I am doing the start of a deep dive into 5 states: Iowa, WI, MI, PA and FL.
I am starting with Iowa. There is a decent debate raging about the collapse of Democratic Support in the Midwest. Some are arguing the cause is economic. Others think it is based on social and racial issues (The owner of the Bleeding Heartland blog thinks it is the latter).
But how do you measure economic stagnation to begin with? One way is in population change. It is an old story – one told for a century in Vermont. The young move away because there are no jobs. This problem existing in Vermont in rural areas for century – but began to reverse in the 60’s.
Here is a scatter plot of change in population and change in Democratic Support. That is all this plot captures: I didn’t think it would begin to explain the change.
And yet it did. About half the change in Democratic Support from 2008 to 2016 is explained by the population change.
Places that grew in population (Sioux County, Butler, Black Hawk, Polk and Dallas) had smaller declines that places with big population declines (Lucas, Adams, Fremont, Van Buren).
In fact, the only county that saw an increase in Democratic Support was Dallas County – the west Des Moines Suburb/Exurb – which grew by 29% between 2008 and 2016. Ironically this is where I worked for Bernie and Edwards in the Caucuses.
The first time I was in Dallas County I thought it reminded of me of New Tampa – a growing suburb of Tampa.
Something clearly happened at the low end of the income scale all through the Midwest, though the more you look at exit polls the less confident in them you become.
Dropoff seems to be one substantial portion.
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/12/26/1614565/-Wisconsin-Exit-Polls-Beware-the-False-Narrative
Beware the single variable. The drop/off-drop/out in voting in the presidential race in IA was 39,300 from that of 2012. A trend that was consistent across most states, but there isn’t a single narrative to describe the impact of that across states for Clinton and Trump. In IA and in the aggregate, Trump wasn’t hit with any of the drop-off or shift to 3rd party as he received 68,000 more votes that Romney had. Obama received 172,000 more votes than Clinton did.
The population increase in Dallas County, IA changed very little form that of ’12 and what change there was was in the direction of being redder.
That could be explained by drop off in population being skewed towards former Democratic voters, which I think is likely.
The numbers in this diary refer to census data, not turnout data. In either case I have no idea where the data is that you are making statements from relative to Dallas County – a County I have canvassed in twice in the last 10 years.
Dallas County had a population 59,315 in 2009, 72,205 in 2012 and 80,133 in 2015. So it grew by 11% in 3 years (2015 is the most recent year available)
That is not small population growth by any measure.
Turnout in Dallas in 2012 was 32640. turnout in 2016 was 37540. When measured from 2012 the Clinton vote decline by 5% relative to the state decline of 10% in Democratic vote. In absolute terms Clinton received almost the same number of votes as Obama did.
I picked 2008 to go far back in time to find counties where population wasn’t changing.
Dallas County is an outlier – both in growth and in change of support for Democrats.
My last sentence should have read that the population increase in Dallas County had no impact on voter participation or the results. I used the numbers on the Wikipedia page and for data such as this Wikipedia is reliable and Politico for the 2016 results
[2012] 37,937 total votes; Obama 43.4% [16,466 votes] and Romney 55.2% [20,921]
[2016] 37,609 total votes, Clinton 41.6% (15,662 votes) and Trump 51.3% (19,888 votes).
The breakdown for others (550 votes) in 2012 wasn’t supplied. Total others in 2016 was 2,659. Of that Johnson took 1,749, Mullin 518, and a whopping 118 votes for Stein. IOW, at best, Dallas County was flat between 2012 and 2016. No D decline as in other counties; however, it was already at D -11.8. Removing a bunch of rightwing non-Trump votes from the 2016 results to claim that Clinton’s -9.7 is a Democratic improvement over 2012 isn’t valid. One could say that the state as whole shifted to where Dallas Co has been. And the margin between Clinton and Trump (9.6) understates the actual 2016 D deficit in the state.
