Election Geography 2008

For the past eight years our politics has been riven by the red versus blue state narrative. While the popular media cast red versus blue as a culture war rooted in the ‘60s, subsequent research shows our divisions have much to do with geography. As Obama and McCain distance themselves from partisan stereotypes, many hope the upcoming election will break this pattern, but recent primary results should give us pause. (We should note that explaining overall election results is different than explaining geographic patterns. For instance, all women voters could vote the same and since women voters are a majority of the electorate, that would explain how their candidate won. But since women are fairly evenly distributed across the population, no geographic pattern would emerge.)

Our political geography has been deciphered by several studies by the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, political scientist James Gimpel with The Christian Science Monitor’s Patchwork Nation website, and journalist Bill Bishop in his book titled, The Big Sort. All these studies show how the basic divisions plays out among urban, rural, and suburban communities. The best way to examine this phenomenon is with census demographic data by county.

The following table shows how presidential voting in 2000 and 2004 broke down by county characteristics. The relevant county data include population per sq. mi., median family income, share of married households, share of female heads-of-household, as well as shares of white and black households.


Regression analysis confirms that population density and marriage status explain most of the differences in voting patterns. One might guess that race was a more significant factor, but female heads-of-household and black households were very highly correlated—at .81, where 1.0 is perfect correlation—and female heads-of-household dominated the racial factor.


Fast forward to 2008 and this is where it gets interesting. We apply this same methodology to recent hotly contested Democratic primaries and what we discover about how different communities voted may surprise those banking on a new post-partisan geography.

The following table displays the county profiles of three state primaries in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana compared to the national profile. Amazingly, these 259 counties offer almost a perfect demographic sample for the total set of the nation’s counties, so these three primaries taken together offer a good proxy for the national profile.


Comparing the primary results for these three states to the election results for the same counties in 2000 and 2004, yields the following results.


We see that the voters in these three states’ counties voted in a distinct red vs. blue pattern. Counties that voted for Obama align closely with those who voted for Gore and Kerry and those that voted for Clinton align almost perfectly with Bush. But remember, all these voters were Democrats! So partisanship has been taken out of the equation and what we’re left with is political preference based upon lifestyle, economic, and community interests.

Regression results are a bit more mixed for these votes because of how identity groups voted. For example, black households and female heads-of-household were even more highly correlated (.9), but black women tended to vote for Obama and white women tended to vote for Clinton. In general, exit polls confirmed that urban, black and college-educated voters favored Obama while older women, suburban and rural, working class whites favored Clinton.

Unless something else changes, the upcoming presidential campaign’s increased ideological rhetoric will likely push voters toward their communal red vs. blue comfort zones. It’s doubtful the personal strengths and campaign strategies of McCain and Obama will be enough to overcome this. Rather, campaign incentives to win at any cost will probably seek to exploit it.

Can Wikis Save Democracy?

Recent polls show President Bush's approval ratings are languishing at a historic low. The only thing worse is the all-time low approval ratings for that wild and crazy gang over on Capitol Hill. Their approval ratings are 10 points lower! Only 16% of those polled say the country is moving in the right direction.
Have we lost all faith in our democracy? Have we decided that no matter who runs things they're going to run them into the ground? The dissatisfaction with our government institutions has reached a nadir (and I don't mean Ralph Nader either). Perhaps there's some audacity for hope (and I don't mean Barack's either).

Our problems of creating a government by the people and for the people may be solved by social network power and a little idea called a wiki. You know, like Wikipedia.

What is a Wiki?

A wiki is an Internet-based technology that enables mass collaboration among peers. It's a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. Some defining features:
• A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons.
• Wiki promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page link creation almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.
• A wiki is not a carefully-crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the website landscape.

Advantages of Wikis

1. Low cost organization – free software and hosting
2. Enables mass collaboration – ground-up creation process
3. Open participation  sense of ownership and control over product
4. Easy to make and correct mistakes
5. Converges solutions: thesisantithesissynthesis
6. Solves collective action problems by reducing costs and raising benefits of participation
7. Integrates ideas across many levels and issues
8. Promotes public goods public commons
9. Many-to-many network
10. Favors populism over elitism by offsetting organizational power, money and fame.
11. Power and control resides with the users, i.e., not the elites
12. Saves history of changes, reversible

Why a Policy Wiki?

A wiki enables mass collaboration among peers by reducing the costs of collaboration and providing the necessary incentives for participation. This changes the costs and benefits of collaboration and facilitates collective action. This is especially significant for the provision of public goods.

