Post-Election Miscellany

[malsperanza]

I'm still in a state of delirium and will probably post something about What It Means to Me eventually, long after everyone has gotten bored with it.

Meanwhile, here is a selection of really astute comments from my flist for November 5:

From cleolinda: "I don't think I had realized until that moment how much I had lost over the last eight years, until the moment that I got it back [...] It's not over. One election doesn't solve anything--no matter who you elect, that candidate still has to live up to his promise. No matter what change you want, you have to get out there and make it yourself. But for the first time in a very long time, it felt like the country had opened its eyes again and remembered its name."

From swan_tower: "Many of you are no doubt making one of two transitions: either you're cautiously venturing back onto the Internet, having temporarily exiled yourself to avoid all the political talk, or you're trying to fill the empty hours now that you no longer need to obsessively check all your favorite political websites."

From blackholly: "As Gavin just said, 'it's like living in the future that I want to be in.' " And from uzu_uzu in blackholly's comments: "We finally hit PLAY on the big future machine."

From pepysdiary (November 5, 1665): "I heard the Duke of Albemarle's chaplin make a simple sermon: among other things, reproaching the imperfection of humane learning, he cried: 'All our physicians cannot tell what an ague is, and all our arithmetique is not able to number the days of a man'; which, God knows, is not the fault of arithmetique, but that our understandings reach not the thing."

And for the fun of it:

From elainetyger: "Incidentally, the Empire State Building was red on 2 sides and blue on 2 sides yesterday, and was blue all around today."

* * * *

The NY Times always publishes an "electoral trends" map after the voting is done, showing which counties voted more Democrat or more Republican than last time.





In other words, in nearly every area of the country votes for Democrats increased, notably in states that the GOP carried. (Arizona would probably have looked much like New Mexico or Colorado if McCain had been from a different state; Alaska might have been a bit bluer as well (and most counties in Alaska have tiny populations; Anchorage usually carries the state.)

What's most interesting to me is the swath through Appalachia and into the Texas and Lousiana Bible belt, which trended more strongly Republican. It is entirely isolated, and in some areas went dramatically more Republican.

Lousiana, for example, reacted to the failure of the government to assist it in recovery from Hurricaines Rita, Katrina, and Gustav by voting against progressive politics and strong government. A journalist friend of mine in Lafayette attributes this to a complete lack of confidence that government can do a better job; in other words: the Reagan Revolution has taken firm hold there.

But what about the rest of the red? Is it Christian fundamentalism? Is this the last truly, solidly rural area of the country? Arkansas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma (and a chunk of northern Alabama) account for nearly all the red trend. Are they the only places where race influenced the vote? I kind of doubt that, actually, because take a look at Indiana, which has in the past been susceptible to race issues. I'd like to see this map compared with a poverty map, a map of Hispanic populations, and some other demographics. But what strikes me is how clearly defined the red trend is: The long and short of it is that Palin's small-town America lives entirely in Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Appalachia; the small towns in the rest of the country are part of the United States.

Full interactive NY Times map (with Alaska info added and with credits) here

* * * *

From a CNN comments forum:

If McCain had won, "From what I've been told, I'd imagine we'd still be putting out the Fires and dealing with widespread Looting. Would it have really happened? I don't know, and I'd hope it wasn't going to happen either. However, I do know my Uncle who is a hardcore Republican in S. Carolina had an Obama sign on his property, along with a bunch of their neighbors who are also Republicans who didn't want their homes damaged if Obama was to lose. "

This is the first I've heard of this particular piece of battiness. This guy's uncle remembers the burning cities of 1968, after the murder of Martin Luther King. But there aren't a lot of big cities in South Carolina, and I don't really imagine that Charleston and Columbia would have erupted in race-rage if Obama had lost. My neighborhood on the edge of Harlem would have been reallyreallydepressed, though.

Comments

[jlh.livejournal.com]

What's amazing is that the actual Reagan strongholds—the industrial midwest, the Sunbelt southwest—are all moving to the left, which I find interesting in light of that "America is a liberal country" thing I linked to the other day, because I think it really is about the growing leftward movement of professionals who are more worried about social conservatism than about higher taxes.