“Removing a bunch of rightwing non-Trump votes from the 2016 results to claim that Clinton’s -9.7 is a Democratic improvement over 2012 isn’t valid. One could say that the state as whole shifted to where Dallas Co has been. And the margin between Clinton and Trump (9.6) understates the actual 2016 D deficit in the state.
You seem to be unable to understand this is about relative performance, not absolute.
I am trying to understand the change. I never used the word improvement.
This appears to escape you.
You say “isn’t valid” with no reasoning. Dallas has no real baseline: its population has grown by 30% since 2009. It is a former corn field turning into subdivisions.
Your words:
Let’s try this again. 1) On the Democratic ballot line Clinton received fewer votes than Obama did in ’12. (I know that you believe the total number of votes are irrelevant, but that is the real measure of support for a candidate and his/her party. I’m kind of into “count the votes.”) 2) 2012 Obama 43.4% and 2016 Clinton 41.6% (again less support in 2016 for the Democrat) 3) Trump also dropped votes and percentage from Romney — down to 51.3% from 55.2%. You may want that to mean that the Republican party lost support in Dallas Co., but without investigating the breakdown of the third party candidates, such a conclusion is premature. If Johnson and McMullin (who got almost three times the number of Stein votes), who finished third and fourth in Dallas, weren’t on the ballot, where would their voters have gone? McMullin is a LDS Republican put in the race as the “neverTrump” candidate.
In the 2016 Senate race, the vote total only differed from the presidential ballot line by 35 votes. The libertarian candidate received 61% of Johnson’s vote. Thus, sure looks like 39% of Johnson’s vote was from “neverTrump” GOP voters. (The Democratic Senate candidate received 76% of Clinton’s vote. That 24% balance mostly represents incumbent and not party power. Similar to 2008 when Harkin carried Dallas Co.)
IMHO you’re taking a spurious correlation (change in population to increase/decrease the margin between the GOP and Dem presidential candidates) to explain the collapse of Clinton in IA. She collapsed in red and blue counties and large and small counties. Variables that we can’t actually measure are 1) collapse of DP at local and state level (this is also operative in WI, MI, and OH), 2) attractiveness of Trump v. giant FU to the establishment 3) Clinton negatives (Democrats have long discounted this — but Biden in his awkward way said it in ’08 “Obama is clean.”)
Can you summarize. I don’t care to increase the dKos traffic.
Comparing 2012 to 2016
Bottom line on race in Wisconsin. Trump held serve, pretty much turned out Romney’s vote. Republicans remained. White folks fled Clinton. That lost Wisconsin. What new white folks entered the picture went to Johnson mostly.
It is reassuring to see that the black vote mostly held in Wisconsin. When you look at the black vote nationwide from 2008 to 2012 it dropped nearly 900,000 while from 2012 to this cycle it dropped another 600,000 votes. It is good to see that that national drop off was not really present in Wisconsin, particularly considering this is one of those new voter ID states.
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Trump and the 3rd party candidates gained voters at the lowest end of the income data available for comparison. Clinton lost approaching 225,000 voters earning less than $50,000. Both her and trump lost ground with the middle class set in this array while Clinton gained significantly with the wealthiest income earners in Wisconsin while Trump actually lost ground. The narrative that Trump was attracted middle income and higher folks to his cut taxes message just does not seem to materialize in Wisconsin anyway.
The story here is fundamentally the lower income end fled the Democratic parties banner in Wisconsin. I do wish I had data with smaller, but this is the only range that I could find that matched cycle to cycle.
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This data set was the one I found most surprising. Trump and Clinton GAINED in urban areas at a near equal clip, both lost ground in suburban areas, with Clinton taking the biggest beating while Trump, once again, holds serve with the traditional republican rural base of support. 3rd parties gained more in rural areas of Wisconsin than did Trump.
It is important to note that exit polling data is based on how people self-identify, but, as noted below, only 23 counties actually saw an increase in total votes cat, while 49 showed a decline in voting.