Government policy design, implementation and adaptation is a public good that requires mass collaboration of citizens, experts, NGOs, government agencies and those involved in the political process. This collaboration is costly, requiring subsidies from a variety of sources including philanthropic foundations, research and educational institutions, ideological or partisan organizations such as unions, political parties or business organizations, politicians, and bureaucrats. The process is top-down and suffers many disadvantages of institutional dynamics and citizen participation is minimal.

A policy wiki would be bottom-up, virtually cost-free and administered with a minimal of effort. It would be a network of dynamic intelligence integrating many different issues and levels of analysis. A policy wiki would not be a forum for partisan propagandizing. It could engage the public in a much more direct and effective way than traditional methods of political activism or writing to one’s congressperson. The wiki would link local, state and federal levels of policy so that users could quickly locate the specific issue they wish to address. In a sense, the wiki would be like a local to national community bulletin board that constantly informs and adapts. Most critical, a policy wiki would be productive by converging on solutions rather than splintering policy debates into various opposing camps.

Two Parties Too Few?

In a Townhall article today Michael Medved argues against the idea of third parties in our two-party political system (article here).

The reader comments posted reveal how little people understand the two-party system and what trade-offs are involved compared to other possible party systems. First, there is the context. The USA is not Switzerland, France or Germany. National scale matters. The USA is also much more ethnically and culturally diverse than nations like Germany, France, Japan, India or China. The plurality of interests that make up American society means possible political differences are significantly greater and this has implications for how the political system arrives at single national policy outcomes. (Think about the red-blue divide we currently experience? Would a multi-colored rainbow divide be better?)

A second major assumption is what we wish a party system to do - what is the main objective. Public comments suggest that the primary objective is to validate individual voters preferences and reward their participation. But is this really the primary objective? Is not the primary objective to govern a free democratic society in a way that strengthens the nation to insure those constitutional principles under which we choose to live together? Our elections are not about making voters happy - it's about finding candidates that can represent and lead the entire nation, from sea to shining sea.

The third caveat is how the party system is a function of the electoral rules. We have a two-party system by design with an electoral system based on single-district, simple plurality, winner-take-all rules. This means the election strategy is to capture the middle where one can win a simple plurality of the votes. This election strategy forces candidates and parties towards the center where only two parties can be left or right of each other. A third party would have to frog leap over one of the two parties to capture the necessary votes to prevail. To make third parties viable over the long term would require changing the electoral rules.

Under these three conditions, a two-party system provides the best of all worlds or, if one chooses the glass half-empty attitude, the least of all evils among alternative electoral systems. A two-party system forces a highly diverse polity to converge on an acceptable policy. It forces the extremes to move toward compromise at the center. In contrast, a multi-party system allows interests to diverge into many small camps where compromise becomes impossible. Then the government must be stitched together from many small coalitions that have failed to compromise over policy. It's a recipe for chronic instability, as one can witness in countries with proportional representation and multi-party coalition governments.

So, what does this mean for third parties? The system is not static, and one of the two major parties can fail and be replaced by a third party. If Obama loses in November one might expect the Democratic party to split and dissolve, where the centrist Democrats would repudiate the left wing radicals and vice versa. If the Republicans lose one could expect the same split unless the party recalibrates its ideological identity. But absent an abject failure and collapse of one of the two parties, there is no real need or benefit from a third-party movement in American politics. There are many other ways to fiddle with electoral processes to introduce more choice, like instant run-offs or weighted preferences, but the point is still to converge on one candidate with a national mandate. The party system doesn't exist for the happiness and satisfaction of we voters. Time we got over it.

No We Can't?

Dan Henninger cites the example of the WTC 9/11 site in NYC to show how dysfunctional our self-validating democratic politics has become (article here). He writes:

Given a choice between unity and politics, we chose the indulgent pleasures of politics.

...as a case study of system malfunction, the Port Authority report on unbuilt Ground Zero is a warning shot to our acrimonious national politics. A can-do tradition is losing ground to can't-possibly-do. Barack Obama's appeal rests heavily on the belief that he'll bring back can-do. He's one man. The answer lies deeper, with a people who have to choose between politics that moves its system forward or a politics that just wants to have fun.

This is what this blog and the companion website are all about. The self-indulgence of our politics has cost us dearly and will continue to until we, the voters, choose otherwise. There are two additional resources I recommend to readers to delve past the nonsense about how we vote: Bill Bishop's book The Big Sort and this new website I've added to my blogroll: New Geography.
Drop your biases and explore...

Confidence Lost

Take a look at this chart from Gallup on confidence in US institutions:



You can read the Gallup report on this poll here.

