The data from the 2018 General Social Survey are now available, and they include questions on voting in the 2016 election. The GSS is the gold standard for social science research, especially in getting a representative view of the population.
These gold-standard data bear out the impressions and the fuzzier data from exit polls regarding Trump's unique appeal in 2016 -- i.e., compared to Romney -- with the white working class, no matter how it's measured (education, income, self-described class label), with urban voters (except for the biggest shithole cities), with liberals and moderates, and with Democrats and Independents.
I won't rehash those findings here, since they are already well known. The flipping of urban areas is not so well known, but I already wrote the definitive post on that topic (with maps) back in 2016. His flipping of the Rust Belt states and the one district in Maine is still commonly attributed to the rural vote -- but nobody lives there, certainly not in heavily populated industrial states, so even if rural people did vote more for Trump than Romney, that would not have been enough to make a difference.
It was Trump's surge in urban areas -- where a whole lot more people live -- that flipped those states. These were second or third-tier cities (the forgotten man and the forgotten woman) rather than the shiny, smug, affluent first-tier cities, who voted even less for Trump than Romney. Bunch of striver-tards.
The major political group division today is rural vs. urban, so this dimension will show the most cognitive dissonance. Voters may cross other political lines, but not urban vs. rural. People can believe that white working-class people voted Republican -- smearing them as working-class bigots, or bla bla bla. But they can absolutely not fathom that legions of urban dwellers defected to a Republican after voting for Obama twice.
There's also the class difference: yuppies are happy to smear working-class whites for voting Trump, because that does not implicate themselves. But if they had to blame urban dwellers, that would indict their own in-group, the one that they identify the most forcefully with (supposedly cosmopolitan urbanites).
Well, here's another major finding that explodes the clueless punditry on the hot-button issue of immigration and economic nationalism. The GSS shows that the surging white vote for Trump came from Ellis Island ethnic groups, not from the founding stock. That had to have been true, given which states, which counties, and which party members Trump managed to flip. There's not a lot of founding stock in Staten Island, Wilkes-Barre PA, the Detroit or Cleveland metro areas, and all those other Rust Belt towns that drew the Ellis Island immigrants during their industrial revolution heyday.
Among whites, those whose ancestry is from England & Wales voted 55% for Romney, and 53% for Trump -- if anything, a slight decline percentage-wise, and given how large their total numbers are in the population, that amounts to a fairly big loss in total voters. He must have made up for it with other ethnic groups.
He did somewhat better with smaller founding stock groups like the French (French and French Canadians), going from 37% for Romney to 43% for Trump -- but still losing to Clinton.
The one partially founding stock group who surged for Trump were the Scots, who voted 53% for Romney and 64% for Trump. However, the Scotch-Irish form a decent chunk of those who claim Scottish descent in the US, and although they were present in large numbers from before the Revolution and into the closed-borders Jeffersonian period, they also joined the Ellis Islanders during the open-borders era of the Jackson, Lincoln, and most of the McKinley periods.
Turning to clear Ellis Island groups, we see a surge for Trump, particularly among the largest groups:
The Irish voted 45% for Romney, 57% for Trump.
Italians voted 40% for Romney, 55% for Trump.
The Germans voted 50% for Romney, 55% for Trump.
Scandinavians* voted 45% for Romney (who lost them), 49% for Trump (beating Clinton's 39%).
The Slavs** voted 41% for Romney, 45% for Trump (tying with Clinton).
All these decades and centuries later, there is still a big East vs. West European split, including immigrants to the US who have supposedly been assimilated into the melting pot. Slavs have assimilated less, and among Ellis Island descendants they are the most in favor of immigration. They are also the one group of Europeans who we continue to import, since they're still poor and can be exploited as cheap labor by the employer class.
The one exception among Ellis Islanders were the Jews (those raised Jewish), who voted 24% for Romney, and just 16% for Trump. That change is likely a product of their higher class status and residence in the largest cities, compared to working-class dwellers of 3rd-tier cities in the other Ellis Island groups. It makes it all the more hilarious that Trump and the GOP are shilling so hard for Israeli interests, and trying to paint the Democrats as the real anti-Semites. That's obviously for the wealthy AIPAC-connected donors, and not Jewish voters themselves.
To this wave of defection by Ellis Islanders to the candidate who took a hard line against immigration and promoted economic nationalism, the clueless libs and leftoids wag their finger, scolding them about remembering when "y'all were the poor immigrants in this country," and how others should be able to enjoy that today.
"Ey-oh, oh-ey -- that was then, and this is now. America barely had anybody in it when our guy, Christopher Columbus, discovered it. Now? -- this country is fuckin' FULL. Sorry, lots of luck to ya, but the rest of the world AIN'T OUR PROBLEM."
That's what the dumb liberal airheads don't get about importing cheap labor (the only form of immigration) -- the initial immigrants strike it rich, compared to where they're from, but after wave after wave after wave of immigrants, the initial ones have their supposedly higher standard of living eroded by all the others desperately trying to cash in on the bubble while it's still inflating.
But no boom avoids ending in a bust. At some point, new immigrants will see no improvement to their standard of living by moving countries -- because that niche has already been filled up by waves of earlier immigrants -- and they decide against immigrating.
During the inflation of a cheap labor bubble, it's in the material interests of each wave of immigrants to want the borders slammed shut right after they themselves have gotten in. Why face even more competition in the labor market than already exists? (That's true for native workers, too, of course.) But as poorly rooted immigrants, they lack the collective organizing power to make that happen.
However, after these immigrants have been assimilated into the mainstream, it is still in their interests to want the borders kept shut, only now they have greater civic engagement and organization. Now they can do something collectively to make that happen. It starts with voting, and we just saw the Ellis Islanders make a decisive shift against open borders and cheap labor -- their people have been there, done that, and don't want to live in clapboard tenements while slaving away for pennies a day like their ancestors.
But it could escalate far more from there. With wave after wave of newer immigrants during the Reagan era, the old Ellis Island immigrants have an interest in distinguishing themselves -- they're the good, old, assimilated immigrants, not these bad, new, unassimilated immigrants. What do they think about the new ones assimilating just like their ancestors did?
"Ey-oh, oh-ey, these ain't exactly Irish and Italians who are coming into the country these days, y'know what I mean? Just take a look. Plain as day."
The Italians swung more than the other groups probably because their enclave in the Mid-Atlantic has been so swamped by Muslims, which will make Italian-American ethnogenesis far more hardened than for other Ellis Island groups who find themselves living next to Mexicans, for instance. At least the Mexicans are some kind of Christians. Religious divides make for incredibly heightened "Us vs. Them" contests over resources. In the Mid-Atlantic Italian-American mind, they're the policemen and firefighters who gave their lives during an Islamic attack on 9/11, and many smaller-scale ones since then.
So far, you haven't seen the events necessary to create that level of between-group hostility among Somalis and Swedes in Minnesota, or Irish and Indians in Chicago. But that's only a matter of degree, since the Swedes and Irish shifted substantially toward Trump's 2016 platform, just not quite so much as the Italians did.
What are the Bernie people and other would-be realigners going to do to reassure these Ellis Island defectors and bring them into a mass-politics coalition that can move on from Reaganism into something different?
First, any negative reference to "white people" will blow up in their faces. The clueless libs think they're dunking only on the rural hillbillies and genteel WASPs in red states when they drone on and on about "white people". But a large chunk of assimilated Ellis Islanders in blue-state cities take offense to that, too, not just the founding stock. And far from brushing it off as meaningless banter, they take the threat of open borders very seriously. They've already taken one election hostage to get their legitimate grievances across to the callous elites -- who says they can't do so again?
Economic populists on the Left must prioritize class and economics over race and other boutique identity issues, and in a way that intersects with the immigration issue. Their policy can be that while they welcome people of all backgrounds, we first and foremost have to protect our own workers, so there will be no immigration that serves as a cheap labor pipeline to the rich employer class. Most people recognize that just about all immigrants are poorer than natives, so they can connect the dots on their own that such an economics-only policy will in fact reduce immigration by over 90%. Anxiety alleviated!
But given how poorly the entire Left has understood the 2016 election, I don't expect them to learn any lessons here either, not now anyway. They are still committed to the cognitive dissonance-reducing view that an army of Anglo rednecks rose up out of rural areas to swing cities, counties, and states that haven't voted Republican in decades.
They can't admit how much they've lost from their urban coalition, since "urbanite" is their primary identity badge, nor will they be able to admit how much they've lost from their Ellis Islander coalition, for the same reason (many on the Left are Ellis Islanders).
I think it will take another devastating loss in 2020 to wake up the opposition to just how bitterly hated their platform is. Nobody wants Reaganism anymore, so the real issue is what replaces it -- and the answer is not, "Reaganism, but woke" or even worse, "Reaganism, but woke and enforced by commissars".
Leave it to the neolibs and the radlibs to alienate even the Ellis Islanders. The opposition has to radically change its tune by shutting up about identity, and focus only on mass economics, or it will deliver another term of moribund Reaganism.
* Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish combined to boost sample size
** Czechoslovakians, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Lithuanians, Yugoslavians, Romanians, and Other Europeans, who did not identify Jewish as the religion they were raised in
GSS variables: pres16, pres12, race, ethnic, relig16
Showing posts with label GSS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GSS. Show all posts
January 29, 2018
Black vs. immigrant tensions heating up; nationalists should ally with blacks
A few weeks ago I advocated mobilizing blacks in order to defeat amnesty for illegal immigrants and the broader push to import all 10 billion of the world's population in the coming years. Black people hate other races (while tolerating American whites since they're used to us), especially immigrants who just came here and think they own the place -- and especially when they try to hog all the credit and benefits of being minorities.
The 50-year cycles of collective violence that Peter Turchin has documented will see another peak circa 2020, and as usual these riots will be more easily inflamed between people of different racial, ethnic, and national origin groups. Only this time, the twist is that the political zeitgeist is all about the split between immigrants and Americans -- pitting African-Americans against the new immigrant groups who are Latino and Asian.
These groups are all at open war with each other on the West Coast, where gangs are entirely along ethnic lines. But it's about to boil over into the mainstream as well. Right on cue, here is Tariq Nasheed blasting a Grammy speech by Cuban immigrant singer Camila Cabello, who was promoting the feel-good new-immigrant narrative about how "America was built by DREAMers" (lots of "thank you for telling it like it is" in the comments from blacks):
Whereas the African-American narrative history is about having been brought here against their will to toil in the fields for no pay, the new immigrants' narratives are about coming here eagerly to enjoy a higher standard of living. Blacks resent these prospering newcomers for trying to marginalize the black narrative about having been unwilling victims. "Being a minority in America," in the black view, is supposed to reflect historical victimization, not being in charge of your own fate and seeking a better life in another country.
Blacks resent not only Latino and Asian immigrants for trying to hijack their minority narrative in this way -- they react the same dismissive way to clueless liberal Ellis Islanders who try to commiserate with blacks about having been discriminated against when they first came here as an Other ethnic group. If you weren't brought over here in chains, if you weren't forced to literally slave away in the cotton fields -- save your sob story about "No Irish Wanted" signs.
Aside from cultural narratives, the cold hard economic reality today is that blacks are far more harmed by opening the floodgates of immigration, as immigrants compete with lower-skilled workers and pack themselves into urban housing markets, both of which disproprotionately hit African-Americans.
So it comes as no surprise that a Harvard-Harris poll finds that blacks are the most eager to dramatically reduce immigration numbers. Half of them want the lowest possible numbers that are still greater than zero (1 to 250,000). The current level is around 1 million.
According to the General Social Survey, blacks are about the same as whites when it comes to wanting lower immigration, when you control for population density. Generally, rural residents are more for reducing immigration than urban residents. But when you look within a large city, blacks and whites are about the same; within the suburbs, they're the same; within rural areas, the same. The only reason it looks like whites are the most in favor of reducing immigration is because they are more likely to live in rural and small-town areas than blacks are.
And of course, within each level of population density, the "other" racial group (a mix of Latino and Asian) is markedly different from both the whites and blacks in being against reduced immigration, and in favor of increasing it.
Now, the clueless cuckservative response to this is to tell blacks, "Well, guess you're gonna have to leave the DEMOCRAT PLANTATION and jump on board the Trump train!" Wrong. The solution is to form a bipartisan movement to reduce immigration going forward, to give as little amnesty as possible now, and to deport the most of the illegal population.
Blacks will never vote GOP in large numbers, whether it's Reagan or Bush or Trump or anyone else. And why should they? It's the Democrats who take care of them, with the exception of bringing in all these immigrants, who they then promote at the expense of black people. Everything else in the Democrat platform benefits blacks, though, so they're only going to want to change this one big issue within their own party -- not change parties.
But if that's a key area of overlap with Trump voters, why turn down an alliance just because the other side won't totally join your own side? To win, we only need to form alliances -- not to pull off total conversions.
Indeed, after the failure of a populist re-alignment on the GOP side, that's only more reason for the populist-nationalists who voted Trump to crash the Democrat party and serve as the cavalry for other groups among the Dems who have similar goals as ours.
Shrinking the military footprint after failed imperialism? We can ally with the peaceniks. Single-payer healthcare? We can ally with just about any grassroots Dem group. Reducing and undoing mass immigration? Not with white-guilt liberals, but with the African-Americans who form a large and influential chunk of the Democrat base.
Obviously the framing would be different to appeal to African-Americans than working-class whites, but it's already being put out there by blacks themselves for us to adopt. Being a minority in America means having gone through historical victimization and suffering a lower standard of living. Current government programs are meant to correct that historical injustice. None of that applies to Latino or Asian immigrants who willingly come here en masse to enjoy a higher standard of living. Only to Native Americans and African-Americans.
On an informal level, we can easily encourage black resentment at being marginalized by these new immigrants. It's already there, we just need to stoke it. They understand that it's zero-sum when it comes to cultural attention and government programs -- it's either blacks or the Latino/Asian immigrants.
Just remember: no lame give-away messages about why they need to vote Republican or read Milton Friedman or something retarded like that. Your goal is to sound like a New Deal liberal from the Civil Rights era who, in this strange new world of mass immigration of Latinos and Asians, wants protectionism for the historical black community against the immigrants.
It's going to take a shift that seismic to turn the tide on immigration in this country. When the black section of the Democrat base starts demanding an end to mass immigration, as a form of economic and cultural self-defense, then we'll see some real serious shit.
Populist-nationalists should join them outright in re-directing the Democrat party's priorities, while free-market conservatives who remain in the zombie-GOP should be willing to sacrifice something in order to get an end to immigration as we know it. Would Congressman Steve King be so opposed to "Medicare for All" if it could be traded for deporting most of the illegal population and reducing future immigration to a fraction of what it is now?
In these topsy-turvy endtimes for Reaganism, we're going to be striking all kinds of unusual deals.
GSS variables: letin1, race, srcbelt
The 50-year cycles of collective violence that Peter Turchin has documented will see another peak circa 2020, and as usual these riots will be more easily inflamed between people of different racial, ethnic, and national origin groups. Only this time, the twist is that the political zeitgeist is all about the split between immigrants and Americans -- pitting African-Americans against the new immigrant groups who are Latino and Asian.
These groups are all at open war with each other on the West Coast, where gangs are entirely along ethnic lines. But it's about to boil over into the mainstream as well. Right on cue, here is Tariq Nasheed blasting a Grammy speech by Cuban immigrant singer Camila Cabello, who was promoting the feel-good new-immigrant narrative about how "America was built by DREAMers" (lots of "thank you for telling it like it is" in the comments from blacks):
I’m no. This country was NOT “built” by Dreamers. It was built by the free labor of Black Americans who are still disrespected by white supremacists and immigrant groups who often exhibit the same anti-Black hatred. So chill with the alternate history https://t.co/yO1QgPqR4V— Tariq Nasheed (@tariqnasheed) January 29, 2018
Whereas the African-American narrative history is about having been brought here against their will to toil in the fields for no pay, the new immigrants' narratives are about coming here eagerly to enjoy a higher standard of living. Blacks resent these prospering newcomers for trying to marginalize the black narrative about having been unwilling victims. "Being a minority in America," in the black view, is supposed to reflect historical victimization, not being in charge of your own fate and seeking a better life in another country.
Blacks resent not only Latino and Asian immigrants for trying to hijack their minority narrative in this way -- they react the same dismissive way to clueless liberal Ellis Islanders who try to commiserate with blacks about having been discriminated against when they first came here as an Other ethnic group. If you weren't brought over here in chains, if you weren't forced to literally slave away in the cotton fields -- save your sob story about "No Irish Wanted" signs.
