I didn’t know until today that when columnist Robert Novak tarred George McGovern as the candidate of legalized pot, draft amnesty and legal abortion (later alliterated to acid, amnesty and abortion) that his source was McGovern’s future running mate Tom Eagleton. Of course, Eagleton also contributed to McGovern’s historic drubbing by declining to disclose that he’d been treated for depression with electroconvulsive therapy. Once that became public, McGovern felt compelled to drop him from the ticket in favor of Sargent Shriver.
The acid, amnesty and abortion charge was never a fair characterization of McGovern’s stated positions. He did not favor the legalization of either acid or marijuana, his position on abortion was that it should be left to the states to decide, and Nixon, Carter and Ford all favored some kind of amnesty for Vietnam draft dodgers, so it’s hard to see how McGovern really stood out from his peers.
Nonetheless, the accusation captured something fundamental about the chasm that was opening between the new left and the old, and the full measure of the backlash would be felt at the ballot boxes in November 1972. The Democrats under McGovern’s leadership had gotten too far ahead of the rest of the country and whatever the merits of their positions at the time it’s fair to say that they were out of touch with the electorate and had alienated an essential part of their political base.
Something similar seems to be happening now to the Republican Party. As Ron Brownstein details in his careful review of the midterm election exit polls, traditional GOP constituencies are moving against the party with what can only be described as revulsion and indignation. Chief among these are white professionals, particularly women, and particularly in the suburbs.
In McGovern’s case, he shed Democratic voters while doing very little to win over anyone from the Republican side, resulting in a landslide loss. The Republicans aren’t in quite so dire a position because they’ve actually been gaining support among the Democrats’ traditional farmer/labor wing. In other words, we’re not seeing the playing board tip so much as watching the pieces get moved around. That’s why the 2016 election was so close and why the Senate is so evenly divided and why bellwether states like Florida are still delivering toss-up results. Yet, this swapping of voters is not going to remain close to even for long because the Democrats are much better positioned for the future.
More than anything else, the midterms exposed an enormous generational divide.
The exit poll measuring preferences in House elections found that Democrats carried fully two thirds of voters aged 18-29. That was their best showing with them in exit polls since at least 1986 (narrowly exceeding their level even in former President Barack Obama’s sweeping 2008 victory) and a big improvement on Hillary Clinton’s 55% among them in 2016. And preliminary calculations indicate that youth turnout may have been half again as large in 2018 as it was in 2014, the most recent midterm.
Even more striking was the consistency of the Democratic advantage around the nation. The Democratic candidate won voters aged 18-29 in all 21 Senate races with an exit poll except for Indiana, where Joe Donnelly tied Republican Mike Braun. (These figures do not include the exit poll in California, where two Democrats ran against each other after claiming the top spots in last June’s state top-two primary.) Senate Democrats carried about three-fifths or more of these younger voters in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota (both for incumbent Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, who was elected in a special election), Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Democrats also reached at least 60% with them in governor’s races in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In the California governor’s race, Democrat Gavin Newsom carried 69% of younger voters.
Just as important, the Democratic advantage extended up the age ladder. Against Trump in 2016, Clinton carried only 51% of voters aged 30-44; while Trump won just 41% of them, a substantial 8% scattered to third-party candidates.This time, those voters consolidated behind Democrats. In the national House exit poll, Democrats won 58%.
As younger voters get older and settled in their communities, they will vote in greater percentages, while the base of the GOP is already geriatric. It’s true that today’s kids will likely get more conservative and tax-averse as they reach their peak-earning years, but the GOP is starting off at a very low point with this generational cohort. That they’re already losing people in their peak-earning years is a bad sign for the future.
An obvious reason why the Republicans are doing so poorly with people under retirement age is that their message is basically a rebellion against the growing diversity of America. That movement isn’t going to slow down and will in fact accelerate regardless of whether or not Trump succeeds in building a southern border wall.
If the Republican Party doesn’t change to adapt, they will suffer increasingly big political losses over time.
The other major indicator in the midterms was educational attainment. Pretty much any area with above-average education levels was a killing zone for the GOP. With some exceptions in the Senate races, like West Virginia, Montana, and Nevada, any places with below-average education levels were unfriendly to the Democrats.
This creates an unfortunate problem. Just as conservatives now see diversity as a political threat, they are beginning to see a college education as a political threat. It’s not just that college students are increasingly hostile to conservative opinions. The Republicans aren’t going to remain committed to higher education if they think it is costing them elections.