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The final Wisconsin data I am going to include is the above by gender data. Sure, a certain number of men went to Trump, and both men and women went 3rd party, it is Clinton’s loss of support in Wisconsin that mattered. This entire data set seems to show that the assumption about a bunch of racists rising up to support Trump just is not true, however, people seemed unwilling to support Clinton of either gender.
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Conclusions
It is clear that the prevailing narrative is just dead wrong in Wisconsin. Trump basically held serve (and when you look nationally Trump did worse with the percent of white than Romney did). The real culprit was collapsing support for Clinton, not a new surge in support for Trump. There appeared to be no significant surge in rural counties according to the exit polling data.
Yet in FL there was a surge of a million voters. Trump picked up 455 thousand and Clinton 266 thousand. But CA, Trump lost 355 thousand. Still seems to me that Clinton was going for a national landslide and Trump concentrated on getting the increases where he needed them. FL, as usual, was always in play. Clinton kept trying to put AZ, NC, and OH in play. And worked on putting CO, NV, PA, MI, and WI. Democratic bloggers laughed about Trump’s game plan with no on the ground organizing as they licked their chops over the prospect of that Clinton landslide.
I would say given the shifts among the young (about which I have written) and at the lower end of the income scale the diarist us nowhere close to right
This is about findings relative to Iowa not Wisconsin
I don’t think the diarist is close to right but if people want comment on that diary they should go there
The problem is that the Democratic party is now the party of people who do not represent people in the heartland. Period.
Yet here’s the irony. After all of the organizational intrigue. After all of the smarmy condescension. After all of the reassurances that they knew what they were doing when in fact they had no fucking clue what they were doing — now we’re the ones who are going to pay, we’re the ones who are going to have to do the heavy lifting to fix this mess because the Democrats have disappeared and they aren’t going to reappear for another 18 months (at least here — in Wisconsin the Democrats don’t do anything but elections).
Liberals, because they’re liberals, are trying to shift the blame: “well, it was bad but if Sanders had been nominated it would have been worse”. That’s a counterfactual: the Sanders campaign had some crucial weaknesses but he wasn’t the nominee — Clinton was. She had one job, just one fucking job to do, and she blew it. And now that time for taking responsibility has come, they’re not in the mood. Which just means that next time will be more or less the same as this time.
Bitter? Why, yes. We’re a little bitter. But you’re right. What’s left of the Democratic Party doesn’t represent people here.
Neoliberals have always represented the meritocracy. As Booman put it…”Talent rises to the top. It moves up and out of town, rarely to return.” The perfection of markets.
They are fine with this. Perfectly happy if 20% own 80% of the wealth as long as that 20% is 50% female, 12+% AA, 20+% Hispanic, and so forth.
They cannot seem to admit that elites have thoroughly warped the market through political power. That all their wonky PPPartnerships ensure looting, not efficiency.
Where lefties expect to find somewhat well-known candidates free of that religion is a mystery to me.
All over Iowa (and, indeed, the whole rural Midwest) I see Germanic names. Mocking Trumps’ Germanic roots surely did not go over big.
I wonder how many voters felt about this as I did about Republicans mocking Mario Cuomo’s first name?
Thanks for this. You’re doing important work here and I look forward to reading your further conclusions esp. w/r/t Wisconsin.
One comment, to dataguy’s point above:
“The problem is that the Democratic party is now the party of people who do not represent people in the heartland. Period.”
I raise this because other comments link articles specific to Wisconsin, but a similar point might be made relative to Iowa and other midwest states as well.
Your numbers will not capture an important subjective factor in the election but it’s one that shouldn’t be ignored: the Democratic Party of Wisconsin is nothing but an empty husk. This has been true for years and is, or should be, common knowledge among people who are paid well to know such things and take them into account. It was for that reason that in 2012, the Obama campaign (OFA) came in and drove the field operation; they told the state party people here when to jump and how high. In 2016 the Clinton campaign left all the decisions up to the state party, even though Clinton failed to carry Wisconsin in the primary election. A more cautious person might have taken that to be a red flag but, well, here we are.