Aside from cultural narratives, the cold hard economic reality today is that blacks are far more harmed by opening the floodgates of immigration, as immigrants compete with lower-skilled workers and pack themselves into urban housing markets, both of which disproprotionately hit African-Americans.
So it comes as no surprise that a Harvard-Harris poll finds that blacks are the most eager to dramatically reduce immigration numbers. Half of them want the lowest possible numbers that are still greater than zero (1 to 250,000). The current level is around 1 million.
According to the General Social Survey, blacks are about the same as whites when it comes to wanting lower immigration, when you control for population density. Generally, rural residents are more for reducing immigration than urban residents. But when you look within a large city, blacks and whites are about the same; within the suburbs, they're the same; within rural areas, the same. The only reason it looks like whites are the most in favor of reducing immigration is because they are more likely to live in rural and small-town areas than blacks are.
And of course, within each level of population density, the "other" racial group (a mix of Latino and Asian) is markedly different from both the whites and blacks in being against reduced immigration, and in favor of increasing it.
Now, the clueless cuckservative response to this is to tell blacks, "Well, guess you're gonna have to leave the DEMOCRAT PLANTATION and jump on board the Trump train!" Wrong. The solution is to form a bipartisan movement to reduce immigration going forward, to give as little amnesty as possible now, and to deport the most of the illegal population.
Blacks will never vote GOP in large numbers, whether it's Reagan or Bush or Trump or anyone else. And why should they? It's the Democrats who take care of them, with the exception of bringing in all these immigrants, who they then promote at the expense of black people. Everything else in the Democrat platform benefits blacks, though, so they're only going to want to change this one big issue within their own party -- not change parties.
But if that's a key area of overlap with Trump voters, why turn down an alliance just because the other side won't totally join your own side? To win, we only need to form alliances -- not to pull off total conversions.
Indeed, after the failure of a populist re-alignment on the GOP side, that's only more reason for the populist-nationalists who voted Trump to crash the Democrat party and serve as the cavalry for other groups among the Dems who have similar goals as ours.
Shrinking the military footprint after failed imperialism? We can ally with the peaceniks. Single-payer healthcare? We can ally with just about any grassroots Dem group. Reducing and undoing mass immigration? Not with white-guilt liberals, but with the African-Americans who form a large and influential chunk of the Democrat base.
Obviously the framing would be different to appeal to African-Americans than working-class whites, but it's already being put out there by blacks themselves for us to adopt. Being a minority in America means having gone through historical victimization and suffering a lower standard of living. Current government programs are meant to correct that historical injustice. None of that applies to Latino or Asian immigrants who willingly come here en masse to enjoy a higher standard of living. Only to Native Americans and African-Americans.
On an informal level, we can easily encourage black resentment at being marginalized by these new immigrants. It's already there, we just need to stoke it. They understand that it's zero-sum when it comes to cultural attention and government programs -- it's either blacks or the Latino/Asian immigrants.
Just remember: no lame give-away messages about why they need to vote Republican or read Milton Friedman or something retarded like that. Your goal is to sound like a New Deal liberal from the Civil Rights era who, in this strange new world of mass immigration of Latinos and Asians, wants protectionism for the historical black community against the immigrants.
It's going to take a shift that seismic to turn the tide on immigration in this country. When the black section of the Democrat base starts demanding an end to mass immigration, as a form of economic and cultural self-defense, then we'll see some real serious shit.
Populist-nationalists should join them outright in re-directing the Democrat party's priorities, while free-market conservatives who remain in the zombie-GOP should be willing to sacrifice something in order to get an end to immigration as we know it. Would Congressman Steve King be so opposed to "Medicare for All" if it could be traded for deporting most of the illegal population and reducing future immigration to a fraction of what it is now?
In these topsy-turvy endtimes for Reaganism, we're going to be striking all kinds of unusual deals.
GSS variables: letin1, race, srcbelt
November 2, 2017
Muslim immigration benefits GOP factions, not Dems
While it is welcome to hear Trump advocate for ending the diversity lottery in immigration, we must realistically assess who is behind the open-borders policy toward Muslims, and whether that makes it likely or unlikely that Congress will obey the President's orders (which also happen to manifest the will of the American people -- not that Congress cares about that part).
The key awakening of the Trump and Bernie movements was that questions of airy-fairy cultural values don't matter -- it is the cold hard material reality that matters.
Democrats didn't win elections because they championed liberal instead of conservative values in social-cultural domains -- voters simply saw them as the party that would impoverish and refuse to protect them in a slightly less callous fashion than the other party, who would throw the American people into poverty and absence of security with abandon.
Trump then turned around the GOP's presidential fortunes by convincing voters that he cared more about their stagnating and eroding material conditions -- on economics, immigration, and jihadism -- and would make those areas the focus of his presidency, not the same ol' culture war BS that we expect of Republican politicians.
An earlier post asked whether amnesty for illegal immigrants, largely Hispanic, would be suicide for the Dems or for the GOP?
We cannot answer that without a focus on institutional analysis, in other words which factions of the elite control the Dems vs. the GOP. The major split is the Democrat factions hailing from economic sectors that easily scale up -- banking / finance, media / entertainment, digital / hi-tech, etc. -- while the GOP factions hail from sectors that are more physical and physically constrained, like the military, agriculture, energy resource extraction, and so on.
For amnesty, it is clear how the GOP factions benefit materially from large-scale immigration, whether legal or illegal. The farms and small businesses, who are loyal Republican sectors, depend on cheap labor to thrive, since their economic activity is so labor-intensive. Importing hordes of servants from the Third World boosts the material standing of these GOP sectors.
On the other hand, Democrat sectors like the media, tech companies, and finance, are not labor-intensive and therefore do not derive a big boost in profits from cheap labor. Not that they don't make use of foreigners, but it's not the main source of their soaring wealth. That comes instead from the higher and broader reach of their company that is not very labor-intensive -- for example, a merger of two media companies, or the entry of a Wall Street bank or Silicon Valley tech company into a "developing nation".
So the Democrat factions do not benefit materially from open borders.
But wait! What about using those hordes of foreigners to vote Democrat and tip the scales irrevocably in the Democrats' favor? One problem: they don't bother voting, not even when they're eligible.
This moronic view crippled the GOP for the longest time, as they saw their electoral weakness tracing back to their lack of support from Hispanics, rather than the white working class who won't vote for the unabashedly elitist party.
Now that moronic view is going to cripple the Democrats, who also see their electoral success as owing to their dominance among ethnic minorities rather than the white working class.
The reality as revealed by the General Social Survey, from that earlier post on amnesty, looking at the 2012 election:
And that's among those who were eligible -- obviously the participation of illegals is even lower, since they'd be taking a greater risk in voting, and are more apathetic about America's political outcomes since they just got here and are only interested in stealing jobs, and maybe the occasional rape and murder, rather than steering the government's future.
Now let's turn to Muslims, another demographic group who the moronic Democrat Establishment views as an absolute lynchpin to its (previous) electoral success. They're only 2% of the population, and they're in safe blue states anyway, so right away we know they are the key to nothing. But even assuming they became as large as Hispanics and more broadly distributed...
Going back to the General Social Survey, in 2012 only 49% of those who were raised as Muslims bothered to vote, among those who were eligible. In 2008, it was 38%. In 2004, 53%. In 2000, 55%. Each of these samples is small (less than 50) because Muslims are so small in population, and the GSS is a representative sample of the population. Pooling them all together in a 21st century group, only 49% voted.
That is far smaller than the 70% and above rates of participation by natives and whites. And it's of a tiny slice of the population, sitting at only 2%. So it doesn't matter that they vote 85% Democrat, since that's only 85% of 49% of 2% -- Muslims deliver diddly squat for Democrats.
Of course, insulated tunnel-vision Democrats can't conceive of throwing Muslims under the bus because they're convinced that multiculturalism is what won them elections, contrary to all data. But once they've drunken the kool-aid, it can be hard to undo its effects.
The point remains, though, and at some point the power factions and the party itself will realize that they do not benefit materially from Muslim immigration, and if anything have sinking prospects at the ballot box from apologizing for every radical Islamic terrorist attack on the American people -- "think of the backlash against poor innocent Muslims!" Not the way to win elections with American voters.
Who does benefit from allowing in immigrants from the Muslim world? Why, the same GOP factions who partner with the jihadist nations and militias over in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. Namely the Pentagon brass, who prize the expansion of imperial borders over the safety of the core homeland.
They rely as all empires do on the cooperation of local elites in distant lands, and in the Middle East, they have thrown in with the jihadists like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, the Taliban (when they were fighting the Soviet Union), and so on and so forth. The military elite do not care whether their allies are barbarian jihadists who want to destroy America, as long as they will cooperate in getting the Pentagon and the CIA more pieces on the global chess board.
Of course, that never happens -- it is Iran rather than Uncle Sam who controls Iraq, after 30 years of our interventions in that country, and it is the Pakistani Deep State that controls Afghanistan, not us. But again, once people drink the kool-aid, it's hard to reverse the symptoms. The Pentagon still believes that bending over backwards for jihadists will get them more territory to control and patrol on the great big global chess board.
In the military leaders' minds, bending over backwards for its radical Islamic allies requires us to open our borders to immigrants from any Muslim-majority nation, as a costly and honest signal of our shared fates. In the early stage of the Trump administration, before the White House was hijacked in April by the Pentagon boarding party who pushed for further involvement in regime change in Syria, you might remember Iraq initially being on the list of countries barred from sending people across our border.
The Pentagon threw a fit and demanded that Iraq be taken off the list. Why? Because banning Iraqis would threaten the cooperation of Iraqis in Iraq with the American military presence in Iraq. Not that we're getting anything out of that presence, but still, that's what motivates the Pentagon -- keeping a "seat at the table," despite never getting anything. The GOP administration complied with the orders of its primary power faction, and Iraq was removed from the travel ban list.
You can bet that it was also the Pentagon, arms manufacturers and dealers, and defense contractors, who lobbied to keep true terrorist threats off of the list, like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The war machine is in bed too deep with the leaders of those two countries to put their citizens on a travel ban. To do otherwise would risk their cooperation in the attempt to put more territory in the region under Pentagon control (again, not that that has ever worked out favorably for the Pentagon).
The leaders of Muslim countries have a hell of a lot of leverage over the GOP factions like the military-industrial complex. If they want open borders for Muslim immigration, the GOP will have to deliver it or else feel the pain of the screws tightening from their Muslim allies in the imperial project over in the Middle East and Central / South Asia.
The GOP factions of oil and energy companies are also highly materially motivated to get in bed with jihadist nations like Saudi Arabia, or take over non-jihadist nations like Iran. But oil is lower-ranking than the military, and there's little oil and gas in Afghanistan.
What are the leaders of those Muslim countries going to do to hurt the Democrat factions? Refuse to allow Hollywood movies to be shown? Ban the local CNN International station? Kick out American investors from Wall Street? Not bloody likely. Hollywood and the media, social media companies, and Wall Street banks do not rely so crucially on those Muslim nations -- they have their fingers in pies all around the world, unlike the Pentagon which is concentrated so heavily in the Muslim world. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street wouldn't even feel it if Uzbekistan or Saudi Arabia banned them from their country.
The only Muslim nation that the Democrat factions are eager to stay on the good side of is Iran, which is a ripe niche for Western financial investors after being cut off by sanctions for so long. They are a very large population, civilized, and fairly prosperous by regional standards. That was the motivation of the Iran deal -- material interest, not multicultural feel-good-ism.
But Iran is among the most moderate of Muslim countries, being Shia (radical Islam plagues only the Sunni side). They do not proselytize, and are not hell-bent on sending their own people or their co-religionists to infiltrate the US. When they use empty bluster as a negotiating tactic against the Dems, it's based on military strikes, not threatening to unleash hordes of immigrants into our country.
Mexico threatens the opposite, and does the opposite -- never any military bluster, but saying it would be a shame if they were to not police the hordes of other Central Americans pouring through Mexico on their way to El Norte. Mexico is a real threat, Iran is a fake threat.
In the long-term, and even the medium-term, it is cynical material interests that drive behavior, not airy-fairy values-oriented BS. Ideology is a rationalization of material motivations.
On both forms of material interests, whether wealth or power, the Democrat factions stand to gain little from Muslim immigration, whereas the GOP factions stand to gain a lot -- continued cooperation from Muslim countries in the Pentagon's imperial ambitions on the other side of the world, and depending on the country, preferred access for oil and gas companies.
That means the GOP presents more of an obstacle to ending the diversity lottery, banning Muslims from entering the country, and so on. It is in the grip of a power faction -- the Pentagon -- that would rather leave a festering open wound on the nation's honor and security after September 11th, rather than give Saudi Arabia even a rap on the knuckles in retaliation for their attack against us.
We've seen so far that Hispanics and Muslims don't vote, especially if they're immigrants, and this point will generalize to all ethnic minority groups who could be brought in by the diversity lottery.
Take Africa, to end the argument with. Among blacks raised in America, 77% voted in 2012, as opposed to 40% of all African immigrants, or even 52% of eligible African immigrants. (And African immigrants were a mere 6% of the black sample of the GSS respondents about the 2012 election.) Immigrants simply don't give a shit about our government's current or future workings -- as long as they get paid more money than back in their home countries, they don't care what else happens here.
Among the elite factions, the Democrats stand little to gain from such open-borders immigration policies -- not to mention antagonizing one of their key junior partner factions, the labor unions who will get decimated by cheap non-union labor. That's really not going to help Dems with the white working class in Rust Belt states.
The GOP stands to gain immensely, whether it is cheap labor for the labor-intensive sectors that make up the GOP coalition, or the military elite who want the cooperation of the sending nations in far-flung imperial adventures, or the oil and gas sector who want cooperation from oil-rich nations sending their immigrants here.
Now among the base, it is obviously the opposite -- Republican voters are far more opposed to open borders than Democrat voters are. If the citizens were to triumph over the politicians and the power elites of their own party, then the GOP would easily and eagerly ban Muslim immigration, kick out Hispanic illegals, and the rest of it.
But until more power is in the citizens' hands, and while power remains concentrated in the elites, the Democrats pose relatively less of a threat vis-a-vis immigration. They will buckle to pressure from below more easily, since their power factions don't gain nearly as much as GOP elites do. We do have the kool-aid effect to overcome with the Democrat multicultis, but that is an easier task than threatening the cold hard material wealth and power that the GOP elites derive from open borders.
GSS variables: vote12, vote08, vote04, vote00, relig16, reg16, race
The key awakening of the Trump and Bernie movements was that questions of airy-fairy cultural values don't matter -- it is the cold hard material reality that matters.
Democrats didn't win elections because they championed liberal instead of conservative values in social-cultural domains -- voters simply saw them as the party that would impoverish and refuse to protect them in a slightly less callous fashion than the other party, who would throw the American people into poverty and absence of security with abandon.
Trump then turned around the GOP's presidential fortunes by convincing voters that he cared more about their stagnating and eroding material conditions -- on economics, immigration, and jihadism -- and would make those areas the focus of his presidency, not the same ol' culture war BS that we expect of Republican politicians.
An earlier post asked whether amnesty for illegal immigrants, largely Hispanic, would be suicide for the Dems or for the GOP?
We cannot answer that without a focus on institutional analysis, in other words which factions of the elite control the Dems vs. the GOP. The major split is the Democrat factions hailing from economic sectors that easily scale up -- banking / finance, media / entertainment, digital / hi-tech, etc. -- while the GOP factions hail from sectors that are more physical and physically constrained, like the military, agriculture, energy resource extraction, and so on.
For amnesty, it is clear how the GOP factions benefit materially from large-scale immigration, whether legal or illegal. The farms and small businesses, who are loyal Republican sectors, depend on cheap labor to thrive, since their economic activity is so labor-intensive. Importing hordes of servants from the Third World boosts the material standing of these GOP sectors.
On the other hand, Democrat sectors like the media, tech companies, and finance, are not labor-intensive and therefore do not derive a big boost in profits from cheap labor. Not that they don't make use of foreigners, but it's not the main source of their soaring wealth. That comes instead from the higher and broader reach of their company that is not very labor-intensive -- for example, a merger of two media companies, or the entry of a Wall Street bank or Silicon Valley tech company into a "developing nation".
So the Democrat factions do not benefit materially from open borders.
But wait! What about using those hordes of foreigners to vote Democrat and tip the scales irrevocably in the Democrats' favor? One problem: they don't bother voting, not even when they're eligible.