When their ideas are seen as disreputable and immoral by academia, that makes it easier for them to reject expert opinions and the entire scientific method, leading them into an unfit condition to exercise leadership. They’ve already traveled pretty far down this road, but it’s likely to get far worse in the near future.
Increasingly, the GOP doesn’t want to live in reality. They don’t want the country as it is, and they don’t want the evidence that scientists and experts provide. They’ve created a right-wing media-saturated bubble to protect them from outside facts, but this seems more like a holding action than any kind of permanent solution.
The deep erosion of the Republican Party’s position in Texas is a leading indicator of where things are headed if conservatives retain their iron grip on the Party of Lincoln. But, unfortunately, the results of the midterms will make things worse. The GOP in January will be representing a less diverse, less educated, and less affluent slice of America than they are today, making it unlikely that they’ll hear the right messages from their constituents.
It appears that they’ve entered the same kind of death spiral that the Democrats suffered leading up to the Reagan Revolution.
So I’m white, rural, near retirement age, and have gotten progressively more liberal as the years have worn on. It’s depressing to think that I’m a freak among my peers.
Me, too. I’m right there with you.
Maybe we should start a club.
. . . to me to wonder how much that split between getting more liberal versus getting more “conservative” as we age correlates with the more-educated/less-educated split (I’m guessing probably a lot). That would be an interesting analysis. Someone should get right on it.
That would be an interesting thing to look into. My suspicions on this align with yours.
I’ll send a wire to my friend Perry White at the Daily Planet and have him put Jimmy Olsen on that right away! 😉
I’m there with the both of you.It’s not that I am so much more liberal now, it’s that I no longer need to accept or buy into conservative premises about government, a la the belief that big government is always bad and inefficient.
I no longer believe that we need to move at all rightward, cause that way is reactionary and backwards.
Best real world example is the local “non-partisan” board of commissioners where a strong conservative was replaced by an even more conservative and female one, who believes that ALL taxes are bad and votes accordingly. Hence, she’s a big reason, along with a couple of other thinly disguised GOP’er’s, that our public libraries had to close temporarily when the commissioners couldn’t agree on a budget. They do not believe in taxes for anything, locally, except for fire and police protection. Forget all the other nice things, including public education. (All of them plus their kids went to local private schools). This is NOT the way it was a few decades ago.
and this local government is in minority-majority small city that recently combined city and county governments into one with very draconian restrictions on expenditures and budget. Our state legislature, all Republican, had the yea or nay vote on the consolidation measure.
You can’t sell a public good — libraries, for example — in a country where half the political nation doesn’t believe the word ‘public’ has any actually-existing real-world referrent.
That’s socialism!
I don’t think there’s any real statistical evidence that people actually DO become “more conservative” as they grow older. Whatever your political opinions are at 30, that is likely where you will remain. Have you seen older people actually change their political views? I don’t know very many people who have done that, and mostly they were moderate, socially liberal Republicans who were alienated due to the GOP wars on gays, women and minorities and everybody who is culturally different than they are.
People who came of age during the Reagan years were more conservative than my generation. People who came of age under Obama, more socially liberal, but more conservative economically.
As for the GOP dying a little each day, that’s been going on for a long time now, and there’s no sign it has reached critical mass yet. The results in Florida and Texas indicate that the GOP is still viable nationally, despite being a distinct minority party, due to the built in advantages of having a purely rural white base.
It’s homogeneous, so self-reinforcing. They have their own media so they don’t need to worry about being drowned in a sea of contrary opinion. In short, the system is built in such a way that rural white conservatives will continue to have more power than they should simply due to the way we decide elections by the votes of states, rather than people.
Unless we modify the Constitution, and that will probably happen at some point, we’re stuck fighting a bitter Civil War with the Deplorables until they are finally subdued. And that will unfortunately take decades we just don’t have if we are to solve crises like Global Warming.
It is interesting that the cultural revolution of the 70’s is now where the culture is. Young people accept as settled law the ideas we put forth during those tumultuous years. Acid (marijuana), Amnesty (supporting diversity and justice reform) and Abortion (all reproductive rights) that got McGovern canned is what will sink the GOP.
Glad to see young people wising up about not supporting third party spoilers.
Excellent post, BooMan.
This graph in Wall Street Journal:
shows that in the House, the top 30 districts in terms of education was half Republicans in 1992.
Since then it has been decreasing and in 2018 they hold only 2 seats!
To me this shows that it is becoming like oil and water – how can these two mix in the long run? There will be pockets of emulsions, but it is inconceivable they will mix homogeneously again!