I also wonder if part of the reason that Arkansas moved right is because they'd been further left than the area around them for so long thanks to the legacy of Clinton? So they were just more on the Democratic side for longer than, say, MS or certainly TN which Gore couldn't even deliver.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

I have a slightly different perspective on it. I've never bought the "America is a center-right country" nonsense. The Rove/WSJ crew just kept repeating it over and over until people (pundits) thought it had legs. But with 80% of the country living in urban areas, with ethnic mixing and demographic shifts now deeply embedded, the country is, if anything, more center-left than ever. (Clinton, IMO, is to the right of the old "Rockefeller Republicans," but I'd still call him a centrist.)

Overall, I'd say the US is solidly centrist, and the center is broadening. I'm very interested in the rise of the self-described Independent voters, who are shedding party loyalties. They are on the whole sensible voters, and engaged. They went for Obama big, not Nader, not Barr, though they do like the idea of mavericks, and are generally hostile to the 2 big parties.

So IMO, this is not a leftward trend but a fairly simple correction of a long, anomalous swing to the right. I don't believe that the industrial Midwest was ever Republican. The Reagan revolution got the votes of ex-union workers whose solid blue-collar lifestyle was tanking. They liked his (false) message of bootstraps and small government. Some of it was also the failing agricultural economy.

It doesn't surprise me that young voters are back to voting a progressive ticket. I don't fully understand why that demographic went for Reagan, but they were already bailing out on the GOP in the Clinton years, and the Bushes never really got them back, and instead relied on apathy and low turnout--not really a smart strategy in the long run.

People do still care about taxes, including professionals (what pundits are misleadingly calling "the suburbs"), who are hanging onto their white-collar lives and home ownership by their fingernails. I think they mostly don't care strongly one way or the other about the social issues--not enough to change a vote. But they do care about the environment, the economy, and wars: issues that don't split on party lines.

So I'd make a distinction between "values" issues:

Abortion
Teh gay
Guns
Church-state
Taxes

and public issues:

Environment
Health care
Pensions/old age/savings
Children/education
Wars
Taxes

Of these, only taxes falls into both categories. And a lot of the stuff that government actually takes care of doesn't appear at all. I think the latter list gets the vote out and crosses many party lines, especially among professionals--and even more visibly among women.

The Sunbelt... well, that does represent a big demographic shift. From being underpopulated states full of ranchers, cattle, airforce bases, and retirees, it is now full of boom cities with lots and lots of Latinos, jobs, and kids. The ranchers and retirees are probably going to continue to vote the same way they always have, but they're outnumbered.

I bet you're right about Arkansas: the trend jump is a correction post-Clinton, not a huge new leap rightward. Makes perfect sense.

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

I can imagine riots if McCain had won, but not because of race. The vast majority of pre-election polls showed Obama with a significant lead, so if McCain would have won in spite of the polls, many people would have been screaming (even louder than 2000 and 2004) "Voter Fraud!"

I think the red trends on that map are the result of racism, pure and simple. The only places that voted more Republican in a huge Democratic year are in the rural South, so the racism explanation is almost a no-brainer. In particular, the racist Republicanism of most of the White voters in Louisiana is what ultimately drove me away from my home state, where in 1990, 60% of Whites voted for David Duke. Those trends never went away. Democrats in Louisiana are among the most conservative Democrats in all the land.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

I dunno. It's certainly easy to point to racism, but there's plenty of that in other parts of the country--Indiana being a prime example. The interesting thing about the trend map is that most of the deep South (below the swath) is trending bluer--strongly in cities and suburbs, but also overall; for example, in the western half of Virginia and North Carolina, which are rock-solid Republican, as well as most of Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. Georgia is a remarkable case.

So I think one has to look beyond racism. Appalachia is beginning to define itself as politically very distinct from the rest of the South. It's an area that has been largely bypassed by development and growth, even during the booms of the 1980s and 1990s. It's still poor, still drained of jobs, and still has lousy education.

I think it's a toxic mixture of religious extremism and lack of jobs. That nasty combination has led to rightwing populism at other times in America's history (Father Coughlin in the Depression, frex).

Louisiana is a special case, I think, because it has such a unique culture. Jindal wouldn't be so popular if he weren't Catholic, but the fact that he *is* very popular suggests that race is not the problem. Yes, a lot of people voted for their hometown boy Duke in 1992, but Clinton carried the state. What's happened since then? Well, what state has been failed and abandoned more thoroughly by Washington than LA?

This article in yesterday's Washington Post sums it up well:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/06/AR2008110602572.html