This moronic view crippled the GOP for the longest time, as they saw their electoral weakness tracing back to their lack of support from Hispanics, rather than the white working class who won't vote for the unabashedly elitist party.
Now that moronic view is going to cripple the Democrats, who also see their electoral success as owing to their dominance among ethnic minorities rather than the white working class.
The reality as revealed by the General Social Survey, from that earlier post on amnesty, looking at the 2012 election:
Among immigrants -- those residing outside the US at age 16 -- only 46% voted, vs. 71% of native citizens.
Among Hispanics -- regardless of race or immigrant status -- only 44% voted, vs. 73% of non-Hispanics.
Within the Hispanic population, only 28% of immigrants voted, vs. 51% of native citizens.
And that's among those who were eligible -- obviously the participation of illegals is even lower, since they'd be taking a greater risk in voting, and are more apathetic about America's political outcomes since they just got here and are only interested in stealing jobs, and maybe the occasional rape and murder, rather than steering the government's future.
Now let's turn to Muslims, another demographic group who the moronic Democrat Establishment views as an absolute lynchpin to its (previous) electoral success. They're only 2% of the population, and they're in safe blue states anyway, so right away we know they are the key to nothing. But even assuming they became as large as Hispanics and more broadly distributed...
Going back to the General Social Survey, in 2012 only 49% of those who were raised as Muslims bothered to vote, among those who were eligible. In 2008, it was 38%. In 2004, 53%. In 2000, 55%. Each of these samples is small (less than 50) because Muslims are so small in population, and the GSS is a representative sample of the population. Pooling them all together in a 21st century group, only 49% voted.
That is far smaller than the 70% and above rates of participation by natives and whites. And it's of a tiny slice of the population, sitting at only 2%. So it doesn't matter that they vote 85% Democrat, since that's only 85% of 49% of 2% -- Muslims deliver diddly squat for Democrats.
Of course, insulated tunnel-vision Democrats can't conceive of throwing Muslims under the bus because they're convinced that multiculturalism is what won them elections, contrary to all data. But once they've drunken the kool-aid, it can be hard to undo its effects.
The point remains, though, and at some point the power factions and the party itself will realize that they do not benefit materially from Muslim immigration, and if anything have sinking prospects at the ballot box from apologizing for every radical Islamic terrorist attack on the American people -- "think of the backlash against poor innocent Muslims!" Not the way to win elections with American voters.
Who does benefit from allowing in immigrants from the Muslim world? Why, the same GOP factions who partner with the jihadist nations and militias over in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. Namely the Pentagon brass, who prize the expansion of imperial borders over the safety of the core homeland.
They rely as all empires do on the cooperation of local elites in distant lands, and in the Middle East, they have thrown in with the jihadists like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, the Taliban (when they were fighting the Soviet Union), and so on and so forth. The military elite do not care whether their allies are barbarian jihadists who want to destroy America, as long as they will cooperate in getting the Pentagon and the CIA more pieces on the global chess board.
Of course, that never happens -- it is Iran rather than Uncle Sam who controls Iraq, after 30 years of our interventions in that country, and it is the Pakistani Deep State that controls Afghanistan, not us. But again, once people drink the kool-aid, it's hard to reverse the symptoms. The Pentagon still believes that bending over backwards for jihadists will get them more territory to control and patrol on the great big global chess board.
In the military leaders' minds, bending over backwards for its radical Islamic allies requires us to open our borders to immigrants from any Muslim-majority nation, as a costly and honest signal of our shared fates. In the early stage of the Trump administration, before the White House was hijacked in April by the Pentagon boarding party who pushed for further involvement in regime change in Syria, you might remember Iraq initially being on the list of countries barred from sending people across our border.
The Pentagon threw a fit and demanded that Iraq be taken off the list. Why? Because banning Iraqis would threaten the cooperation of Iraqis in Iraq with the American military presence in Iraq. Not that we're getting anything out of that presence, but still, that's what motivates the Pentagon -- keeping a "seat at the table," despite never getting anything. The GOP administration complied with the orders of its primary power faction, and Iraq was removed from the travel ban list.
You can bet that it was also the Pentagon, arms manufacturers and dealers, and defense contractors, who lobbied to keep true terrorist threats off of the list, like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The war machine is in bed too deep with the leaders of those two countries to put their citizens on a travel ban. To do otherwise would risk their cooperation in the attempt to put more territory in the region under Pentagon control (again, not that that has ever worked out favorably for the Pentagon).
The leaders of Muslim countries have a hell of a lot of leverage over the GOP factions like the military-industrial complex. If they want open borders for Muslim immigration, the GOP will have to deliver it or else feel the pain of the screws tightening from their Muslim allies in the imperial project over in the Middle East and Central / South Asia.
The GOP factions of oil and energy companies are also highly materially motivated to get in bed with jihadist nations like Saudi Arabia, or take over non-jihadist nations like Iran. But oil is lower-ranking than the military, and there's little oil and gas in Afghanistan.
What are the leaders of those Muslim countries going to do to hurt the Democrat factions? Refuse to allow Hollywood movies to be shown? Ban the local CNN International station? Kick out American investors from Wall Street? Not bloody likely. Hollywood and the media, social media companies, and Wall Street banks do not rely so crucially on those Muslim nations -- they have their fingers in pies all around the world, unlike the Pentagon which is concentrated so heavily in the Muslim world. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street wouldn't even feel it if Uzbekistan or Saudi Arabia banned them from their country.
The only Muslim nation that the Democrat factions are eager to stay on the good side of is Iran, which is a ripe niche for Western financial investors after being cut off by sanctions for so long. They are a very large population, civilized, and fairly prosperous by regional standards. That was the motivation of the Iran deal -- material interest, not multicultural feel-good-ism.
But Iran is among the most moderate of Muslim countries, being Shia (radical Islam plagues only the Sunni side). They do not proselytize, and are not hell-bent on sending their own people or their co-religionists to infiltrate the US. When they use empty bluster as a negotiating tactic against the Dems, it's based on military strikes, not threatening to unleash hordes of immigrants into our country.
Mexico threatens the opposite, and does the opposite -- never any military bluster, but saying it would be a shame if they were to not police the hordes of other Central Americans pouring through Mexico on their way to El Norte. Mexico is a real threat, Iran is a fake threat.
In the long-term, and even the medium-term, it is cynical material interests that drive behavior, not airy-fairy values-oriented BS. Ideology is a rationalization of material motivations.
On both forms of material interests, whether wealth or power, the Democrat factions stand to gain little from Muslim immigration, whereas the GOP factions stand to gain a lot -- continued cooperation from Muslim countries in the Pentagon's imperial ambitions on the other side of the world, and depending on the country, preferred access for oil and gas companies.
That means the GOP presents more of an obstacle to ending the diversity lottery, banning Muslims from entering the country, and so on. It is in the grip of a power faction -- the Pentagon -- that would rather leave a festering open wound on the nation's honor and security after September 11th, rather than give Saudi Arabia even a rap on the knuckles in retaliation for their attack against us.
We've seen so far that Hispanics and Muslims don't vote, especially if they're immigrants, and this point will generalize to all ethnic minority groups who could be brought in by the diversity lottery.
Take Africa, to end the argument with. Among blacks raised in America, 77% voted in 2012, as opposed to 40% of all African immigrants, or even 52% of eligible African immigrants. (And African immigrants were a mere 6% of the black sample of the GSS respondents about the 2012 election.) Immigrants simply don't give a shit about our government's current or future workings -- as long as they get paid more money than back in their home countries, they don't care what else happens here.
Among the elite factions, the Democrats stand little to gain from such open-borders immigration policies -- not to mention antagonizing one of their key junior partner factions, the labor unions who will get decimated by cheap non-union labor. That's really not going to help Dems with the white working class in Rust Belt states.
The GOP stands to gain immensely, whether it is cheap labor for the labor-intensive sectors that make up the GOP coalition, or the military elite who want the cooperation of the sending nations in far-flung imperial adventures, or the oil and gas sector who want cooperation from oil-rich nations sending their immigrants here.
Now among the base, it is obviously the opposite -- Republican voters are far more opposed to open borders than Democrat voters are. If the citizens were to triumph over the politicians and the power elites of their own party, then the GOP would easily and eagerly ban Muslim immigration, kick out Hispanic illegals, and the rest of it.
But until more power is in the citizens' hands, and while power remains concentrated in the elites, the Democrats pose relatively less of a threat vis-a-vis immigration. They will buckle to pressure from below more easily, since their power factions don't gain nearly as much as GOP elites do. We do have the kool-aid effect to overcome with the Democrat multicultis, but that is an easier task than threatening the cold hard material wealth and power that the GOP elites derive from open borders.
GSS variables: vote12, vote08, vote04, vote00, relig16, reg16, race
September 8, 2017
Is amnesty suicide for the Dems or for the GOP?
Now that the DACA people are going to be amnestied, the next move by globalists will be to broaden it to other groups who are slightly lower on the sympathy scale, potentially including all 20 million illegals by the final round.
Immigration hardliners argue that mass amnesty is suicide for the GOP, since immigrants lean so heavily Democrat. They are trying to argue to Republican party leaders that, even if they despise their voters, they should at least back off of amnesty in order to ensure their own survival as a major party.
This is a naive argument, which explains why it is never listened to by the GOP. Most immigrants, legal or illegal, are heavily concentrated in safe states -- mostly deep blue ones like California and New York, but also deep red ones like Texas and Utah. Millions more newly legalized citizens with voting rights in California will be no big loss to the GOP there, as the party effectively no longer exists in that state.
What about turning red states like Texas into blue ones? That also will not happen, because most of these immigrants are Hispanic, and Hispanics do not vote, even when they are eligible. This covers blue state cases as well -- they will not get even further blue, as their Hispanic immigrants will not vote either.
The most recent year of good voting data is for the 2012 presidential election, as studied by the General Social Survey, the gold standard in social research (large national probability samples going back to the 1970s). Let's review the cold hard facts on voting participation. We will stick just to people who are even eligible to vote, assuming the best-case scenario for immigrant advocates who want them to be able to vote.
Among immigrants -- those residing outside the US at age 16 -- only 46% voted, vs. 71% of native citizens.
Among Hispanics -- regardless of race or immigrant status -- only 44% voted, vs. 73% of non-Hispanics.
Within the Hispanic population, only 28% of immigrants voted, vs. 51% of native citizens.
Again, those are all considering people who are already eligible to vote.
The voting rates for all groups are lower in the West South Central region, which is basically Greater Texas. So the largest red state is in no danger of being flipped blue by low-voting Hispanics, immigrants, or Hispanic immigrants.
The only large state that could be affected is the swing state of Florida -- but then Florida has always been a swing state, back when it was mostly white, and right up through 2016 with its heavy Hispanic and immigrant population. So the GOP may reason that it has little to lose there if there are more immigrants.
An earlier post showed that large non-citizen populations do not affect how a state votes, but rather how much of a force multiplier it has. The number of Congressmen sent to the House is determined by resident population, not citizen population, so that states with lots of immigrants get more Representatives in Congress than they should. That is reflected in their weight within the Electoral College when it comes time to choosing a President as well.
But the GOP has already given up trying to be a national party that can field viable candidates for President. They lucked into the presidency in 2000 when the full Florida recount showed that Gore won among voters. They could have legitimately won in 2004, although who can say how much of that was due to the incumbency effect that resulted from the botched election of 2000. But maybe W. Bush could have been the Republican Jimmy Carter and won by a hair, serving only one despised term during an otherwise unbroken string of victories for the other party.
Of course Trump did better than W. Bush could have ever dreamed of, but he ran against the GOP, and the GOP did everything it could to stop him, and continues to subvert him well after he's taken office in the White House. So they still have no pretensions of being a national party to contest the presidency.
And although making Congressional representation reflect citizens only, rather than any old residents, could give Republicans better numbers in Congress, it also might not. The main shift would be fewer reps from the Sun Belt, with its enormous immigrant populations, and more reps back to the Rust Belt, where hardly any residents are immigrants.
In some Rust Belt areas like Ohio and Indiana, that would give more Republicans to Congress. But it would also mean more reps from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York. Maybe those new districts would go to Trump-style Republicans -- but that's a nightmare for the GOP leadership. Otherwise they would go to Democrats. Almost certainly not would they become new corporate-friendly warmonger Republicans that the leadership desires.
So the GOP can rationally argue there is little downside to its electoral prospects from giving amnesty to all illegals and even throwing the borders wide open. At least up until the point where immigrants do begin to overwhelm the safe red states in voting numbers (different from resident numbers, since immigrants don't vote).
What about the upside? Well, the GOP is all about cutting labor costs to employers to boost corporate profits. They represent various specific sectors like the Pentagon and energy and agriculture, but they also represent a sector-general class of managers and investors. This managerial and investing class will continue to make a killing pursuing the off-shoring policies it has been getting for several decades now. Instead of off-shoring, it can also bring the cheap foreign labor here through immigration.
In addition to making managers and investors in general happy, the GOP program of open borders and free trade will also make one of its major elite factions happy -- agriculture. These mega-farms are highly profitable not only because of heavy subsidies from the government, but also because they hire cheap foreigners to toil in the corn fields, dairy pastures, and meatpacking plants.
The free trade agreements have all served to remove manufacturing from the US and give it to the other cheap countries, while improving agricultural exports from the US and wiping out the farms of the newly industrialized cheap countries. "Trade" is not general, it is specifically taking the form of American food traded for manufactured products from the cheap countries (clothing, cars, electronics, etc.). That's why Trump always used to complain that while Asia sends us cars by the shipload, "all we send them is beef".
From the GOP's perspective, car companies and auto workers unions do not contribute to the Republican coffers or political capital within Washington, while the mega-farms of agribusiness do, so why would Republican leaders try to make Detroit happy instead of Omaha? Especially when these large-scale farms and ranches all lie within the Great Plains, where the reddest of red states are found, while manufacturing plants are in purple states at best, and deep blue states at worst.
The Republican party's grand vision is to reverse the Industrial Revolution and have a nation's residents toiling in the fields, or performing menial servant labor waiting on people with money. They want us to go back to the feudal ages, where the GOP will enjoy the support of the landed aristocracy.
Therefore, it makes perfect sense that they would want to import hordes of field-toilers and servant-peasants from parts of the world that never launched their own Industrial Revolution. Especially when there is no electoral downside. Any self-preservation argument to the GOP leadership is doomed to failure, because they know better than you do what is good for their own preservation. They will only chuckle at your naivete.
On the other hand, large-scale immigration is a disaster to the Democrat party, whether they know it or not.
Sure, you could say as I just did about the GOP, "They would know better than you what is in their own interests as a party," but then the Democrats just got wiped out in a historic upset, losing many states that were solid blue for decades -- Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, a district in Maine, and essentially Minnesota (spoiled only by a third-party conservative).
So far, zero states have flipped from red to blue due to demographic replacement by immigrants. Rather, it has been white liberal yuppie carpetbaggers who have recently flipped red states blue. They are a far larger population size, they are all eligible to vote, and they turn out at high rates.
But now we've seen six medium-sized states defect en masse from the blue column, showing that it is the Democrats who are truly out of touch with what preserves their party. Not immigrants, but the (white) working class in the Industrial Midwest, who have much higher labor union membership rates than others around the country. Like yuppies, union members are already eligible to vote, are organized politically, and turn out at high rates. If you lose enough union rank-and-file support, kiss the Midwest goodbye.
There are about 15 million union members today, equal to estimates of the illegal immigrant population. Which group is more important to keep, if their interests are opposed and will not come as a combined bloc?
Back to the GSS statistics: for eligible voters, 81% voted among people who are union members or are married to one, vs. 67% among non-union households. And they are not clustered in deep blue or deep red states. Compared to non-union voters, union-linked voters were more likely to come from blue safe-havens like the Mid-Atlantic and Pacific regions, but also from the East North Central region (OH, MI, IN, IL, WI), and presumably the Great Lakes by extension.
Only Illinois is a deep blue state, and Indiana a deep red state. Ohio is usually a swing state, and although Michigan and Wisconsin voted reliably blue, it was not by a large margin -- enough for Trump to steal them away by appealing to Rust Belt working class whites.
As an inverse of the GOP, the Democrat party does not rely on the generalized corporate managerial and investing class, although it does have the backing of specific factions like Wall Street and Silicon Valley. It also relies on labor unions, and enough of them are still industrial unions rather than public sector service unions -- at least in the key Rust Belt states, rather than safe states like California.
