Great article. Obama is killing off the Demo party.
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By Sean Trende - September 14, 2011
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Share tweetmeme_style = 'compact'; tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/09/14/new_york_9_and_the_democratic_coalition_111328. Last night, Republican Bob Turner won a surprisingly strong victory in New York's 9th Congressional District. As I noted after the New York-26 special election last May, special elections don't have much predictive power; we can't use this race to forecast the outcome of the 2012 presidential race -- or even whether Republicans will retain their majority in the House. Still, just as the special election in NY-26 can be seen as part of a gradual decline of Republican fortunes in upstate New York, yesterday's results in NY-9 tells us a bit about the state of the Democratic coalition, both in terms of its fading prospects among white voters, and the effects of packing its most reliable voters into a few districts.
To understand what’s going on in New York-9, let’s travel back to 1988. That year, Democrats won only 40 percent of the white vote in this country, en route to an eight-point defeat for their national ticket, headed by Michael Dukakis. Democrats’ losses among whites were broad: Upper-class whites, suburbanites, and even working-class whites voted Republican. The Democrats’ congressional majorities, while large, were also increasingly shaky; as old Southern Democrats retired, they were increasingly being replaced with Republicans.
In 1992, Democrats nominated Bill Clinton for president, who famously professed to be a “new” Democrat. Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it,” while eschewing tax increases for the middle class.
This paid substantial dividends among the white voters with whom Democrats had struggled for almost four decades. While Republicans had won 60 percent or more of the two-party white vote in 1980, 1984 and 1988, Clinton came a point away from being the first Democrat since LBJ to carry whites. It wasn’t just any whites among whom Clinton improved the Democratic vote share. The white working class -- which never fully left the Democratic Party, especially at the congressional level -- warmed toward a candidate who didn’t seem antagonistic to their values, while suburban whites appreciated his fiscal realism.
Clinton repeated the feat in 1996, but afterward, the Democratic performance among whites began to decline. As the party’s nominees became more liberal, the Clinton coalition slowly dissipated. Al Gore won only 44 percent of the two-party vote among whites nationally, while John Kerry won just 41 percent of the white vote. In 2008, for all the hype about Obama’s “broad” coalition, he only won 43 percent of the white vote, about two points better than Kerry. Obama’s win came almost entirely from turning out more minority voters, and doing better among them.
Obama has had problems with working-class whites in particular. Recall that on the eve of the Democratic convention in 2008, McCain was almost even with Obama in the RCP Average. Gallup’s tracking poll -- which had McCain ahead -- showed that Obama’s weakness was largely due to an underperformance in this group. McCain’s lead among high-school-educated whites at that point was 23 points. Among whites with some college, he led by 21 points. After the Republican convention, those numbers were 22 points and 28 points, respectively.
These voters were brought into Obama’s camp only after the financial collapse; by mid-October, McCain led by only six points among those with no college degrees and 11 points among those with some college. This shift allowed Obama to win the election, although by a smaller margin than many expected.
Over the course of Obama’s presidency, it has been more of the same. Consider the following chart:
Obama’s overall weekly job approval is at 41 percent, but it is concentrated heavily among African American adults. To put this in perspective, in Gallup’s October 1994 polling, President Clinton’s job approval was also at 41 percent. Yet his job approval was five points higher among whites (38 percent); his job approval among blacks had sunk to a still-healthy, but not otherworldly, 63 percent. You may say, “That’s only five points' difference,” but it’s a good bet that Weprin wishes Obama’s approval rating had been about five points higher in New York’s 9th district.
This is important because the African American vote is unevenly distributed in our country. Although blacks make up 13 percent of the population according to census figures, African American voters tend to be packed into a few districts. This “packing” has indeed increased the number of African Americans in Congress, but it has come at the expense of having more districts where African American voters have little influence -- about 90 percent of the districts in the nation have African American populations of less than 30 percent, a few points more than was the case in 1970 (despite a two-point increase in the African American share of the population).
Which brings us to NY-9. The following map (courtesy of Dave’s Redistricting Tool) shows precincts in Queens and Brooklyn by race, with New York-9’s outlines superimposed (blue precincts are African American, green are Hispanic, red are white):
As you can see, this is largely a combination of white precincts in central Queens and South Brooklyn. It’s an impressive gerrymander; standing alone, South Brooklyn would be about a 55 percent McCain district, even allowing for some voters in the 13th. It would be easy to make this a Democratic stronghold, but it would come at a cost of jeopardizing minority control of the neighboring districts. Although it is only 62 percent white, it is also only 4 percent black; Latinos and Asians in the district vote less proportionately than their white and African American counterparts.
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Moreover, these are working-class whites; the last of the “Archie Bunkers.” Many of the firefighters and police officers who gave their lives on 9/11 hailed from this district. The median income for the district is about $55,000 a year, which is the lowest of any of the non-majority minority districts in the city area. By contrast, in all four suburban Long Island districts, the median income is around $80,000 a year. Many of the surviving white ethnic communities are in this district; 12 percent of the district still identifies as Italian, 7 percent as Irish.
Estimates of the Jewish population are more difficult to calculate, but Jews probably constitute about 25 percent of the population (and are probably higher as a share of the electorate). While the most heavily Orthodox Jewish communities such as Borough Park (about 70 percent for McCain) are strategically placed in other districts, the Jewish voters here still tend to be more conservative than the Jewish communities around Miami or in Manhattan. Many are Russian immigrants (around 7 percent of the district) who tend to lack affinity for government intervention in the economy. Still, while the Jewish presence is significant, it can’t explain everything that is going on here.
Overall, we can see here a microcosm of the Democrats’ performance among whites, especially working-class whites. The following table shows the Democratic presidential vote in the district over the past few election cycles (the 1988 number is Democratic performance under the 1992 lines; the district’s base partisanship did not change appreciably in the 2000 redistricting), as well as how the Democratic candidate’s performance in the district compared to his share of the national vote:
Democratic performance in the district improved greatly from 1988 to 1992, and continued to improve in the '90s. When Anthony Weiner ran in 1998, after Chuck Schumer vacated the seat to run for Senate, he received 66 percent of the vote there.
Since then, however, there has been a substantial decline in Democratic performance here as the party began to nominate presidential candidates who had more difficulty relating to working-class whites than had Clinton or Gore. Today the district probably leans Democratic at the presidential level by a weaker margin than it has since Watergate. As congressional voting increasingly aligns with presidential voting, this becomes a potential problem for the Democrats. In some respects, this can be seen as a continuation of trends we saw in 2010, when a lot of Democrats in working-class white districts saw their vote shares decline significantly. Many of them survived because they drew weak opponents, and because their vote shares were declining from pretty solid performances in 2008, but for some, including Paul Kanjorski and Jim Oberstar, the decline was career-ending. New York-9 appears to be in this vein.
Again, we have to resist reading too much into a single special election. There won’t be too many districts with large conservative Jewish populations. Nor will there be many Democratic candidates who get the size of the national debt wrong by an order of magnitude, as did Weprin.
At the same time, I think that if Democrats had a 2012 nominee like Bill Clinton who related well to the white working class, they wouldn’t be in trouble here. But they don’t; they have a nominee whose coalition is much narrower than Clinton’s was (although it is deeper among core Democratic constituencies). If the result in NY-9 is largely about white working-class voters continuing to align their congressional votes with their presidential votes, it could open a whole new crop of seats up to potential competition.
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Sean Trende is Senior Elections Analyst for RealClearPolitics. He can be reached at strende@realclearpolitics.com.
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