But let's think about what this poll is telling us. Interestingly, the military, most small business, the police and the Church are tightly controlled hierarchical organizations - in other words they are not democratic. The perception of trust and confidence tells us that people think these non-democratic organizations work pretty well.

Now let's look at the bottom: Congress at 12% is now considered the most ineffective institution in American society. And yet it's supposed to represent our democracy. Not such a good sign, do ya' think?

Look at the media - down there below our poor beleaguered president. Now that's a slap in the face. Organized labor and the justice system? Regulated HMOs? Ouch. This tells me our "liberal" institutions are hurting real bad in terms of public confidence. Perhaps we can blame this on the Bush presidency, but somehow that explanation doesn't appear to account for enough. It seems more likely we're having a problem with the self-regulation of our public institutions. The public--which these institutions are supposed to serve--see the politicians, CEOs, labor leaders, judges and bankers as part of the problem rather than the solution.

What's the solution? I'd guess something like citizen wikis. I recently read up on wikis and though their application to private goods and business seems very limited, their real value lies in the provision of public goods. Think about Wikipedia and how it may become the repository of all knowledge that dwarfs the great universities and libraries of the past. Wikipedia is still fairly unreliable, but the process by which it grows is self-correcting and thus the knowledge base is constantly becoming more accurate and valuable. Think of applying this to public institutions where information flows from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Perhaps this is the way we can make public institutions work for the people they're meant to serve.

I think Obama is hip to the power of the network and he may ride that network power to the presidency. But it doesn't really matter whether it's President McCain or Obama because citizen wikis could render the power hierarchies superfluous and purely symbolic, and that includes the presidency and the Congress. Think the royal family in Britain.

It's Not Just Ignorant Voters

It was an interesting coincidence that the day I finished reading a new book a publisher had sent me gratis, I picked up this week’s copy of USNWR and found an article summarizing that book’s argument with an interview from the author. (See here) Such serendipity demands affirmation, and so I comment.

I found Mr. Shenkman’s book engaging, quite succinct and convincing in its general parameters. He documents well the failures of our society reflected in the public’s selected awareness of politics. These include the failures of an educational system to teach, and students to learn, fundamental civics and how our republic functions. One must assume this also includes the history of our civic institutions and a wide range of current events beyond Lindsey and Britney.

A second factor he cites is the role of the media in all this – both print media and television. We may be able to correct the educational deficiencies, but we’ll have to learn how best to manage the effects of media technology and entertainment because it’s not going back in Pandora’s box. Media is entertainment is drama is simple conflict. If news people want to be taken for something of greater consequence they must learn to distinguish between reporting the facts and interpreting events. The first is reportage, the second is commentary.

However, I do believe Mr. Shenkman’s story then begins to veer into murkier waters. First off, his example of the public’s knowledge of the Iraq war as a sign of stupidity is fatuous. I daresay none of us know very well what is going on in the Middle East beyond what we see on TV and read in the headline news. Our foreign policy is run by a small cadre of Washington elites that include the Department of State, the DoD, the military corps, and the presidency and cabinet, with oversight by both houses of Congress. Even well educated political professionals must evaluate this information against their pre-ordained mental frameworks.

What Mr. Shenkman attributes to stupidity on WMDs is in fact a loss of confidence and trust in the media and the political establishment. Because both parties have politicized Iraq, the public has decided to believe what confirms prior beliefs and disbelieve whatever contradicts those priors. So, anti-war groups refuse to believe reports from General Petraeus or the administration and hawks refuse to give credence to reports from the NY Times, Washington Democrats or the Iraq Survey Group. This loss of trust is not stupidity; for the average voter it’s a lesson well learned.

Mr. Shenkman should be castigating a news media that has politicized reporting and misinformed to the point where everybody chooses to believe whatever they want. The tarnished reputation of the NY Times is the most serious casualty here. Next, Mr. Shenkman should train his sights on the educational establishment that has elevated political correctness over truth and self-criticism. We have let ourselves become defined by our racial, ethnic and sexual identities and this has poisoned our politics. The major political parties have been front and center on this and the Democrats can shoulder much of the blame for stitching together a coalition based on race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. This has yielded the red vs. blue subculture nonsense that now defines our politics. If we vote our immutable identities, how can we possibly compromise?

There is no indication in the current election cycle that voters are ready to discard this self-defeating calculus. In fact, Democratic primary voters divided themselves up, with the eager prompting of both Clinton and Obama, into camps of red v. blue conflict with nary a Republican operative in sight. It was working class whites, women and Hispanics against blacks, academic and urban elites. In this sense, we voters are stupid to allow our identities to cast our votes. This is the change we should demand of ourselves, but one that neither Obama nor McCain can deliver.