Once those manufacturing plants are destroyed through off-shoring, the new workers in the cheap countries will not be joining unions, let alone voting in American elections for the pro-union party. So there goes millions of reliable Democrat voters. Even if the plants are kept in America, but operated by cheap foreign labor, the immigrant workers will not be unionized, and again -- bye-bye millions of reliable Democrat voters, in crucial states no less.
It is out of self-preservation that the Democrats have opposed the free trade deals for decades. Enough of them are neoliberals who vote with the majority of Republicans to push them through, and only neoliberals are allowed to become Democrat Presidents. But the majority of Congressional Democrats in both houses have opposed them, from NAFTA to permanent normal trade relations with China to CAFTA to South Korea to Trade Promotion Authority for negotiating the TPP.
Yep, the Republicans are so rotten that they make us find a few good things about the voting records of some of the most horrendous Democrats ever to serve -- Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, Harry Reid, Sherrod Brown, even Bob Menendez, voted against most or all of these anti-factory / pro-mega-farm deals.
It's not that the Democrats look after their constituents better than the GOP does. It's that the Democrats' constituents include large numbers of organized labor in high-paying sectors like manufacturing, whereas the GOP looks after the landed aristocracy in the Plains. The only sector with a large number of employees who vote reliably Republican, and whom the GOP looks after, is the military.
But that just means the GOP tries to inflate military bubbles so that more and more members of the military have "something to do somewhere around the world," rather than use them effectively for specific purposes when our national interests are clearly defined and large in magnitude. Most of that labor is not put toward truly productive use, and those guys could be creating far more value as engineers for an auto company, logistics experts for steel mills, and quality-control for tool production.
That is a large chunk of potential Democrat industry-related voters that could be stolen from the GOP if only the Democrats would more forcefully promote the re-industrialization of the economy, and demand an America-first defense policy to replace our failed and crumbling globalist empire.
It turns out that the Democrats have more to lose in the short and medium term from amnestying the millions of illegals, opening the borders, and off-shoring our manufacturing. That's why the GOP has always been the main vehicle for the cheap labor lobby. If the Democrats don't reverse course on immigration, they will lose the Rust Belt forever.
They are pursuing amnesty and open borders out of identity politics and multiculturalism, which is a crazy parasitic growth destroying their party. They are not doing it out of rational electoral calculations, let alone being part of the cheap labor lobby -- or else they would have signed onto all of those free trade deals.
On the one hand, it makes it more likely to get through to them since there is a rational basis for them to give up amnesty, vs. little rational basis for Republican leaders to give it up. On the other hand, if the party is emotionally hijacked by identity politics warriors, they may not be able to respond rationally. It's all still up in the air at this point, although the number of progressives coming out with "yeah but" arguments about immigration (Thomas Frank, Peter Beinart) is a welcome sign.
The Trump movement has already burned down the Republican party, which refused to serve the people. Now that Trump is beginning to cut deals with "Chuck and Nancy" rather than Ryan and McConnell, maybe the next phase of the movement will be rehabilitating the Democrat party. "Factories over foreigners" and "Medicare for all except those who must go back" -- that's how they win back the Midwest.
GSS variables: vote12, race, hispanic, reg16, region, union
Immigration hardliners argue that mass amnesty is suicide for the GOP, since immigrants lean so heavily Democrat. They are trying to argue to Republican party leaders that, even if they despise their voters, they should at least back off of amnesty in order to ensure their own survival as a major party.
This is a naive argument, which explains why it is never listened to by the GOP. Most immigrants, legal or illegal, are heavily concentrated in safe states -- mostly deep blue ones like California and New York, but also deep red ones like Texas and Utah. Millions more newly legalized citizens with voting rights in California will be no big loss to the GOP there, as the party effectively no longer exists in that state.
What about turning red states like Texas into blue ones? That also will not happen, because most of these immigrants are Hispanic, and Hispanics do not vote, even when they are eligible. This covers blue state cases as well -- they will not get even further blue, as their Hispanic immigrants will not vote either.
The most recent year of good voting data is for the 2012 presidential election, as studied by the General Social Survey, the gold standard in social research (large national probability samples going back to the 1970s). Let's review the cold hard facts on voting participation. We will stick just to people who are even eligible to vote, assuming the best-case scenario for immigrant advocates who want them to be able to vote.
Among immigrants -- those residing outside the US at age 16 -- only 46% voted, vs. 71% of native citizens.
Among Hispanics -- regardless of race or immigrant status -- only 44% voted, vs. 73% of non-Hispanics.
Within the Hispanic population, only 28% of immigrants voted, vs. 51% of native citizens.
Again, those are all considering people who are already eligible to vote.
The voting rates for all groups are lower in the West South Central region, which is basically Greater Texas. So the largest red state is in no danger of being flipped blue by low-voting Hispanics, immigrants, or Hispanic immigrants.
The only large state that could be affected is the swing state of Florida -- but then Florida has always been a swing state, back when it was mostly white, and right up through 2016 with its heavy Hispanic and immigrant population. So the GOP may reason that it has little to lose there if there are more immigrants.
An earlier post showed that large non-citizen populations do not affect how a state votes, but rather how much of a force multiplier it has. The number of Congressmen sent to the House is determined by resident population, not citizen population, so that states with lots of immigrants get more Representatives in Congress than they should. That is reflected in their weight within the Electoral College when it comes time to choosing a President as well.
But the GOP has already given up trying to be a national party that can field viable candidates for President. They lucked into the presidency in 2000 when the full Florida recount showed that Gore won among voters. They could have legitimately won in 2004, although who can say how much of that was due to the incumbency effect that resulted from the botched election of 2000. But maybe W. Bush could have been the Republican Jimmy Carter and won by a hair, serving only one despised term during an otherwise unbroken string of victories for the other party.
Of course Trump did better than W. Bush could have ever dreamed of, but he ran against the GOP, and the GOP did everything it could to stop him, and continues to subvert him well after he's taken office in the White House. So they still have no pretensions of being a national party to contest the presidency.
And although making Congressional representation reflect citizens only, rather than any old residents, could give Republicans better numbers in Congress, it also might not. The main shift would be fewer reps from the Sun Belt, with its enormous immigrant populations, and more reps back to the Rust Belt, where hardly any residents are immigrants.
In some Rust Belt areas like Ohio and Indiana, that would give more Republicans to Congress. But it would also mean more reps from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York. Maybe those new districts would go to Trump-style Republicans -- but that's a nightmare for the GOP leadership. Otherwise they would go to Democrats. Almost certainly not would they become new corporate-friendly warmonger Republicans that the leadership desires.
So the GOP can rationally argue there is little downside to its electoral prospects from giving amnesty to all illegals and even throwing the borders wide open. At least up until the point where immigrants do begin to overwhelm the safe red states in voting numbers (different from resident numbers, since immigrants don't vote).
What about the upside? Well, the GOP is all about cutting labor costs to employers to boost corporate profits. They represent various specific sectors like the Pentagon and energy and agriculture, but they also represent a sector-general class of managers and investors. This managerial and investing class will continue to make a killing pursuing the off-shoring policies it has been getting for several decades now. Instead of off-shoring, it can also bring the cheap foreign labor here through immigration.
In addition to making managers and investors in general happy, the GOP program of open borders and free trade will also make one of its major elite factions happy -- agriculture. These mega-farms are highly profitable not only because of heavy subsidies from the government, but also because they hire cheap foreigners to toil in the corn fields, dairy pastures, and meatpacking plants.
The free trade agreements have all served to remove manufacturing from the US and give it to the other cheap countries, while improving agricultural exports from the US and wiping out the farms of the newly industrialized cheap countries. "Trade" is not general, it is specifically taking the form of American food traded for manufactured products from the cheap countries (clothing, cars, electronics, etc.). That's why Trump always used to complain that while Asia sends us cars by the shipload, "all we send them is beef".
From the GOP's perspective, car companies and auto workers unions do not contribute to the Republican coffers or political capital within Washington, while the mega-farms of agribusiness do, so why would Republican leaders try to make Detroit happy instead of Omaha? Especially when these large-scale farms and ranches all lie within the Great Plains, where the reddest of red states are found, while manufacturing plants are in purple states at best, and deep blue states at worst.
The Republican party's grand vision is to reverse the Industrial Revolution and have a nation's residents toiling in the fields, or performing menial servant labor waiting on people with money. They want us to go back to the feudal ages, where the GOP will enjoy the support of the landed aristocracy.
Therefore, it makes perfect sense that they would want to import hordes of field-toilers and servant-peasants from parts of the world that never launched their own Industrial Revolution. Especially when there is no electoral downside. Any self-preservation argument to the GOP leadership is doomed to failure, because they know better than you do what is good for their own preservation. They will only chuckle at your naivete.
* * * * *
On the other hand, large-scale immigration is a disaster to the Democrat party, whether they know it or not.
Sure, you could say as I just did about the GOP, "They would know better than you what is in their own interests as a party," but then the Democrats just got wiped out in a historic upset, losing many states that were solid blue for decades -- Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, a district in Maine, and essentially Minnesota (spoiled only by a third-party conservative).
So far, zero states have flipped from red to blue due to demographic replacement by immigrants. Rather, it has been white liberal yuppie carpetbaggers who have recently flipped red states blue. They are a far larger population size, they are all eligible to vote, and they turn out at high rates.
But now we've seen six medium-sized states defect en masse from the blue column, showing that it is the Democrats who are truly out of touch with what preserves their party. Not immigrants, but the (white) working class in the Industrial Midwest, who have much higher labor union membership rates than others around the country. Like yuppies, union members are already eligible to vote, are organized politically, and turn out at high rates. If you lose enough union rank-and-file support, kiss the Midwest goodbye.
There are about 15 million union members today, equal to estimates of the illegal immigrant population. Which group is more important to keep, if their interests are opposed and will not come as a combined bloc?
Back to the GSS statistics: for eligible voters, 81% voted among people who are union members or are married to one, vs. 67% among non-union households. And they are not clustered in deep blue or deep red states. Compared to non-union voters, union-linked voters were more likely to come from blue safe-havens like the Mid-Atlantic and Pacific regions, but also from the East North Central region (OH, MI, IN, IL, WI), and presumably the Great Lakes by extension.
Only Illinois is a deep blue state, and Indiana a deep red state. Ohio is usually a swing state, and although Michigan and Wisconsin voted reliably blue, it was not by a large margin -- enough for Trump to steal them away by appealing to Rust Belt working class whites.
As an inverse of the GOP, the Democrat party does not rely on the generalized corporate managerial and investing class, although it does have the backing of specific factions like Wall Street and Silicon Valley. It also relies on labor unions, and enough of them are still industrial unions rather than public sector service unions -- at least in the key Rust Belt states, rather than safe states like California.
Once those manufacturing plants are destroyed through off-shoring, the new workers in the cheap countries will not be joining unions, let alone voting in American elections for the pro-union party. So there goes millions of reliable Democrat voters. Even if the plants are kept in America, but operated by cheap foreign labor, the immigrant workers will not be unionized, and again -- bye-bye millions of reliable Democrat voters, in crucial states no less.
It is out of self-preservation that the Democrats have opposed the free trade deals for decades. Enough of them are neoliberals who vote with the majority of Republicans to push them through, and only neoliberals are allowed to become Democrat Presidents. But the majority of Congressional Democrats in both houses have opposed them, from NAFTA to permanent normal trade relations with China to CAFTA to South Korea to Trade Promotion Authority for negotiating the TPP.
Yep, the Republicans are so rotten that they make us find a few good things about the voting records of some of the most horrendous Democrats ever to serve -- Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, Harry Reid, Sherrod Brown, even Bob Menendez, voted against most or all of these anti-factory / pro-mega-farm deals.
It's not that the Democrats look after their constituents better than the GOP does. It's that the Democrats' constituents include large numbers of organized labor in high-paying sectors like manufacturing, whereas the GOP looks after the landed aristocracy in the Plains. The only sector with a large number of employees who vote reliably Republican, and whom the GOP looks after, is the military.
But that just means the GOP tries to inflate military bubbles so that more and more members of the military have "something to do somewhere around the world," rather than use them effectively for specific purposes when our national interests are clearly defined and large in magnitude. Most of that labor is not put toward truly productive use, and those guys could be creating far more value as engineers for an auto company, logistics experts for steel mills, and quality-control for tool production.
That is a large chunk of potential Democrat industry-related voters that could be stolen from the GOP if only the Democrats would more forcefully promote the re-industrialization of the economy, and demand an America-first defense policy to replace our failed and crumbling globalist empire.
* * * * *
It turns out that the Democrats have more to lose in the short and medium term from amnestying the millions of illegals, opening the borders, and off-shoring our manufacturing. That's why the GOP has always been the main vehicle for the cheap labor lobby. If the Democrats don't reverse course on immigration, they will lose the Rust Belt forever.
They are pursuing amnesty and open borders out of identity politics and multiculturalism, which is a crazy parasitic growth destroying their party. They are not doing it out of rational electoral calculations, let alone being part of the cheap labor lobby -- or else they would have signed onto all of those free trade deals.
On the one hand, it makes it more likely to get through to them since there is a rational basis for them to give up amnesty, vs. little rational basis for Republican leaders to give it up. On the other hand, if the party is emotionally hijacked by identity politics warriors, they may not be able to respond rationally. It's all still up in the air at this point, although the number of progressives coming out with "yeah but" arguments about immigration (Thomas Frank, Peter Beinart) is a welcome sign.
The Trump movement has already burned down the Republican party, which refused to serve the people. Now that Trump is beginning to cut deals with "Chuck and Nancy" rather than Ryan and McConnell, maybe the next phase of the movement will be rehabilitating the Democrat party. "Factories over foreigners" and "Medicare for all except those who must go back" -- that's how they win back the Midwest.
GSS variables: vote12, race, hispanic, reg16, region, union
November 6, 2016
Trump out-performing Bush in major demographics
The depressive cucks and glib libs who constantly harp on the doom-and-gloom (or baseless enthusiasm) about how "demography is destiny" will be pleasantly surprised by Trump's performance in a number of major demographic groups. (All Bush data from the General Social Survey, using most recent year after the election.)
Race
George W. Bush got in the high 50s with whites, and the USC poll shows Trump already there. Bush got in the low 40s with Hispanics, and Trump is already there too. Among blacks, Bush got about 10%, and although Trump is currently around 5%, he was around 15% for an entire month recently. He does well in the Emerson polls with blacks, so I take the 15% to be the ceiling he'll reach.
In any event, the non-white electorate this year will be more Hispanic and less black than it was in 2000 and '04, so we'll do better than Bush did overall.
Age
Bush only got 48% of voters 65+ in '00, and 53% of them in '04. Trump is currently at 55% and surging -- hammering home the word "Watergate" is working wonders to remind older voters just how corrupt, ungovernable, and shameful a hypothetical Clinton White House would be. Since the electorate skews older, this group matters most -- Bush himself actually won the popular vote in '04 because he improved his numbers with old people by 5 points.
Among 35-64 year-olds, Bush got in the mid-50s both times, while Trump is topping out in the high 40s, maybe low 50s if enough cucks switch from Johnson. This is the only age group that he may not do as well as Bush with, because the helicopter parents are concerned with their children rather than the broader community and nation, and Trump hasn't been pushing "family values" at all. He's still winning this group, just not by as much as Bush did.
Among 18-34 year-olds, Bush got around 47% each time. Trump is currently in the mid-40s and steadily rising, so he'll probably do as well in the young group.
Given how much older this electorate will be than before, and how much greater he's doing with the older groups, Trump is easily going to do better than Bush.
Sex
Bush got in the high 40s with women both times, while Trump is in the low 40s and steadily rising. He could get to where Bush was, but I'm thinking in the mid-40s is looking more realistic. However, the would-be First Female President is not getting as much of the womens vote as Gore or Kerry did -- they got in the high 40s, while Crooked Hillary is at 48% and falling. The third party vote among women will be much greater this time.
Among men, Bush got 55% both times, and that's right where Trump is. Perhaps he could go up another point or two, but his ceiling has consistently been 55-56%. Gore only got 38% of men, which is where Hillary is now -- and her long-term ceiling is 40%. Kerry did even better at 43%, and he still lost.
Education
This is by far the biggest shift since the Bush wins. He got in the low 50s with people who had a H.S. degree or less, whereas Trump is going to end up at least 5 points higher.
For those with some college, Bush got 54% in '00 and 51% in '04, and Trump will get 51% as well.
For college degree-holders, Bush got around 50% both times, and the Democrats a few points lower, with not much third party support. Now, Hillary is getting 50%, with Trump's ceiling at 40%. That assumes 10% of the college-educated will vote third party, and I don't see that happening. So Trump could end up getting into the mid-40s, though still losing this group.
