{"id":14864,"date":"2023-11-07T07:57:08","date_gmt":"2023-11-07T12:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americancompass.org\/?p=14864"},"modified":"2023-11-07T07:57:12","modified_gmt":"2023-11-07T12:57:12","slug":"the-receding-democratic-majority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americancompass.org\/the-receding-democratic-majority\/","title":{"rendered":"The Receding Democratic Majority"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
In 2002, we wrote a book, The Emerging Democratic Majority<\/em>, which predicted that by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the Democrats would have established a majority. It would not be the extended dominance they enjoyed from 1932 to 1980, but it would be a real advantage over several decades. We pointed to new groups within the Democratic coalition, including college-educated professionals and single women, and to the growing numbers of minority voters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These voters were concentrated in postindustrial metro centers that we termed \u201cideopolises,\u201d such as Boston, New York, San Francisco, and the Raleigh\/Durham Research Triangle, where ideas rather than material goods are produced. Democrats would still need a significant share of working-class votes, and the votes of people who lived in small towns and midsize cities that had relied on manufacturing or mining, but not the solid majorities that had sustained the New Deal party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since 2010, American politics has been stuck in a teeter-totter between the parties. The majority we predicted did not emerge. What happened?<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n When the Democrats won the White House and Congress in 2008, our prediction appeared to have been confirmed. We were hailed as seers. Indeed, it seemed as if the new president, Barack Obama, in responding effectively to the financial crash and the Great Recession, might create a Roosevelt-like majority. But the Democrats\u2019 dominance lasted only two years. Since 2010, American politics has been stuck in a teeter-totter between the parties. The majority we predicted did not emerge. What happened? Where did we and where did the Democrats go wrong? <\/p>\n\n\n\n We did get the new groups right. In The Emerging Democratic Majority<\/em>, we argued that professionals, women, and minorities were displacing the old New Deal blue-collar working class as the key ingredients in a new Democratic majority. Professionals included nurses, teachers, software programmers, engineers, and scientists. Once typified by the dentist or doctor who ran his own business and was a loyal Republican, professionals began voting more Democratic in the late \u201960s and by the 1988 election were supporting Democrat Michael Dukakis over Republican George H. W. Bush.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second group was women, and particularly single and working women. Around half of adult women are now unmarried and their labor force participation in the 21st century has been pushing 60%, up from under 40% in 1960. Women had tilted Republican as late as 1976, but a substantial gender gap began to appear in 1980 and is now a regular feature of our elections. In 2020, women supported Biden over Trump by 13 points, while men supported Trump by six points. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The third group was minorities. Blacks had begun voting Democratic during the New Deal and, after the Republican repudiation in 1964 of the civil rights reforms, became uniformly Democratic. Democrats had historically been the party of immigrant groups and Republicans the party of Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Hispanics, except for Miami\u2019s Cubans, had earlier been Democratic, and after the 1965 reform of immigration law, their numbers expanded rapidly. Most Asians had been voting Republican. In the 1990s, however, they started to come around. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We calculated that as working women, minorities, and the college educated grew in number, and as postindustrial metro centers grew, Democrats would have a durable advantage in both national and state-level elections\u2014if<\/em> they retained about 40% of the white working class and stayed close to an even split in heavily white working-class Rust Belt states. That did happen in 2008 when Obama won not only the vote of the new Democratic groups from the \u201960s, but also white working-class voters in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama received 79% support among nonwhite voters, carrying Black voters by 88 points, Hispanic voters by 32 points, and Asian voters by 22 points. He carried women by 16 points, single women by 35 points, and voters under 30 by 30 points. He made a historic breakthrough with white college-educated voters, carrying them by a point and carrying white college-educated women by 9 points. And he won the postgraduate vote by 18 points, reflecting the Democrats\u2019 growing strength among professionals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama\u2019s victory bore out our prediction that, based on the growth of postindustrial metropolitan areas, the Democrats would even begin to do well in southern states they had been losing since 1980.