Wrt to OFA it was a double edged sword. They went outside the party hacks but they didn’t create an organization that could replace if Obama wasn’t on the ballot
The Clinton campaign had no wisconsin strategy to speak. They didn’t think they needed one
But this diary isn’t about Wisconsin
Mea culpa. Sorry for the thread hijack.
So you ascribe population drop to millenial flight? Have you considered white mortality. Seems the age of many of these rural cohorts are such that their families are not recently of reproductive age…
You also seem to be making the case that the population is self sorting…Dems are going urban and Reps are staying rural.
No worries about WI – the DKOS diary isn’t even right about African American turnout – but I havenot gotten there yet.
The focus for me is on understanding the deep red in the map below.
The intuition is that economic stagnation begits population stagnation. There is a swath of the country beginning in Minn and Iowa and ending in the outskirts of PA that has turned against Democrats in a profound way.
The question is why. To a Bernie guy like myself the answer is economics. But there are some who live there who think it is a cultural reaction.
David Atkins wrote a smart piece arguing we should HOPE it is economics, because if it is cultural we are screwed.
This is the start – it will take a while.
THanks
Dan
In the Atlantic this morning:
link
This debate is going to grow.
By my math Kerry got 29% of the vote in 2004 in Elkhart. So Obama went up by 15%, lost a significant amount of the improvement in 2012 and Clinton basically got the Kerry vote in 2004.
This is to some extent the story if you go far enough back in the Midwest. In this sense Obama begins to look a bit like an outlier. Kerry won MN and MI by about 3.5, WI by .38, and Iowa by about .7. Obama’s margins, in this telling were fattened by Bush’s failure, and he held onto a large portion of that vote in ’12.
The culture versus economics debate is going to grow – and it will be hard to prove decisively one way or another. I think the answer is in economic change that effected culture. It may be worth remembering that some of these states voted for Dukakis in part because of the farm crisis of the 1980’s.
I’m increasingly leaning towards the idea that these areas are solid to leaning Republican, but they are willing to vote for a Democrat if they’re perceived as “independent” and different. Gore, Kerry, and Clinton all fit the same perceived mold, for better or for worse. I truly think Sanders would have done signifcantly better just because of a perception of independence.
Or would he have been labeled a commie for saying he was a Socialist? “Just another socialist Democrat who wants to tax you to death.” I think Bernie would have done better too, but I’m not so sure he would have swept.
That doesn’t work in some places in Iowa and Ohio.
The confusing thing here is the shifts in income moving in opposite directions. This is a really big deal and deserves a good deal of attention.
Because history says it won’t last. The most likely read is Trump win backs the vote with those over 100K whop voted for Romney. He passes tax cuts, and he acts for the most part like a normal conservative Republican on social issues.
That means to be competitive you need to win back the votes of those that were lost downscale and that were lost among the young.
I know very smart people who look at the numbers in the Midwest and come away very depressed. As narrow as these margins are – these are in states that Obama and Clinton won twice, and some that even Kerry won.
If the Democratic Party cannot be competitive in the Midwest it will never be a majority party in either the Senate or the House.
I absolutely believe Sanders would have won. I keep going back to the final night in the Iowa Caucuses. Her event was not very big. I was at an early event for her in NH as well – it wasn’t that well attended.
From the beginning there was a lack of enthusiasm. Maybe after 8 years we take holding the White House for granted – I think that is some of it.
It is now a month and a half later – and I still don’t really understand what happened in the Midwest.
agree Sanders would have won. seems to me a matter of both economics and culture widely defined [not culture as in race or abortion issues] culture as way of life and concept of what is important in life. neither party has anything to say pertinent to most ppl in the area you are studying – and neither party is even trying. and since T is obviously scamming most of his voters, progressives could step in immediately if willing to try something new. first up, is Medicaid, loss of which is going to devastate many ppl. are dems out there on the ground talking with ppl? yet another petition from DFA is utterly useless.
very thoughtful about the “front line” ppl. these Bolds are cutting across party affiliation
http://boldlouisiana.org/frontlineholiday/
[I know your posts are analysis]
Do you live in FL, FLDEM?