Summing up
The demographics that are relevant for the national popular vote are age and sex, which don't vary so much across the states. Trump is doing much better than Bush on both of these dimensions.
The relevance of race varies a lot by state, although here too Trump is poised to do as well or slightly better than Bush.
Education also varies in importance a lot by state, since some metro areas attract most of the college grads, while other entire states are not so heavily burdened with credentialist strivers. This is what makes Colorado the hardest to get for a Republican among the white Mountain states (excluding NM), or the West Coast, or the ACELA corridor along the East Coast.
Not as much of a problem in the Rust Belt, however, which is where the blue states that Trump is actually fighting for are located. Losing the post-grad vote will not deprive him of Michigan, although it would Massachusetts.
The Rust Belt also tends toward the whiter side and the older side (younger people leave in search of greener pastures, and there's not enough of a local boom to attract replacements from outside).
So not only is Trump going to do better in the popular vote, he's going to do better in the Electoral College than the last Republican President. No one can look at the numbers, and the geography, and conclude that Trump will do worse than Bush. And Bush won, so Trump will win -- even more big-league.
Race
George W. Bush got in the high 50s with whites, and the USC poll shows Trump already there. Bush got in the low 40s with Hispanics, and Trump is already there too. Among blacks, Bush got about 10%, and although Trump is currently around 5%, he was around 15% for an entire month recently. He does well in the Emerson polls with blacks, so I take the 15% to be the ceiling he'll reach.
In any event, the non-white electorate this year will be more Hispanic and less black than it was in 2000 and '04, so we'll do better than Bush did overall.
Age
Bush only got 48% of voters 65+ in '00, and 53% of them in '04. Trump is currently at 55% and surging -- hammering home the word "Watergate" is working wonders to remind older voters just how corrupt, ungovernable, and shameful a hypothetical Clinton White House would be. Since the electorate skews older, this group matters most -- Bush himself actually won the popular vote in '04 because he improved his numbers with old people by 5 points.
Among 35-64 year-olds, Bush got in the mid-50s both times, while Trump is topping out in the high 40s, maybe low 50s if enough cucks switch from Johnson. This is the only age group that he may not do as well as Bush with, because the helicopter parents are concerned with their children rather than the broader community and nation, and Trump hasn't been pushing "family values" at all. He's still winning this group, just not by as much as Bush did.
Among 18-34 year-olds, Bush got around 47% each time. Trump is currently in the mid-40s and steadily rising, so he'll probably do as well in the young group.
Given how much older this electorate will be than before, and how much greater he's doing with the older groups, Trump is easily going to do better than Bush.
Sex
Bush got in the high 40s with women both times, while Trump is in the low 40s and steadily rising. He could get to where Bush was, but I'm thinking in the mid-40s is looking more realistic. However, the would-be First Female President is not getting as much of the womens vote as Gore or Kerry did -- they got in the high 40s, while Crooked Hillary is at 48% and falling. The third party vote among women will be much greater this time.
Among men, Bush got 55% both times, and that's right where Trump is. Perhaps he could go up another point or two, but his ceiling has consistently been 55-56%. Gore only got 38% of men, which is where Hillary is now -- and her long-term ceiling is 40%. Kerry did even better at 43%, and he still lost.
Education
This is by far the biggest shift since the Bush wins. He got in the low 50s with people who had a H.S. degree or less, whereas Trump is going to end up at least 5 points higher.
For those with some college, Bush got 54% in '00 and 51% in '04, and Trump will get 51% as well.
For college degree-holders, Bush got around 50% both times, and the Democrats a few points lower, with not much third party support. Now, Hillary is getting 50%, with Trump's ceiling at 40%. That assumes 10% of the college-educated will vote third party, and I don't see that happening. So Trump could end up getting into the mid-40s, though still losing this group.
Summing up
The demographics that are relevant for the national popular vote are age and sex, which don't vary so much across the states. Trump is doing much better than Bush on both of these dimensions.
The relevance of race varies a lot by state, although here too Trump is poised to do as well or slightly better than Bush.
Education also varies in importance a lot by state, since some metro areas attract most of the college grads, while other entire states are not so heavily burdened with credentialist strivers. This is what makes Colorado the hardest to get for a Republican among the white Mountain states (excluding NM), or the West Coast, or the ACELA corridor along the East Coast.
Not as much of a problem in the Rust Belt, however, which is where the blue states that Trump is actually fighting for are located. Losing the post-grad vote will not deprive him of Michigan, although it would Massachusetts.
The Rust Belt also tends toward the whiter side and the older side (younger people leave in search of greener pastures, and there's not enough of a local boom to attract replacements from outside).
So not only is Trump going to do better in the popular vote, he's going to do better in the Electoral College than the last Republican President. No one can look at the numbers, and the geography, and conclude that Trump will do worse than Bush. And Bush won, so Trump will win -- even more big-league.
October 6, 2016
Trump improving among non-"married with children" group, vs. old Republicans
One major aspect of the Trump re-alignment that has not gotten any coverage is how the Republican vs. Democrat candidates are appealing to people of different marital status, presence of children, and so on.
Usually the Republican runs on an explicitly natalist platform, whereas Trump has sidelined the issue of abortion, doesn't talk about family values, and doesn't specifically target people who are married with children. Now it is the Democrat who is appealing to suburban parents about how problematic the other candidate's tone and words would be if they came into contact with their innocent children's ears, and what kind of role model the other candidate would set for their little dears while growing up.
Trump is focusing on making life better for all Americans, not just those who score highest on the Ned Flanders index of household type, and he's focusing mainly on class and economic issues. Hillary ought to ask her husband who wins when one candidate is speaking plainly to the plight of working class whites, while the other is a hoity-toity tone-monitor lecturing the rest of us about family values. See here for an earlier discussion.
I compared the support for Trump across various marital and household types, using the Reuters tracking poll for September 2016 and Romney's performance as recorded in the General Social Survey (a national probability sample, and the gold standard for social science research). I restricted respondents to those aged 30-49, to control for whether or not they're likely to be married, have kids at home, etc. I also added 5 points to the Reuters numbers, since they deliberately altered their methodology to penalize him by that much.
He's under-performing Romney among the married-with-children ideal by 15-20 points, but doing much better in the other types (single and never married, divorced, cohabiting, married without children, etc.), by around 5-10 points. This helps Trump because most of the 30-49 age group of voters in 2012 were not married-with-children (only 25-30%). The net effect in this age group is to add about 3 points above Romney. If he can convince the married-with-children types that fixing our broken country is more important than what words their kids hear on the internet, he could improve by 10 points above Romney in this age group.
Reuters doesn't allow us to know the ages of the children at home, but I suspect Trump is out-performing Romney among parents with babies (under 6), since that's the one married-with-children demographic that Democrats tend to win. They emphasize childcare when the kids need it most, and now Trump has stolen their thunder on that topic with his plan to make early childcare more affordable. His sub-Romney support is likely among parents of preteens and teenagers.
Trump's improvement among cohabiting boyfriend-girlfriend households, the divorced, and so on, is not due to these households spurning the ideal of nuclear household living -- as though they simply had fewer burdens and responsibilities, and wanted bigger tax cuts to pursue their materialist hedonistic lifestyles. That would be the yuppies, who are still largely Democrats.
Rather, the non-Flanders people are turning to Trump because they do want to settle down, get married, have children, raise a family, visit the neighborhood children's lemonade stands, host their kids' friends for birthday parties, and the like. But given the downward class mobility that has plagued more and more young people as good-paying jobs have been off-shored or undercut by immigrants working here, and relentless mergers and acquisitions have concentrated the good jobs into fewer households, it's become harder and harder to begin the process of family formation.
Over 10 years ago, Steve Sailer wrote about affordable family formation being the key to the GOP's future, since Republicans did better with voters who were married, had more kids, and lived in areas with cheaper housing (such as in wide-open areas that are easier to develop than land lying next to a major body of water). His policy implications, however, were restricted to lowering costs rather than also raising incomes, and focused only on immigration and deregulation of building (fewer immigrants, less demand for housing, cheaper rents and mortgages).
The main driver of stagnating and falling real incomes over the past 40 years has not been immigration, which has made the trend even worse, but the disappearance of high-paying jobs. That is due to both the off-shoring of jobs (especially manufacturing, which paid many times the minimum wage), and the consolidation of good jobs via the trend toward monopolization in the era of deregulation mania.
However, using trade agreements and tariffs to bring those good jobs back here would hurt corporate profits (the very reason they were off-shored in the first place). So would breaking up big industries and blocking most mergers and acquisitions. Here we see the trade-off between favoring business interests and affordable family formation -- beyond the wage-lowering effect of businesses bringing in cheap unskilled labor. Even if we kicked all the immigrants out and shut the door, we would still have to take on the Chamber of Commerce in order for more citizens to realize the American dream in their family lives.
Under the Reagan-era coalition of the GOP, business interests were inviolable, and an elitist agenda was pursued. Downward mobility meant you were a sucker who should just go vote for the welfare-dispensing Democrats. With the populist re-alignment of the Trump movement, business interests will become subordinated to the well-being of all citizens. Now it is coherent and popular to discuss both the cost-lowering solution of immigration restriction, as well as the income-raising solution of a more protectionist trade policy and trust-busting attitude.
The natural "golden age" to look back toward for affordable family formation is the Baby Boom of the early post-WWII period. There was minimal immigration, but more importantly there was soaring prosperity (falling inequality) due to protectionist trade policy, a distrust of monopoly, and collective bargaining by labor unions. Tightly regulated banking was not very profitable, while most recent high school graduates could earn enough at a manufacturing plant to get married, buy a house, and start having children.
Only by proposing a fundamental re-structuring of the economy -- re-industrialization -- has Trump been able to succeed where the old Republican party had so pitifully failed in promoting affordable family formation.
Bernie Sanders was on the right track, too, and also galvanized the downwardly mobile and stagnant "young" people ("when you're over 70, under 40 will seem young"). However, he didn't focus quite enough on re-industrialization, almost writing it off as fantasy to return to the good ol' 1950s and '60s.
He focused on maintaining or extending the knowledge economy, just making it cost less to get a degree. But what are they supposed to do with that degree? Not everybody is going to become a professor, lawyer, or doctor. Raise the minimum wage for overly educated service workers? Fewer would be hired. Better to have higher-paying jobs being produced because the work is valuable to the company owners and the end consumers -- assembling a truck, not assembling a taco.
As Trump's plan of re-industrialization and trust-busting bears fruit, I think more and more of the Sanders supporters will come around to the new Republican party.
Usually the Republican runs on an explicitly natalist platform, whereas Trump has sidelined the issue of abortion, doesn't talk about family values, and doesn't specifically target people who are married with children. Now it is the Democrat who is appealing to suburban parents about how problematic the other candidate's tone and words would be if they came into contact with their innocent children's ears, and what kind of role model the other candidate would set for their little dears while growing up.
Trump is focusing on making life better for all Americans, not just those who score highest on the Ned Flanders index of household type, and he's focusing mainly on class and economic issues. Hillary ought to ask her husband who wins when one candidate is speaking plainly to the plight of working class whites, while the other is a hoity-toity tone-monitor lecturing the rest of us about family values. See here for an earlier discussion.
I compared the support for Trump across various marital and household types, using the Reuters tracking poll for September 2016 and Romney's performance as recorded in the General Social Survey (a national probability sample, and the gold standard for social science research). I restricted respondents to those aged 30-49, to control for whether or not they're likely to be married, have kids at home, etc. I also added 5 points to the Reuters numbers, since they deliberately altered their methodology to penalize him by that much.
He's under-performing Romney among the married-with-children ideal by 15-20 points, but doing much better in the other types (single and never married, divorced, cohabiting, married without children, etc.), by around 5-10 points. This helps Trump because most of the 30-49 age group of voters in 2012 were not married-with-children (only 25-30%). The net effect in this age group is to add about 3 points above Romney. If he can convince the married-with-children types that fixing our broken country is more important than what words their kids hear on the internet, he could improve by 10 points above Romney in this age group.
Reuters doesn't allow us to know the ages of the children at home, but I suspect Trump is out-performing Romney among parents with babies (under 6), since that's the one married-with-children demographic that Democrats tend to win. They emphasize childcare when the kids need it most, and now Trump has stolen their thunder on that topic with his plan to make early childcare more affordable. His sub-Romney support is likely among parents of preteens and teenagers.
Trump's improvement among cohabiting boyfriend-girlfriend households, the divorced, and so on, is not due to these households spurning the ideal of nuclear household living -- as though they simply had fewer burdens and responsibilities, and wanted bigger tax cuts to pursue their materialist hedonistic lifestyles. That would be the yuppies, who are still largely Democrats.
Rather, the non-Flanders people are turning to Trump because they do want to settle down, get married, have children, raise a family, visit the neighborhood children's lemonade stands, host their kids' friends for birthday parties, and the like. But given the downward class mobility that has plagued more and more young people as good-paying jobs have been off-shored or undercut by immigrants working here, and relentless mergers and acquisitions have concentrated the good jobs into fewer households, it's become harder and harder to begin the process of family formation.
Over 10 years ago, Steve Sailer wrote about affordable family formation being the key to the GOP's future, since Republicans did better with voters who were married, had more kids, and lived in areas with cheaper housing (such as in wide-open areas that are easier to develop than land lying next to a major body of water). His policy implications, however, were restricted to lowering costs rather than also raising incomes, and focused only on immigration and deregulation of building (fewer immigrants, less demand for housing, cheaper rents and mortgages).
The main driver of stagnating and falling real incomes over the past 40 years has not been immigration, which has made the trend even worse, but the disappearance of high-paying jobs. That is due to both the off-shoring of jobs (especially manufacturing, which paid many times the minimum wage), and the consolidation of good jobs via the trend toward monopolization in the era of deregulation mania.
However, using trade agreements and tariffs to bring those good jobs back here would hurt corporate profits (the very reason they were off-shored in the first place). So would breaking up big industries and blocking most mergers and acquisitions. Here we see the trade-off between favoring business interests and affordable family formation -- beyond the wage-lowering effect of businesses bringing in cheap unskilled labor. Even if we kicked all the immigrants out and shut the door, we would still have to take on the Chamber of Commerce in order for more citizens to realize the American dream in their family lives.
Under the Reagan-era coalition of the GOP, business interests were inviolable, and an elitist agenda was pursued. Downward mobility meant you were a sucker who should just go vote for the welfare-dispensing Democrats. With the populist re-alignment of the Trump movement, business interests will become subordinated to the well-being of all citizens. Now it is coherent and popular to discuss both the cost-lowering solution of immigration restriction, as well as the income-raising solution of a more protectionist trade policy and trust-busting attitude.
The natural "golden age" to look back toward for affordable family formation is the Baby Boom of the early post-WWII period. There was minimal immigration, but more importantly there was soaring prosperity (falling inequality) due to protectionist trade policy, a distrust of monopoly, and collective bargaining by labor unions. Tightly regulated banking was not very profitable, while most recent high school graduates could earn enough at a manufacturing plant to get married, buy a house, and start having children.
Only by proposing a fundamental re-structuring of the economy -- re-industrialization -- has Trump been able to succeed where the old Republican party had so pitifully failed in promoting affordable family formation.
Bernie Sanders was on the right track, too, and also galvanized the downwardly mobile and stagnant "young" people ("when you're over 70, under 40 will seem young"). However, he didn't focus quite enough on re-industrialization, almost writing it off as fantasy to return to the good ol' 1950s and '60s.
He focused on maintaining or extending the knowledge economy, just making it cost less to get a degree. But what are they supposed to do with that degree? Not everybody is going to become a professor, lawyer, or doctor. Raise the minimum wage for overly educated service workers? Fewer would be hired. Better to have higher-paying jobs being produced because the work is valuable to the company owners and the end consumers -- assembling a truck, not assembling a taco.
As Trump's plan of re-industrialization and trust-busting bears fruit, I think more and more of the Sanders supporters will come around to the new Republican party.
September 15, 2016
The minimal role of infrequent voters, 1972 to 2012
An earlier post on the large role of crossover voters showed that they have swung several elections away from the winner of the race among partisans only. We're ready for another spike in crossover voting, as independents are tired of the Democrats and are ready to put the other party in power. Converting formerly reliable Democrat voters into Trump voters is part of a greater re-alignment.
I still don't see that leading to a landslide -- meaning 350 or 400 or more in the Electoral College. Some states will be stubbornly resisting re-alignment, and there isn't a large third party vote that will steal primarily from the Democrats, so we can rule out the states needed to carry a true landslide -- California, New York, Illinois, etc.
