the electorate, as he notes, but still a significant one. The Republican trend he finds surprising is among what he calls “middle-class Americans” in “the office economy” or, to put it in exit poll terms, college but not post-college graduates with household incomes between $50,000 and $100,000. Judis backs this up with a close look at exit polls and voting data and with interviews of middle class voters in Maryland where, to his surprise and mine, Republican Larry Hogan beat Democrat Anthony Brown for governor in a state that voted 62 percent for President Obama in 2012.
All of this echoes some points I have been making. Democratic and Obama support has declined from his sky-high 2008 percentages among Millennials (66 percent) and Hispanics (67 percent). Analysts like Ronald Brownstein have conflated blacks, Hispanics and Asians as “non-whites” and have argued that their inevitably increasing percentage of the electorates meant that we were headed for something like a permanent majority: an argument also advanced in the 2002 book. I have argued that Hispanics and Asians have entirely different heritages and sets of experiences from blacks and also that they are considerably less Democratic than black voters and that the “non-white” classification is misleading, since both of these growing groups have been voting considerably less Democratic and less reliably Democratic than blacks, whose numbers are not increasing significantly as a share of the voting population. It’s not inevitable that the “non-white” vote will always remain as Democratic as it was in 2008.
Similarly the Millennials. In 2008 their margin for Obama over John McCain amounted to 7 percent of the total electorate — almost exactly Obama’s margin nationwide. In the 2014 exit poll under-30s margin for House Democrats over House Republicans amounted to 1.5 percent of the total electorate. You don’t dominate American politics forever because one demographic group favors you by that amount.
Judis notes these things as well, but he concentrates on groups of white voters and provides some thorough and serious analysis of how they are abandoning Democrats. He notes that the Obama Democrats’ big government policies have repelled more than attracted white working class voters and that the increased taxes imposed by Democrats like former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley have repelled the segment of middle class whites he is examining — people he sees as “not driven by any racial animus” (contrary to what some liberal analysts argue) and as “socially liberal.” In other words, while cultural issues make them open or even favorable to Democrats, economic issues are driving them away.
This looks a lot like the politics of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan won a never-since-duplicated landslide and in which George H. W. Bush was elected in 1988 by a percentage margin not matched since, though approached by Barack Obama in 2008. With big margins in the suburbs, Bush in 1988 carried metro Boston, metro New York, metro Philadelphia, metro Cleveland, metro Detroit, metro Chicago and metro Los Angeles — something no Republican has come close to doing since. For a decade or so I have been looking for evidence that big government policies with attendant high taxes would help Republicans gain ground in affluent suburbs, and have not found much. Judis sets out quite a bit more.
“None of this is to suggest that America is headed toward an era of Republican domination,” Judis writes, and I agree. As Sean Trende argues in his book The Lost Majority, there really aren’t any enduring partisan majorities in American politics, or at least haven’t been any for a very long time. When you look at the supposed Democratic dominance period of 1932-68, for example, you find Republicans winning the presidency twice, coming exceedingly close a third time in 1960 and losing two presidential elections in wartime, 1940 and 1944, to a seasoned national leader; and you find a conservative coalition controlling both houses of Congress for 20 years, from 1938 to 1958.
Largely missing from Judis’s otherwise fine article is analysis of public policy. If most voters believed the stimulus package had really stimulated the economy, if they believed that Obamacare would provide real health care security, if they believed that the Obama Democrats’ big government policies were making them and their country better off — why then the Democratic majority that emerged in 2006 and 2008 would have persisted for at least a little longer and Obama might not have been the only president in American history re-elected with a popular vote percentage lower than the one he won four years before. Instead, I think the programs of the Obama Democrats have pushed more Americans to believe that, as I put it in the lead sentence of a Washington Examiner column last May, “Gummit don’t work good.”
Now we see Obama and left-wing Democrats calling for an expansion of government and significantly higher taxes. That, even more than demographics, looks to me like the current emerging Republican advantage.