Sadly, it is hard to have a discussion with someone on this point without sounding like a pointy-headed elitist who is looking down their nose at people. It has been my experience that you are likely to be accused of thinking you are smarter than everyone else; a snob. But the enthusiastic and celebrated embrace of conscious ignorance that has swept through the ranks of Republican voters is undeniable. And this creation of alternate reality that they have been handed by their media sources and this President just encourages and perpetuates their state of blissful, yet rage-filled, ignorance.
Here’s the key thing about that: politics is fundamentally about VALUES, and I think we all know that being more educated does not necessarily, in and of itself, give you a better set of values. It depends on your upbringing, your community, your culture, and lots of other things. Lots of educated people suck. Lots of uneducated people are amazing.
HOWEVER… the key flashpoint driving the Red-Blue divide in 2018 is racial and ethnic animus. And we DO know — because studies show — that more educated people are less likely to show such prejudices, or will show them to lesser degrees.
So with respect to the key issue driving the country right now, more educated people do, in fact, simply know better. Or, to be more specific, more educated WHITE people simply know better than less educated white people. And it is not elitist to say that. Nor should we shy away from saying it.
“Conservative” “politics” is about values. Your generalization is an understandable one, because all politics is conservative (and all conservatism is violence, therefore all politics is violence); liberalism is anti-politics.
“Liberal” “politics” — if there were such a thing, which there isn’t — would be about pragmatism, about what works/doesn’t work.
That is why education has the effect that is described here. But even this is secondary, because the real question is why, and which, people choose not to cultivate their minds. Time was, those people were effectively excluded from the public square. So must it be again.
Being a university educated and working at an university, I would qualify for the “pointy-headed elitist” label.
But increasingly I see reality cannot be thwarted, just like gravity cannot be defied.
In North Carolina they had stopped the state agency from measuring the rise in the sea levels. But the Hurricane Florence is bringing the reality of more frequent and more devastating hurricanes due to global warming to their rural areas.
In California we are now facing the new abnormal of year round fire season.
I wonder how long those in rural areas that support Trumpism will be able to ignore the damage it is doing to their own existence?
Is there really a problem with coming across that way? I’m only half-joking. Many on the other side revel in their ignorance; why can’t we be prideful of our non-ignorance? They might even respect us more if we were more brash about it – that seems to resonate with them.
No, not at all. What I try to convey to people who want to lamely use that kind of “elitist” rejoinder is that I do actually take a serious view of my need to understand and support my arguments with well researched evidence. Yes, I tell them, I do have “opinions”, but I try to support my opinions with evidence. And many times they do not. They fall back on the trite “Well you have your opinions and I have mine” argument. So I have to point out that there is a distinct difference in the weight of my “opinion” versus their “opinion”. If they cannot refute my facts, and they have nothing to support what they have to say, beyond “well, that’s what I think”, then it’s just damn fine with me if that makes me a pointy-headed elitist. I really don’t give a shit about their unsubstantiated opinions, which serve only to make them feel good, and confirm their own biases.
I’m going to be negative for once, but I think the 18-29 results overstate how well we have been doing with younger citizens. We have been doing quite well at the polls in that group at least back to 2004 but it has not been fully continuing up the line as they age. I think the issue is that young voters are heavily skewed to educated voters, because a lot of the mobilization and registration in those groups is through educational institutions. As the cohorts age, the less educated members start voting and our advantage fades.
I do think that younger voters are genuinely moving towards us and that that will have consequences in the future, just that the effect is less than the exit polls indicate.
No, it’s that the electorate continues to age since at least 2006. Median age voter was like 58, higher than 2014, and the exit polls overstate youngs portion of the electorate.
Updated:
D+44 among 18-29, D+27 among 30-44. Among two party share, that translates to 72-28 among 18-29, and around 63-37 among 30-44.
There’s noise in interpreting this data, but the 2014-2018 data suggest a steadily aging cohort where yesterday’s 18-29 is today’s 30-44.
But you’d need to go back to 2010 at least to validate.
Full data here:
Link
Third party share in 2016 was huge among these two groups, 15% and 8% respectively. In 2008 and 2012, it was 1-2%.
Turning against education and the educated does not necessarily mean a death spiral. Fascist movements have always been hostile to higher education, and that hasn’t stopped a number of them from succeeding. Anti-intellectual rule will probably be more economically harmful today than it was in the 70’s or the 30’s but it might still succeed. The example for that is all the rural areas which are becoming more and more Republican even as Republican rule accelerates their decline. This election did see a backlash against their pathologic policies in Kansas and to a lesser degree in Nebraska and Wisconsin, but it remains to be see whether that will stick.