Others are convinced that a landslide is coming, on the basis of infrequent voters coming out of the woodwork, and in all sorts of states. I've already addressed the basic flaws of the "monster vote" model in this post. To reiterate: you can't project primary turnout into general turnout, using the same multiplier across the years. The likely outcome of the popular vote is a close or clear win for Trump, but not a landslide.
To alleviate some fears about what happens if no monster vote shows up, let's take a look back and see if such a massive turnout of infrequent voters was even necessary in other recent landslides.
The data are from the General Social Survey (going back to 1972), and unlike most data, allow us to study whether a person voted in two consecutive elections, and if so, who they voted for. This is a national probability sample, and the gold standard in social science research.
How rarely does someone have to vote in order to qualify as "coming out of the woodwork"? Well, they have to at least have skipped the previous election. If you want a more restrictive cut-off, their role will be even smaller than what is presented here.
First, how common were infrequent voters in the overall electorate? The graph below shows what percent of voters had not voted in the previous election:
There are three clear peaks in 1972, 1992, and 2008 -- which makes it seem like a cycle with roughly 4 to 5 elections in between peaks. If that is true, then we will not see another peak in 2016, only 2 elections after the most recent peak. But it will be higher than the low in 2012, somewhere between 10-15%, probably on the lower side. The peaks themselves have all maxed out at 15% of the electorate.
It's possible that the present will break the mold of the past -- say, 20-25% of all voters having sat out the last election. But we ought to have seen signs of that by now. There should be tens of millions of newly registered voters who can be predicted to vote Trump, but there are not.
What effect have they had on the outcome? The graph below shows the popular vote among frequent voters (in blue) and with both frequent and infrequent voters (in orange). Positive values show Democrat victory, negative values a Republican victory:
Notice that no election was switched from a clear win for one party among frequent voters to the other party winning once the infrequents showed up. The orange and blue boxes for each year lie on the same side of the axis. That's despite the three peaks where their influence ought to have been more visible.
In the 1972 peak, the infrequents actually stole about 5 points from Nixon's margin, and he still won in a landslide.
In the 2008 peak, the infrequents added to Obama's margin, but not by much and were not necessary to blow out McCain.
There is one year, however, where the infrequents broke a tie among frequent voters -- 1992, one of the peaks, where they gave Bill Clinton a narrow win in the two-party popular vote. In the post on crossover voters, we saw that the partisan voters in '92 gave a decisive win to Bush, but that the crossovers put it into a tie.
So Clinton winning in '92 relied on two bankshots -- not so surprising since he had to unseat an incumbent, and after decades of losses for Democrats (Carter's one-term win in '76 was one of the closest ever). Both of these feats might not be so miraculous, given that it was the turning point for the culture war era, and he was clearly on the liberal side that would govern for most of the period.
Worth noting: the infrequents in 1980 reduced Reagan's margin. This shows that the only first-term landslide under consideration did not rely on the monster vote, but as shown in the last post, on the massive crossover vote -- the Reagan Democrats, not the Reagan First Timers.
To summarize, the infrequent voters are generally a smaller share of the electorate than the crossover voters (except in some 2nd-term elections when crossovers are taking a breather), and their effect on the outcome has been far less important. Focus less on them to predict the outcome.
As for 2016, all signs point to Trump doing better in the crossover race than in the partisan race, and better among infrequents than among frequents. He's going to win based on winning over the "voters who didn't vote for your party last time".
There is one other group of unusual voters -- those who were too young to vote last time -- but they play no role at all, and are mostly like the infrequent voters. We'll take a quick look at them over the weekend just for the sake of completeness.
GSS variables: presYY (year), voteYY (year)
I still don't see that leading to a landslide -- meaning 350 or 400 or more in the Electoral College. Some states will be stubbornly resisting re-alignment, and there isn't a large third party vote that will steal primarily from the Democrats, so we can rule out the states needed to carry a true landslide -- California, New York, Illinois, etc.
Others are convinced that a landslide is coming, on the basis of infrequent voters coming out of the woodwork, and in all sorts of states. I've already addressed the basic flaws of the "monster vote" model in this post. To reiterate: you can't project primary turnout into general turnout, using the same multiplier across the years. The likely outcome of the popular vote is a close or clear win for Trump, but not a landslide.
To alleviate some fears about what happens if no monster vote shows up, let's take a look back and see if such a massive turnout of infrequent voters was even necessary in other recent landslides.
The data are from the General Social Survey (going back to 1972), and unlike most data, allow us to study whether a person voted in two consecutive elections, and if so, who they voted for. This is a national probability sample, and the gold standard in social science research.
How rarely does someone have to vote in order to qualify as "coming out of the woodwork"? Well, they have to at least have skipped the previous election. If you want a more restrictive cut-off, their role will be even smaller than what is presented here.
First, how common were infrequent voters in the overall electorate? The graph below shows what percent of voters had not voted in the previous election:
There are three clear peaks in 1972, 1992, and 2008 -- which makes it seem like a cycle with roughly 4 to 5 elections in between peaks. If that is true, then we will not see another peak in 2016, only 2 elections after the most recent peak. But it will be higher than the low in 2012, somewhere between 10-15%, probably on the lower side. The peaks themselves have all maxed out at 15% of the electorate.
It's possible that the present will break the mold of the past -- say, 20-25% of all voters having sat out the last election. But we ought to have seen signs of that by now. There should be tens of millions of newly registered voters who can be predicted to vote Trump, but there are not.
What effect have they had on the outcome? The graph below shows the popular vote among frequent voters (in blue) and with both frequent and infrequent voters (in orange). Positive values show Democrat victory, negative values a Republican victory:
Notice that no election was switched from a clear win for one party among frequent voters to the other party winning once the infrequents showed up. The orange and blue boxes for each year lie on the same side of the axis. That's despite the three peaks where their influence ought to have been more visible.
In the 1972 peak, the infrequents actually stole about 5 points from Nixon's margin, and he still won in a landslide.
In the 2008 peak, the infrequents added to Obama's margin, but not by much and were not necessary to blow out McCain.
There is one year, however, where the infrequents broke a tie among frequent voters -- 1992, one of the peaks, where they gave Bill Clinton a narrow win in the two-party popular vote. In the post on crossover voters, we saw that the partisan voters in '92 gave a decisive win to Bush, but that the crossovers put it into a tie.
So Clinton winning in '92 relied on two bankshots -- not so surprising since he had to unseat an incumbent, and after decades of losses for Democrats (Carter's one-term win in '76 was one of the closest ever). Both of these feats might not be so miraculous, given that it was the turning point for the culture war era, and he was clearly on the liberal side that would govern for most of the period.
Worth noting: the infrequents in 1980 reduced Reagan's margin. This shows that the only first-term landslide under consideration did not rely on the monster vote, but as shown in the last post, on the massive crossover vote -- the Reagan Democrats, not the Reagan First Timers.
To summarize, the infrequent voters are generally a smaller share of the electorate than the crossover voters (except in some 2nd-term elections when crossovers are taking a breather), and their effect on the outcome has been far less important. Focus less on them to predict the outcome.
As for 2016, all signs point to Trump doing better in the crossover race than in the partisan race, and better among infrequents than among frequents. He's going to win based on winning over the "voters who didn't vote for your party last time".
There is one other group of unusual voters -- those who were too young to vote last time -- but they play no role at all, and are mostly like the infrequent voters. We'll take a quick look at them over the weekend just for the sake of completeness.
GSS variables: presYY (year), voteYY (year)
September 12, 2016
Crossover voters transform elections: Their turnout and impact, 1972 to 2012
An earlier post discussed the false assumptions of the "monster vote" model, which expects tens of millions of Republican voters who haven't voted in a long time or ever. That put into question whether or not 2016 can be a landslide election.
But are infrequent voters the only source of a landslide? I decided to look into the composition of the electorate going back as far as the data allows, 1972, to see who the crucial groups were in the landslide elections. The data come from the national probability sample in the General Social Survey, which allows us to study the voting behavior of the same person across two elections.
Infrequent voters have not mattered except in close elections, and often their effect goes against the landslide winner. But we'll get to those infrequent voters in another post.
The group that has the largest effect of up-ending the status quo is not an underground army of infrequent voters who swoop in like a deus ex machina, but frequent voters who decide to change sides from who they voted for last time. Although we do live in polarized partisan times, it's a mistake to dismiss the effect of those who do not simply vote for the same party every single time.
The graph below shows what percent of the electorate were crossover voters. First they have to have voted in the previous election, and then they have to have voted for a different party in the current election. Only Democrats and Republicans are counted.
There is a clear decline over time in the willingness to switch your party -- a sign of the well-attested rise in partisanship since the 1980s. About 20% of all voters in 1980 were crossovers, and it's become hard to break 15% since then.
Still, there is a clear cycle around that trend, roughly showing when the voters wanted to dump the incumbent and change the guard. Usually when there's a new party, the voters give it a chance and don't cross over so much when it's up for re-election. When the party has had two terms, then they'll cross over again and change which party is in office.
Ousting a one-term party shows up in the consecutive rise in crossovers from 1976 to 1980. First they wanted to be done with the Nixon administration, crossing over to elect Carter. But then he turned out to be a terrible replacement, so they crossed over even more in 1980 to elect Reagan.
Conversely, voters were fine with the Republicans staying in power during the '80s and crossed over less and less.
Although Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, the spike in crossover voters may show how he won back the Electoral College, through converting many voters who voted for Clinton in the South and Appalachia.
The cycle sure looks like it's about to swing back up again in 2016, as the non-partisans seem to have had enough of the Obama years, especially when they would have to choose Crooked Hillary as their third-term Democrat President. If this year is operating under the same constraints as there have been since the polarizing '80s, the crossover vote will be between 10-15% of the electorate, probably on the higher side. Without the non-partisan climate that prevailed before the '80s, we probably won't see 20% or higher.
How great of an effect have the crossovers had? In other words, how would the election have turned out if you were only allowed to vote for the same party as last time -- and if you wanted to cross over, you stayed home?
That scenario, where only partisans vote, is shown by the blue boxes in the graph below (positive values show a win for the Democrat, negative values a win for the Republican). By allowing people to cross over, as well as stick with the same party, the outcome is shown in orange. These are the outcomes among frequent voters only, but the infrequent voters have not decided any election other than 1992.
Of the 11 elections, 3 have been transformed from one party winning to the other -- shown by the blue and the orange results lying on opposite sides of the axis -- one was reduced from a solid win to a tie, and another tipped from a tie to a solid win.
In 1976, voters who went Nixon-Ford were a lot more common than those who went McGovern-Carter, not only because there weren't many McGovern voters to begin with, but because it was a more natural fit to vote for Nixon and his VP, whereas McGovern was a leftist and Carter a deregulating born-again Southerner. However, his non-leftist stance allowed Carter to draw a large number of former Nixon voters. Given the high rate of crossovers (from the first graph), it was enough to change the outcome from a win for Ford among partisans, to a narrow win for Carter overall.
In 1980, the partisan race was won by Carter because it was more natural to vote Carter twice than to vote Ford and then Reagan, who were from very different wings of the Republican Party (liberal/moderate vs. conservative), and who had faced off in the primaries of the previous election. However, the widespread disappointment with the Democrat -- "Anybody But Carter" -- led to a surge in crossover voting (first graph). That was enough to change the overall election toward Reagan's victory.
These are the famous Reagan Democrats, and that is what won him the election, and in a landslide -- not voters who had not shown up in earlier elections.
In 2000, partisan Democrats outnumbered partisan Republicans because there was positive momentum for the Democrats (who did win the popular vote a third time in a row), and because Gore was Clinton's VP -- a natural progression to follow. But Bush drew a large number of former Clinton voters, primarily in states with counties in Appalachia and in the lower Mississippi region. Perhaps they felt like eight years in the White House had turned Gore into an elitist Eastern liberal (despite hailing from Tennessee), while Bush had a more folksy Southern-ish appeal.
Only by reclaiming these Clinton voters from the Greater South did Bush manage to turn around the Electoral College.
In 1992, a similar dynamic played out as in '76. Among partisans, it was natural to go Bush-Bush than it was to switch from a typical Northeastern liberal like Dukakis to a Southern pro-business moderate like Clinton. Not to mention there were many more Bush '88 voters than Dukakis '88 voters. This gave Bush a decisive win among the partisans. However, like Carter, Clinton appealed to Republicans who were Southern, socially and culturally moderate or conservative, and who wanted a more pro-business than tax-and-spend economic approach.
This enormous crossover appeal allowed him to declare a draw among frequent voters. The infrequent voters would then decide it narrowly in his favor in the popular vote. The regional nature of his crossover appeal made it so that he won more handily in the EC by picking off states in the Greater South.
In 2008, the dynamic was the opposite, with the partisan race more or less tied. Going Bush-McCain was natural as both were neo-cons, Kerry-Obama was too since both were Anybody But Neo-cons, and the size of Bush and Kerry voters were similar the last time. What made this election such a blowout was the crossover from Bush '04 to Obama '08. If you voted in both elections and chose Bush in '04, you had a 25% chance of defecting to Obama, and among Obama voters, Bush '04 voters made up 25% of his coalition (these don't have to be the same number).
Why didn't the Bush voters who defected to Obama choose Kerry in the first place? They might not have thought the Iraq War, the housing bubble, and so on, had been going so badly by '04. But with another four years of neo-con disaster, they could no longer in good conscience vote for McCain and went with Obama by default.
They are the weakest element of his coalition, and will mostly be voting Trump this time -- they wanted a Republican who was against neo-conservatism and Wall Street bailouts, and settled for Obama. And they are a very large chunk of the Obama coalition, at 25%, meaning their return to the Republican Party will be a profound disruption to the so-called "blue wall" of safe Democrat states, even if "only" a majority and not all of them migrate back to red.
The countervailing movement will be the tiny handful of hardcore neo-cons who will defect to Clinton, who never met a war she didn't like, and the somewhat larger number of Joe Scarborough yuppies who feel like supporting a populist would kill their attempts to climb higher up the status pyramid.
But it is clear from polls that the crossover votes heavily favor Trump -- around 15% of Obama voters support Trump, compared to 7% of Romney voters supporting Clinton. And Obama voters outnumber Romney voters, meaning Trump's larger percentage is drawn from a larger population too.
This election will not be decided by an outpouring of folks who rarely vote, but by those who have voted recently and are tired of where the Obama administration has taken things -- particularly those back East, outside of the Sun Belt where all the trendy people have been moving to. In the Great Lakes, Mid-Atlantic, and New England, masses of left-behind voters are up for a change of pace, even a radical one. Things have been going the wrong way for so long, that's what it's going to take.
GSS variables: presYY (year), voteYY (year)
But are infrequent voters the only source of a landslide? I decided to look into the composition of the electorate going back as far as the data allows, 1972, to see who the crucial groups were in the landslide elections. The data come from the national probability sample in the General Social Survey, which allows us to study the voting behavior of the same person across two elections.
Infrequent voters have not mattered except in close elections, and often their effect goes against the landslide winner. But we'll get to those infrequent voters in another post.
The group that has the largest effect of up-ending the status quo is not an underground army of infrequent voters who swoop in like a deus ex machina, but frequent voters who decide to change sides from who they voted for last time. Although we do live in polarized partisan times, it's a mistake to dismiss the effect of those who do not simply vote for the same party every single time.
The graph below shows what percent of the electorate were crossover voters. First they have to have voted in the previous election, and then they have to have voted for a different party in the current election. Only Democrats and Republicans are counted.
There is a clear decline over time in the willingness to switch your party -- a sign of the well-attested rise in partisanship since the 1980s. About 20% of all voters in 1980 were crossovers, and it's become hard to break 15% since then.
Still, there is a clear cycle around that trend, roughly showing when the voters wanted to dump the incumbent and change the guard. Usually when there's a new party, the voters give it a chance and don't cross over so much when it's up for re-election. When the party has had two terms, then they'll cross over again and change which party is in office.
Ousting a one-term party shows up in the consecutive rise in crossovers from 1976 to 1980. First they wanted to be done with the Nixon administration, crossing over to elect Carter. But then he turned out to be a terrible replacement, so they crossed over even more in 1980 to elect Reagan.
Conversely, voters were fine with the Republicans staying in power during the '80s and crossed over less and less.
Although Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, the spike in crossover voters may show how he won back the Electoral College, through converting many voters who voted for Clinton in the South and Appalachia.