My last quibble is with Mr. Shenkman’s idea that to correct our politics we must strengthen labor unions. Huh? In an information economy that is becoming highly entrepreneurial and fluid, it makes absolutely no sense to focus on peak labor organizations. I can only think this is nostalgia for a New Deal past talking. Both manufacturing’s share of national employment and union participation rates are approaching the low teens as a percentage of the labor force. Why should we focus our national attention on such a rapidly shrinking share of the population?

Unions have a positive role, but in developed countries this role should be focused on securing equity participation for its members, not restricting the supply of labor to increase bargaining power. Let organization membership drives and the empowerment of labor versus capital migrate to developing countries, but foreign worker unionization can hardly be a high priority for smart American voters.

I found it unfortunate that Mr. Shenkman’s argument is a bit tainted by a left liberal bias because it will diminish serious consideration by those who disagree. This does not mean I believe Mr. Shenkman is a rank partisan or that he is trying to slip a liberal screed by us. I take Mr. Shenkman at his word concerning objective intent, but we should recognize that those of us who live in professional, academic and urban enclaves tend to view the world through a narrow self-referential prism. Toleration, diversity, negotiation, privacy, civil rights, government regulation, etc. all appear inherent to our chosen lifestyle preferences and we view those ideals as the American norm. Thus, they appear eminently reasonable and centrist, certainly not biased. With this mindset liberals appear mainstream, conservatives appear out-of-sync, and the NY Times appears as the epitome of right reason.

However, US electoral politics have been divided up according to rural, suburban and urban interests and the parties have targeted their appeals to these different segments. I would recommend a book by Bill Bishop titled The Big Sort that explains how this political geography has happened. It is important for any serious student of American politics to understand the grassroots details of American voting patterns and the complexion of political tradition and not rely on the NY Times or Fox News to interpret it.

Instead of liberal-conservative, Democrat-Republican, red-blue, I prefer to classify the dominant political ideology in America as what I would call “tolerant traditionalism.” It’s a less charged conceptualization that captures the vast crossover territory between the two extremes and thus becomes more useful to understanding our varied political preferences.

Another caveat is that opinion polls and sampling never reveal a truth as accurate as what people do, rather than say. Voting is hard data, polling is soft data; when they disagree the hard data wins.

Does the "liberal" message really play?

Here's a very interesting post from the WSJ's political blog that outlines the ideological path our politics has taken over the last 40 years: "Is the Democrats' Message Flawed?".

Peter Brown argues:

After the 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 elections, Democratic leaders argued that the American people had not rejected their ideas or governing philosophy. Instead, they said, their nominee had not effectively communicated the party’s core message. It wasn’t the American people rejecting those views and values, they contended.

Whether that was an accurate reading of the electorate or a self-serving analysis by the party’s elites, it has made wonderful cocktail party fodder for years. But it has also been used as a rationale by those who didn’t see the string of defeats as a call to retool the party’s message.

My own studied view is that the liberal political agenda has needed retooling for a generation, but the true believers who cling to an updated version of FDR's New Deal coalition refuse to accept the lesson of lost elections. Republicans have been the beneficiaries of this monumental self-referential myopia, but conservatives have also failed to redefine their own agenda in the face of new challenges. (One would hope they will be quicker to respond to electoral defeat. See Paul Ryan's proposals under my "Policy Futures" post.)

You'd think the Obama-McCain choice would resolve the issue once and for all, but I have my doubts. The problem as I see it is that both partisan ideological extremes misinterpret mainstream America. I would say that the average non-partisan voter is neither liberal nor conservative and would eschew those labels for what might be better termed "tolerant traditionalism." But left partisans stereotype the "traditionalism" as ignorance, bigotry or religious fakery, while right partisans stereotype tolerance as licentiousness and moral degeneracy. These stereotypes are inconsistent and rejected by those to whom they are meant to be applied. However, we do have the empirical lessons of dozens and dozens of social and economic policies here and abroad that we can evaluate with objective judgments - it's more revealing when we refuse to accept those judgments.

The reason why this election may not resolve this issue is because Obama might be elected and his policy agenda may fail. McCain may win, and fail as well. Or both candidates may completely bastardize their respective ideological agendas, and succeed or fail on their own. The worst case would be for McCain to win and discredit conservatism, while Democrats lay the blame for electoral failure on racism. Then we'll be back at this same point 4 and 8 years from now, probably having learned nothing new about what we believe politically.