It’s not hard for me to understand, as a midwestern resident for my life save for 8 years in NC.
The D party is now a party which represents people who do not live in rural areas. The D party is the party of lesbians, il-imm, blacks, browns, hippies, people on welfare. This is what people see. It is the mommy party.
In the rural areas, people want to identify with the Daddy party. You know, self-reliance, self-help. Republicans.
And that “demographics is destiny” SHIT! Nothing is more destructive than that, NOTHING. Because it encourages sloth and indifferene. Yup, we didn’t win this time, but wait until all those old fuckers die. God in her wisdom creates old people every day, and as people age, they often become more conservative, because liberals today are so fucking stupid.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
Those voters left behind can be both more culturally affiliated with conservatives and economically progressive and its normally a question of which they weighed more. Hillary offered neither, Rs normally offer only the former, and Trump was perceived as offering them both.
We also need to be careful of over-stereotyping. IA voted for Obama twice but not Kerry, so its not race but likeability. Its also not education. The coastal media often portrays IA as uneducated but thats true only if you look at college education rates, and largely because college kids leave the state for jobs. IA is actually one of the top 3 educated states if you look at high school graduation rates (and the public schools are actually good compared to what we have in NYC).
I say that the Democratic Party no longer has much relation to people in the industrial states.
The Democratic Party is now a COMPLETELY urban party. It has activists concerned with problems of blacks, Il-imm, legal immigrants, women, and gays.
None of this has any resonance for rural people. There are very few persons of color in rural areas who farm. Of course there are some, but a huge minority. There are few gay folks there, and people who are gay (like my daughter) are not real public about it.
What can the Dems do?
There are two really hard issues. One is abortion. The abortion issue is cutting more and more strongly against D success. I am not sure what to do about that, since I am a firm supporter of the current availability of abortion services. However, the Trump administration may see a collapse of abortion services in red states. The only states that are safe for abortion rights are IL, NY, CA, WA, HI, OR, and MN. The rest may see huge attacks on abortion, and the SCOTUS may see a change in their position as well. The D party needs to think carefully about abortion.
Gun rights are another hard nut. The D party should surrender on this issue. Every single time this comes up, the D party loses. HRC’s strident comments on gun rights were part of the reason she lost. The NRA is winning, and I do not see this turning around. This issue is a loser for Dems, and it should be abandoned.
What can work? Economic issues which help rural areas and farmers. These include promoting policies which slow the growth of chain businesses, policies which increase independence of farmers and small holders in rural areas (hydrogen economy is my current favorite), and ensuring that farm life is assisted by Dems.
Years ago, in MN, there was the DFL (democrat-farmer-laborer) party, which worked against the railroads and the monopolists. Dems have a possible opening there.
But the current D party, which is seen as a party of cities (lesbians, il-imm, blacks, hippies, welfare workers, single moms), is going to lose and lose and lose. In 2020, unless Ds get govs and people in legislatures, Ds will be frozen out for another 10 years. That should be the focus. What can win gov races?
Possibly health care. We’ll see about that.
I believe it is 39 governorships coming up. Will DNC still be busy discussing Putin and the stolen election? Could be…
Dems are not going to get the religious crazy vote, nor should they want to. People may not be vocally pro-abortion as the Right is vocal, but studies like the one that says 80+% of American Catholics have practiced non-rhythm birth control in their lives tells me that people are quietly disagreeing with the RWNJ’s.
I know my Mom had a diaphragm and my Polish-Italian bosom buddy across the alley got his condoms by swiping them from his father’s drawer which had a large supply.
We knew girls got in trouble and got abortions (illegal ten in Illinois). People just didn’t talk about it. One guy in our High school graduating class got a Freshman girl pregnant and married her. I don’t believe she was the only girl to get pregnant in that school for four years (1959-1964). I do know two girls from the rich side of town who took vacations with their mothers to England during the school year.
In two posts you used the abbreviation il-immm. I googled for it but came up blank. What does it stand for?