The cycle sure looks like it's about to swing back up again in 2016, as the non-partisans seem to have had enough of the Obama years, especially when they would have to choose Crooked Hillary as their third-term Democrat President. If this year is operating under the same constraints as there have been since the polarizing '80s, the crossover vote will be between 10-15% of the electorate, probably on the higher side. Without the non-partisan climate that prevailed before the '80s, we probably won't see 20% or higher.
How great of an effect have the crossovers had? In other words, how would the election have turned out if you were only allowed to vote for the same party as last time -- and if you wanted to cross over, you stayed home?
That scenario, where only partisans vote, is shown by the blue boxes in the graph below (positive values show a win for the Democrat, negative values a win for the Republican). By allowing people to cross over, as well as stick with the same party, the outcome is shown in orange. These are the outcomes among frequent voters only, but the infrequent voters have not decided any election other than 1992.
Of the 11 elections, 3 have been transformed from one party winning to the other -- shown by the blue and the orange results lying on opposite sides of the axis -- one was reduced from a solid win to a tie, and another tipped from a tie to a solid win.
In 1976, voters who went Nixon-Ford were a lot more common than those who went McGovern-Carter, not only because there weren't many McGovern voters to begin with, but because it was a more natural fit to vote for Nixon and his VP, whereas McGovern was a leftist and Carter a deregulating born-again Southerner. However, his non-leftist stance allowed Carter to draw a large number of former Nixon voters. Given the high rate of crossovers (from the first graph), it was enough to change the outcome from a win for Ford among partisans, to a narrow win for Carter overall.
In 1980, the partisan race was won by Carter because it was more natural to vote Carter twice than to vote Ford and then Reagan, who were from very different wings of the Republican Party (liberal/moderate vs. conservative), and who had faced off in the primaries of the previous election. However, the widespread disappointment with the Democrat -- "Anybody But Carter" -- led to a surge in crossover voting (first graph). That was enough to change the overall election toward Reagan's victory.
These are the famous Reagan Democrats, and that is what won him the election, and in a landslide -- not voters who had not shown up in earlier elections.
In 2000, partisan Democrats outnumbered partisan Republicans because there was positive momentum for the Democrats (who did win the popular vote a third time in a row), and because Gore was Clinton's VP -- a natural progression to follow. But Bush drew a large number of former Clinton voters, primarily in states with counties in Appalachia and in the lower Mississippi region. Perhaps they felt like eight years in the White House had turned Gore into an elitist Eastern liberal (despite hailing from Tennessee), while Bush had a more folksy Southern-ish appeal.
Only by reclaiming these Clinton voters from the Greater South did Bush manage to turn around the Electoral College.
In 1992, a similar dynamic played out as in '76. Among partisans, it was natural to go Bush-Bush than it was to switch from a typical Northeastern liberal like Dukakis to a Southern pro-business moderate like Clinton. Not to mention there were many more Bush '88 voters than Dukakis '88 voters. This gave Bush a decisive win among the partisans. However, like Carter, Clinton appealed to Republicans who were Southern, socially and culturally moderate or conservative, and who wanted a more pro-business than tax-and-spend economic approach.
This enormous crossover appeal allowed him to declare a draw among frequent voters. The infrequent voters would then decide it narrowly in his favor in the popular vote. The regional nature of his crossover appeal made it so that he won more handily in the EC by picking off states in the Greater South.
In 2008, the dynamic was the opposite, with the partisan race more or less tied. Going Bush-McCain was natural as both were neo-cons, Kerry-Obama was too since both were Anybody But Neo-cons, and the size of Bush and Kerry voters were similar the last time. What made this election such a blowout was the crossover from Bush '04 to Obama '08. If you voted in both elections and chose Bush in '04, you had a 25% chance of defecting to Obama, and among Obama voters, Bush '04 voters made up 25% of his coalition (these don't have to be the same number).
Why didn't the Bush voters who defected to Obama choose Kerry in the first place? They might not have thought the Iraq War, the housing bubble, and so on, had been going so badly by '04. But with another four years of neo-con disaster, they could no longer in good conscience vote for McCain and went with Obama by default.
They are the weakest element of his coalition, and will mostly be voting Trump this time -- they wanted a Republican who was against neo-conservatism and Wall Street bailouts, and settled for Obama. And they are a very large chunk of the Obama coalition, at 25%, meaning their return to the Republican Party will be a profound disruption to the so-called "blue wall" of safe Democrat states, even if "only" a majority and not all of them migrate back to red.
The countervailing movement will be the tiny handful of hardcore neo-cons who will defect to Clinton, who never met a war she didn't like, and the somewhat larger number of Joe Scarborough yuppies who feel like supporting a populist would kill their attempts to climb higher up the status pyramid.
But it is clear from polls that the crossover votes heavily favor Trump -- around 15% of Obama voters support Trump, compared to 7% of Romney voters supporting Clinton. And Obama voters outnumber Romney voters, meaning Trump's larger percentage is drawn from a larger population too.
This election will not be decided by an outpouring of folks who rarely vote, but by those who have voted recently and are tired of where the Obama administration has taken things -- particularly those back East, outside of the Sun Belt where all the trendy people have been moving to. In the Great Lakes, Mid-Atlantic, and New England, masses of left-behind voters are up for a change of pace, even a radical one. Things have been going the wrong way for so long, that's what it's going to take.
GSS variables: presYY (year), voteYY (year)
September 8, 2016
Where does the electoral pendulum swing? Ask the voters who stayed home last time
The greatest obstacle that Hillary Clinton faces is winning a third consecutive term for the same party. In the last post we saw that everyone who pulled that off was an incumbent in the outgoing administration, and a high-ranking member like President, VP, etc. Hillary is a non-incumbent, which hinders her serving as a bridge of continuity, and she was Secretary of State, a role that has not been a launching pad toward the Presidency since the early 1800s, when it was of greater prestige than the VP.
Now we're going to look more at the idea of momentum that carries the same party from winning one election to the next. The basic idea is that the party has become more popular from the first to the second, an upward trend that could deliver victory in the third election.
The common way to measure this is by looking at the share of the popular vote -- if the party got 51% the first time and rose to 57% the second time, they seem to be on a roll. If they won the first time with 57% and fell to 51% in their second win, that suggests their popularity is evaporating and will not last to secure a third win.
But it turns out this is not entirely accurate. I'll be looking only at the elections back to 1972, because the data-set that the new model is based on only goes back that far. We'll just look at who won the popular vote, since that usually means they won the election. When we say "won," we mean the popular vote.
There have been 6 elections back through 1972 that were the second term of the same party, which allows us to see if they went on to win a third time. How good of a prediction is "gaining share of popular vote"?
In 1972, the Nixon landslide was a major improvement over his narrow win in '68. That suggests soaring popularity for Republicans, which ought to have led them to victory again in '76 -- but the Democrats won instead.
In 1984, the Reagan landslide was up even higher than his earlier landslide in '80. This predicts a win for Republicans in '88, and that did in fact happen.
In 1988, Bush's popular vote was lower than Reagan's in '84, and about what it was in '80 (adjusting for the third party vote). His Electoral College win was smaller than either of Reagan's. That predicts a loss for the fourth election in '92 -- and they did indeed lose it to the Democrats.
In 1996, Clinton's re-election improved from his first win, suggesting a third win in '00 -- and Gore did indeed win the popular vote (though not the EC).
In 2000, Gore's popular vote was down from Clinton's in '96, and far lower in the EC, suggesting that the Democrats would lose the next time -- and in '04 it was Bush who won the popular vote.
In 2004, Bush improved on his showing in '00, predicting a third term in '08 -- yet the Republicans got blown out.
So, the measure works in 4 out of 6 cases, which isn't bad but isn't great either.
For what it's worth, Obama declined in the popular vote (and EC) from '08 to '12, predicting a loss for Democrats in '16.
I stumbled upon an even better measure by investigating the behavior and the effects of voters who are "new" to a party and therefore represent changing directions driven by those who are not partisan loyalists -- having crossed over from the other party, having sat the last election out, or having been too young to vote last time. I'll be writing much more on these topics, but for now let's look at how they predict what happens in the attempt at a third consecutive win for the party.
It turns out that we can predict the fate of that third attempt by looking at the second win, and ask how the "infrequent" voters leaned -- meaning those who could have voted in the last election, but did not, and are now getting off the sidelines to participate. Something motivated them beyond typical partisan loyalty, and that something could be a sign of which way the wind is blowing.
We're using the General Social Survey because it allows us to get the voting behavior of a person across two separate elections.
We'll start with the level of support that, say, the Democrats enjoyed among the "frequent" voters -- those who voted in the last election, and the current one as well. That captures where the zeitgeist already is, whereas the infrequent voters will tell us where it is headed. So we take the difference in support levels for the Democrats, comparing the infrequent against the frequent voters. Compared to the usual voters, how much more Democrat-leaning are the infrequent voters?
For example, in 1972 the frequent voters went 35% for the Democrat, while the infrequent voters went 52%, for a difference of 17 points favoring the Democrat among the infrequents. The graph below shows how Democrat-biased the infrequent voters were, compared to the frequents, where negative values mean they were Republican-biased compared to the frequents.
Let's look at those 6 elections again, and see how this measure of momentum performs. It makes the same correct predictions as the "increasing popular vote" measure does for '84 (R in '88), '88 (D in '92), '96 (D in '00), and '00 (R in '04).
But in the two that the crude measure missed -- '72 and '04 -- it correctly identifies flagging momentum. In '72, the share of the popular vote may have shot up for the Republican, but those who came off of the sidelines actually favored the Democrat (and in an election when he would get demolished). That predicted the failure of the third attempt in '76.
Later in '04, when Bush had improved his popular vote, the voters who had sat it out in '00 decided that they couldn't sit idly by this time, and joined in the effort to dump Bush. As in '72, they failed at their current task, but this counter-movement showed the way forward, and the Republican would lose big-time in the attempted third term in '08.
For what it's worth, this model shows a loss of momentum between Obama's first and second wins. Those who sat it out in '08, but showed up in '12, were more Republican-leaning than the frequent voters. That suggests discontent with the Democrat administration already by their second win, making a third win all but impossible.
This model does not perfectly predict whether a first win will lead to a second win. For example, the infrequent voters in '76 were Democrat-leaning compared to frequents, yet they lost massively in Carter's re-election bid in '80. The infrequents in Reagan's first win were also Democrat-leaning, yet he won re-election handily in '84.
Still, in 8 of the 10 elections, the behavior of infrequents does predict who wins the next time. But those bungled predictions from '76 and '80 are rather damning failures -- missing the Reagan landslides in '80 and '84.
Why do infrequents perfectly predict from a second to a third, or a third to a fourth, but not necessarily from a first to a second? I think these folks who tend to sit things out will let the first term of the party have a chance to do well. After having four years of results to judge them by, they'll come out and give a referendum.
Remember, this does not block the incumbent party right away -- they were biased toward McGovern in '72, Dukakis in '88, and Kerry in '04. Instead, it reveals a stalling momentum, that the people who generally pay little mind to politics are upset enough with the status quo that they're actually participating this time.
On the other hand, if these infrequents make a point of leaving the house this time around just to support the incumbent party, that means even the election-averse citizens are eager for more of the same, and the party has enough momentum to win another term the next time. The infrequents were biased toward Reagan in '84 and Clinton in '96, which heralded popular vote wins for the incumbent party in '88 and '00.
For predicting the 2016 outcome, both measures -- trend in popular vote and bias of infrequent voters -- agree that there is no momentum going from '08 to '12, putting a third win out of reach for the Democrats.
GSS variables: presYY (year), voteYY (year)
Now we're going to look more at the idea of momentum that carries the same party from winning one election to the next. The basic idea is that the party has become more popular from the first to the second, an upward trend that could deliver victory in the third election.
The common way to measure this is by looking at the share of the popular vote -- if the party got 51% the first time and rose to 57% the second time, they seem to be on a roll. If they won the first time with 57% and fell to 51% in their second win, that suggests their popularity is evaporating and will not last to secure a third win.
But it turns out this is not entirely accurate. I'll be looking only at the elections back to 1972, because the data-set that the new model is based on only goes back that far. We'll just look at who won the popular vote, since that usually means they won the election. When we say "won," we mean the popular vote.
There have been 6 elections back through 1972 that were the second term of the same party, which allows us to see if they went on to win a third time. How good of a prediction is "gaining share of popular vote"?
In 1972, the Nixon landslide was a major improvement over his narrow win in '68. That suggests soaring popularity for Republicans, which ought to have led them to victory again in '76 -- but the Democrats won instead.
In 1984, the Reagan landslide was up even higher than his earlier landslide in '80. This predicts a win for Republicans in '88, and that did in fact happen.
In 1988, Bush's popular vote was lower than Reagan's in '84, and about what it was in '80 (adjusting for the third party vote). His Electoral College win was smaller than either of Reagan's. That predicts a loss for the fourth election in '92 -- and they did indeed lose it to the Democrats.
In 1996, Clinton's re-election improved from his first win, suggesting a third win in '00 -- and Gore did indeed win the popular vote (though not the EC).
In 2000, Gore's popular vote was down from Clinton's in '96, and far lower in the EC, suggesting that the Democrats would lose the next time -- and in '04 it was Bush who won the popular vote.
In 2004, Bush improved on his showing in '00, predicting a third term in '08 -- yet the Republicans got blown out.
So, the measure works in 4 out of 6 cases, which isn't bad but isn't great either.
For what it's worth, Obama declined in the popular vote (and EC) from '08 to '12, predicting a loss for Democrats in '16.
I stumbled upon an even better measure by investigating the behavior and the effects of voters who are "new" to a party and therefore represent changing directions driven by those who are not partisan loyalists -- having crossed over from the other party, having sat the last election out, or having been too young to vote last time. I'll be writing much more on these topics, but for now let's look at how they predict what happens in the attempt at a third consecutive win for the party.
It turns out that we can predict the fate of that third attempt by looking at the second win, and ask how the "infrequent" voters leaned -- meaning those who could have voted in the last election, but did not, and are now getting off the sidelines to participate. Something motivated them beyond typical partisan loyalty, and that something could be a sign of which way the wind is blowing.
We're using the General Social Survey because it allows us to get the voting behavior of a person across two separate elections.
We'll start with the level of support that, say, the Democrats enjoyed among the "frequent" voters -- those who voted in the last election, and the current one as well. That captures where the zeitgeist already is, whereas the infrequent voters will tell us where it is headed. So we take the difference in support levels for the Democrats, comparing the infrequent against the frequent voters. Compared to the usual voters, how much more Democrat-leaning are the infrequent voters?
For example, in 1972 the frequent voters went 35% for the Democrat, while the infrequent voters went 52%, for a difference of 17 points favoring the Democrat among the infrequents. The graph below shows how Democrat-biased the infrequent voters were, compared to the frequents, where negative values mean they were Republican-biased compared to the frequents.
Let's look at those 6 elections again, and see how this measure of momentum performs. It makes the same correct predictions as the "increasing popular vote" measure does for '84 (R in '88), '88 (D in '92), '96 (D in '00), and '00 (R in '04).
But in the two that the crude measure missed -- '72 and '04 -- it correctly identifies flagging momentum. In '72, the share of the popular vote may have shot up for the Republican, but those who came off of the sidelines actually favored the Democrat (and in an election when he would get demolished). That predicted the failure of the third attempt in '76.
Later in '04, when Bush had improved his popular vote, the voters who had sat it out in '00 decided that they couldn't sit idly by this time, and joined in the effort to dump Bush. As in '72, they failed at their current task, but this counter-movement showed the way forward, and the Republican would lose big-time in the attempted third term in '08.
For what it's worth, this model shows a loss of momentum between Obama's first and second wins. Those who sat it out in '08, but showed up in '12, were more Republican-leaning than the frequent voters. That suggests discontent with the Democrat administration already by their second win, making a third win all but impossible.
This model does not perfectly predict whether a first win will lead to a second win. For example, the infrequent voters in '76 were Democrat-leaning compared to frequents, yet they lost massively in Carter's re-election bid in '80. The infrequents in Reagan's first win were also Democrat-leaning, yet he won re-election handily in '84.
Still, in 8 of the 10 elections, the behavior of infrequents does predict who wins the next time. But those bungled predictions from '76 and '80 are rather damning failures -- missing the Reagan landslides in '80 and '84.
Why do infrequents perfectly predict from a second to a third, or a third to a fourth, but not necessarily from a first to a second? I think these folks who tend to sit things out will let the first term of the party have a chance to do well. After having four years of results to judge them by, they'll come out and give a referendum.
Remember, this does not block the incumbent party right away -- they were biased toward McGovern in '72, Dukakis in '88, and Kerry in '04. Instead, it reveals a stalling momentum, that the people who generally pay little mind to politics are upset enough with the status quo that they're actually participating this time.
On the other hand, if these infrequents make a point of leaving the house this time around just to support the incumbent party, that means even the election-averse citizens are eager for more of the same, and the party has enough momentum to win another term the next time. The infrequents were biased toward Reagan in '84 and Clinton in '96, which heralded popular vote wins for the incumbent party in '88 and '00.
For predicting the 2016 outcome, both measures -- trend in popular vote and bias of infrequent voters -- agree that there is no momentum going from '08 to '12, putting a third win out of reach for the Democrats.
GSS variables: presYY (year), voteYY (year)
August 18, 2016
Trump getting 15% of black vote, vs. 2-4% for McCain and Romney
The latest USC poll shows a two-day spike in the black vote for Trump, rising from what was steadily 5% or below to around 15%.
This began before his speech in Milwaukee appealing to black voters, and was likely a spontaneous move by blacks themselves. The timing just after the mini-riot in Milwaukee is suggestive, though -- blacks saw yet another black neighborhood and businesses being burned down and terrorized by thugs, and they know Trump is the law & order candidate.
And they also know that Trump has not been campaigning like a typical Republican would, about gutting the social safety net or affirmative action, so they aren't afraid of what he would do to programs they're concerned about. And he's talking about cleaning up the cities, bringing good-paying jobs back, and other bread-and-butter topics that blacks who aren't into identity politics would care about.
Although the black vote is not large enough to determine the outcome of any state, shaving off a few points from Crooked Hillary is good no matter who's doing the shaving. And their support will be greater in some areas like the Southeast, where North Carolina and Florida would be safe if narrow Trump wins with 15% or so of the local black vote.
Romney only got 4% of the black vote, and McCain just 2% -- not surprising when there was a black candidate to vote for, when most are in identity politics mode, and when the alternative was not really going to be better for blacks (or whites) anyway on substantial issues.
Those almost unbelievably low estimates are from the General Social Survey, the gold standard in surveys, which does present the most accurate picture from a very large national probability sample. Unfortunately, the GSS is administered during the summer of even-numbered years, meaning Presidential elections cannot be covered until two years later, and one year after that for the data to be released to the public. By that time, interest has evaporated and nobody bothers looking into it.
Typically people study the exit polls, which are then codified as conventional wisdom, but are more misleading than the GSS. They do not count early voting or bussed-in voting, both of which are more common in Democrat city machine efforts to round up the urban black vote as reliably as possible. (Can't let them try to make it to the voting booth on their own, on Election Day itself -- too much room for error.) And of course the exit polls are not as well-funded and planned out, probabilty-wise, as the GSS is in order to get a representative sample.
Exit polls had McCain getting 4% and Romney 6% of the black vote, when it was really 2% and 4%. Trump looks to be adding a full 10 points to that, showing yet another way in which 2016 is not merely a do-over of 2008 or 2012.
For historical interest, here is what the GSS shows the black vote to be for the Republican candidates back through Nixon in 1968:
1968 -- 11%, Nixon
1972 -- 14%, Nixon
1976 -- 6%, Ford
1980 -- 3%, Reagan
1984 -- 12%, Reagan
1988 -- 20%, Bush Sr
1992 -- 6%, Bush Sr
1996 -- 4%, Dole
2000 -- 9%, Bush Jr
2004 -- 12%, Bush Jr
2008 -- 2%, McCain
2012 -- 4%, Romney
By far the highest support was for Bush Sr. in 1988 -- when the campaign ran an attack ad on Dukakis, a bleeding heart Massachusetts liberal who let out a violent black criminal that went on to commit armed robbery, arson, rape, and murder (Willie Horton). So much for the idea that "fear-mongering" about black criminals will cost a candidate the black vote -- just the opposite! Recall Crooked Hillary's remarks resurfacing from the '90s about black criminals being "super-predators" who "must be brought to heel".
There's a decent chunk of the black population that doesn't want to see their neighborhoods destroyed by thugs, and want the government to come in and act like the black parent who gonna whoop they kid ass if he get outta line. It's not the majority, but it's 10-20% of black voters.
In general, though, the historical data shows that black voters and white voters responded the same way, and do not need to be specifically pandered to in order to win. What did Jack Kemp get for his famous efforts to pander specifically to blacks? -- 4% for Dole-Kemp in '96. Congratulations.
When black support was relatively high for the Republican, it was also high among whites. When it was low with blacks, it was low with whites. The exception that proves which one truly matters more is 1980 -- Reagan barely scraped together 3% of the black vote, yet won over 50% of the popular vote in a three-way race and got nearly 500 Electoral votes.
Trump getting back into the 10-15% range for blacks most likely means his support among whites is going to be a lot higher than it has been for Republicans, either in terms of what percent of them he wins, or how large their turnout numbers are.
Lookin' good, lookin' good.
GSS variables: presYY (year), race
This began before his speech in Milwaukee appealing to black voters, and was likely a spontaneous move by blacks themselves. The timing just after the mini-riot in Milwaukee is suggestive, though -- blacks saw yet another black neighborhood and businesses being burned down and terrorized by thugs, and they know Trump is the law & order candidate.
And they also know that Trump has not been campaigning like a typical Republican would, about gutting the social safety net or affirmative action, so they aren't afraid of what he would do to programs they're concerned about. And he's talking about cleaning up the cities, bringing good-paying jobs back, and other bread-and-butter topics that blacks who aren't into identity politics would care about.
Although the black vote is not large enough to determine the outcome of any state, shaving off a few points from Crooked Hillary is good no matter who's doing the shaving. And their support will be greater in some areas like the Southeast, where North Carolina and Florida would be safe if narrow Trump wins with 15% or so of the local black vote.
Romney only got 4% of the black vote, and McCain just 2% -- not surprising when there was a black candidate to vote for, when most are in identity politics mode, and when the alternative was not really going to be better for blacks (or whites) anyway on substantial issues.
Those almost unbelievably low estimates are from the General Social Survey, the gold standard in surveys, which does present the most accurate picture from a very large national probability sample. Unfortunately, the GSS is administered during the summer of even-numbered years, meaning Presidential elections cannot be covered until two years later, and one year after that for the data to be released to the public. By that time, interest has evaporated and nobody bothers looking into it.
Typically people study the exit polls, which are then codified as conventional wisdom, but are more misleading than the GSS. They do not count early voting or bussed-in voting, both of which are more common in Democrat city machine efforts to round up the urban black vote as reliably as possible. (Can't let them try to make it to the voting booth on their own, on Election Day itself -- too much room for error.) And of course the exit polls are not as well-funded and planned out, probabilty-wise, as the GSS is in order to get a representative sample.
Exit polls had McCain getting 4% and Romney 6% of the black vote, when it was really 2% and 4%. Trump looks to be adding a full 10 points to that, showing yet another way in which 2016 is not merely a do-over of 2008 or 2012.
For historical interest, here is what the GSS shows the black vote to be for the Republican candidates back through Nixon in 1968:
1968 -- 11%, Nixon
1972 -- 14%, Nixon
1976 -- 6%, Ford
1980 -- 3%, Reagan
1984 -- 12%, Reagan
1988 -- 20%, Bush Sr
1992 -- 6%, Bush Sr
1996 -- 4%, Dole
2000 -- 9%, Bush Jr
2004 -- 12%, Bush Jr
2008 -- 2%, McCain
2012 -- 4%, Romney
By far the highest support was for Bush Sr. in 1988 -- when the campaign ran an attack ad on Dukakis, a bleeding heart Massachusetts liberal who let out a violent black criminal that went on to commit armed robbery, arson, rape, and murder (Willie Horton). So much for the idea that "fear-mongering" about black criminals will cost a candidate the black vote -- just the opposite! Recall Crooked Hillary's remarks resurfacing from the '90s about black criminals being "super-predators" who "must be brought to heel".
There's a decent chunk of the black population that doesn't want to see their neighborhoods destroyed by thugs, and want the government to come in and act like the black parent who gonna whoop they kid ass if he get outta line. It's not the majority, but it's 10-20% of black voters.
In general, though, the historical data shows that black voters and white voters responded the same way, and do not need to be specifically pandered to in order to win. What did Jack Kemp get for his famous efforts to pander specifically to blacks? -- 4% for Dole-Kemp in '96. Congratulations.
When black support was relatively high for the Republican, it was also high among whites. When it was low with blacks, it was low with whites. The exception that proves which one truly matters more is 1980 -- Reagan barely scraped together 3% of the black vote, yet won over 50% of the popular vote in a three-way race and got nearly 500 Electoral votes.
Trump getting back into the 10-15% range for blacks most likely means his support among whites is going to be a lot higher than it has been for Republicans, either in terms of what percent of them he wins, or how large their turnout numbers are.
Lookin' good, lookin' good.
GSS variables: presYY (year), race
August 10, 2016
Trump's econ speech: Which states resonate with which parts?
In his recent speech about economic vision, Trump outlined his approach in three major areas -- cutting taxes, lightening up the burden of regulations, and setting trade policies that keep good-paying manufacturing jobs here in America rather than Mexico, China, etc.
Each of these solutions is popular in a different region of the country, whether Trump planned such a broad outreach or simply has good intuition for coalition-building. The non-ideological vision pairs old school libertarianism and protectionism, whichever is best for the larger populist and nationalist cause. This will help in his effort to return several states back into the Republican column -- along with his campaign of not alienating blue-state voters with culture war distractions.
Regional popularity can be measured by responses from the General Social Survey, the gold standard in public opinion research, which has asked questions on these topics in recent years.
First, believing that your federal income tax is too high is most common in the Mid-Atlantic region (NY, NJ, PA). In the 2010s, 55% of people nationally thought it was too high, but it's 68% in the Mid-Atlantic. Even back through the 1970s when the survey began, this region has always been the highest in wanting income tax relief.
The least likely regions to stress over taxes are out West -- the Plains, Mountain, and Pacific regions.
This seems to stem from the materialist vs. non-materialist focus of people's lives. If you live in the heart of the ACELA corridor, you probably derive much of your self-worth from your career, wealth, and displays of wealth. This is true for lower and middle-class residents, too, not just rich people. Cutting taxes allows you to keep more wealth in your bank account, or spend spend spend.
Out West, folks are more lifestyle-oriented, so accumulation and conspicuous consumption of wealth isn't so much of a goal for them.
Second, wanting less regulation of businesses by the government is most popular in several areas, although not in the Mid-Atlantic, who are the most averse to deregulation, along with the Plains.
It is New Englanders, Southerners, and Mountain and Pacific citizens who are the most on board with less regulation. In 2006, 52% nationally wanted less regulation, but it was 5 points higher in these regions, and 20 points higher in New England. Back through the mid-'80s, it has been New England and the Mountain regions that have consistently been more in favor of deregulation. Those two regions are roughly the eastern and western centers of the libertarian spirit.
Third, believing that America does not benefit from belonging to NAFTA is most common in the eastern Midwest (OH, MI, IN, IL, WI) and southern Appalachia (KY, TN, AL, MI). In 2014, 26% of the country as a whole hated NAFTA, but this was 10 points higher in these two regions where there is still a solid manufacturing sector providing good-paying jobs -- especially in the auto industry. Residents here don't want these jobs to get sucked out to a country where labor costs are lower, which is a given under these corporate globalist trade deals.
(Nationally, 27% think NAFTA benefits America, and 47% are neutral, among those with an opinion.)
Interestingly, there's another base of anti-NAFTA sentiment among West Coasters -- but only those who were raised there. They're not as bitterly against NAFTA as the industrial center back East, but more so than the rest of the nation. West Coast residents who were born outside the region, whether elsewhere in America or foreigners, felt the opposite -- noticeably more in favor of NAFTA.
Native West Coasters must remember when all sorts of things were still made locally, whereas the transplants have flocked out West in order to pan for latter-day gold in the white-collar service sector, and aren't so concerned for the native citizens' well-being.
Support for NAFTA is highest in the Plains, both Upper and Lower. Their workers, too, are getting killed by the deal and accompanying immigration, for example the replacement of Americans with Mexicans in the Iowa meatpacking industry. But we are talking about the Cuck Belt here, so it's not surprising. It's no different from the Plains wanting to take in refugees (Upper) and Mexicans (Lower), despite mounting experience with their massive downside and minimal upside.
If the Trump movement, and Trump himself, can emphasize each of these topics in the regions where they resonate most, recent blue states can go red-for-Trump. Kill NAFTA -- Michigan and Ohio, native West Coasters. Lower taxes, more personal spending money -- Philly suburbs, New Jersey. Government shouldn't regulate so many trivial business matters for no reason, while still re-instating necessary regulations like Glass-Steagall -- California, Oregon, New Hampshire.
GSS variables: tax, lessreg, nafta2a, region, reg16, year
Each of these solutions is popular in a different region of the country, whether Trump planned such a broad outreach or simply has good intuition for coalition-building. The non-ideological vision pairs old school libertarianism and protectionism, whichever is best for the larger populist and nationalist cause. This will help in his effort to return several states back into the Republican column -- along with his campaign of not alienating blue-state voters with culture war distractions.
Regional popularity can be measured by responses from the General Social Survey, the gold standard in public opinion research, which has asked questions on these topics in recent years.
First, believing that your federal income tax is too high is most common in the Mid-Atlantic region (NY, NJ, PA). In the 2010s, 55% of people nationally thought it was too high, but it's 68% in the Mid-Atlantic. Even back through the 1970s when the survey began, this region has always been the highest in wanting income tax relief.
The least likely regions to stress over taxes are out West -- the Plains, Mountain, and Pacific regions.
This seems to stem from the materialist vs. non-materialist focus of people's lives. If you live in the heart of the ACELA corridor, you probably derive much of your self-worth from your career, wealth, and displays of wealth. This is true for lower and middle-class residents, too, not just rich people. Cutting taxes allows you to keep more wealth in your bank account, or spend spend spend.
Out West, folks are more lifestyle-oriented, so accumulation and conspicuous consumption of wealth isn't so much of a goal for them.
Second, wanting less regulation of businesses by the government is most popular in several areas, although not in the Mid-Atlantic, who are the most averse to deregulation, along with the Plains.
It is New Englanders, Southerners, and Mountain and Pacific citizens who are the most on board with less regulation. In 2006, 52% nationally wanted less regulation, but it was 5 points higher in these regions, and 20 points higher in New England. Back through the mid-'80s, it has been New England and the Mountain regions that have consistently been more in favor of deregulation. Those two regions are roughly the eastern and western centers of the libertarian spirit.
Third, believing that America does not benefit from belonging to NAFTA is most common in the eastern Midwest (OH, MI, IN, IL, WI) and southern Appalachia (KY, TN, AL, MI). In 2014, 26% of the country as a whole hated NAFTA, but this was 10 points higher in these two regions where there is still a solid manufacturing sector providing good-paying jobs -- especially in the auto industry. Residents here don't want these jobs to get sucked out to a country where labor costs are lower, which is a given under these corporate globalist trade deals.
(Nationally, 27% think NAFTA benefits America, and 47% are neutral, among those with an opinion.)
Interestingly, there's another base of anti-NAFTA sentiment among West Coasters -- but only those who were raised there. They're not as bitterly against NAFTA as the industrial center back East, but more so than the rest of the nation. West Coast residents who were born outside the region, whether elsewhere in America or foreigners, felt the opposite -- noticeably more in favor of NAFTA.
Native West Coasters must remember when all sorts of things were still made locally, whereas the transplants have flocked out West in order to pan for latter-day gold in the white-collar service sector, and aren't so concerned for the native citizens' well-being.
Support for NAFTA is highest in the Plains, both Upper and Lower. Their workers, too, are getting killed by the deal and accompanying immigration, for example the replacement of Americans with Mexicans in the Iowa meatpacking industry. But we are talking about the Cuck Belt here, so it's not surprising. It's no different from the Plains wanting to take in refugees (Upper) and Mexicans (Lower), despite mounting experience with their massive downside and minimal upside.
If the Trump movement, and Trump himself, can emphasize each of these topics in the regions where they resonate most, recent blue states can go red-for-Trump. Kill NAFTA -- Michigan and Ohio, native West Coasters. Lower taxes, more personal spending money -- Philly suburbs, New Jersey. Government shouldn't regulate so many trivial business matters for no reason, while still re-instating necessary regulations like Glass-Steagall -- California, Oregon, New Hampshire.
GSS variables: tax, lessreg, nafta2a, region, reg16, year
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)