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n Obama\u2019s victory bore out our prediction that, based on the growth of postindustrial metropolitan areas, the Democrats would even begin to do well in southern states they had been losing since 1980. Obama won North Carolina by dominating the state\u2019s thriving metro areas. In Mecklenburg County, the fast-growing heart of the Charlotte metro area, Obama bested McCain by 24 points, an amazing 44-point improvement over Michael Dukakis\u2019s showing in 1988. He cleaned up in North Carolina\u2019s Research Triangle, which includes Raleigh and Durham, and three major universities. He won Wake County, where the Raleigh metro area is located, by 14 points, a 29-point swing compared to 1988.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama also reversed the prior Democratic decline among white working-class voters, whom Kerry lost by 23 points in 2004. He cut the Democratic white working-class deficit to a comparatively modest 13 points nationally, and he carried the white working-class vote in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Obama carried Michigan\u2019s Macomb County, immortalized in a 1986 study by consultant Stanley Greenberg as home of the Reagan Democrats, by nine points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the 2010 election, though, Obama\u2019s majority disintegrated. Midterm elections are normally bad for the incumbent party, but 2010 was especially bad for the Democrats. Republicans gained 63 seats and control of the House, performing especially well in the upper Midwest where Obama and the Democrats had seemed to make a breakthrough. House delegations in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin\u2014all states that Obama won\u2014flipped from majority Democratic to majority Republican. The key was the defection of white working-class voters. Democratic congressional support among white working-class voters in Wisconsin went from six points Democratic in 2008 to 20 points Republican in 2010. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We had gotten the new voting groups right, but we were dead wrong about the Democrats\u2019 ability to hold on to the working-class whites.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n Democrats also lost six Senate seats and six governorships, and the main losses were in the industrial Midwest. While Democrats\u2019 support fell across virtually all voting groups, the most consequential shift was among white working-class voters. The Democratic deficit among these voters ballooned to 23 points in 2010. And these voters were at the time close to half of all voters\u2014and considerably more than half in the upper Midwest where a good deal of the carnage took place. We had gotten the new voting groups right, but we were dead wrong about the Democrats\u2019 ability to hold on to the working-class whites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We also underestimated the Democrats\u2019 difficulties in bridging a geographical and industrial divide that cut across America and that, in the 2010 election, became a political chasm. This Great Divide pitted the dynamic postindustrial metro areas of the country against the working-class areas in the small towns, rural communities, and midsize cities scattered across the Heartland that still depended upon manufacturing and resource extraction. This divide came to define the contest between the political parties in the 2010s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In Ohio, the Democratic popular vote for the House fell from a five-point advantage in 2008 to a 12-point deficit in 2010. Five Democratic incumbents were tossed out of office as a red wave swept across the state. Consider Ohio\u2019s Sixth Congressional District that runs along the southeast side of the state and borders Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The district goes from rural Lucasville through Athens and older Ohio River industrial towns and eventually reaches the Youngstown city limits. It was the home to steel and auto plants and to coal-fired power plants. Incumbent Democrat Charlie Wilson, who had carried the district by 30 points in 2008, lost to Republican Bill Johnson by five points in 2010. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These areas were once the center of Democratic Party strength, but now, along with rural areas, they were becoming part of the Republican base.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n And what happened there happened in other districts that were heavily dependent on manufacturing and mining. These areas were once the center of Democratic Party strength, but now, along with rural areas, they were becoming part of the Republican base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2012, Obama easily defeated Mitt Romney, who had opposed the auto bailout and allowed the Democrats\u2019 presidential candidate to run as the candidate of the common man and woman and to revive the image of Republicans as the party of the uncaring rich. But Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives and, in the 2014 elections, the Democrats\u2019 weakness among the white working class and on one side of the Great Divide reemerged with a vengeance. That year, the Democrats lost 13 House seats and a stunning nine Senate seats and suffered major losses at the state level. The key to these losses was once again the defection of the white working class, with the national deficit among these voters increasing to 25 points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2016 our forecast of Democratic success among professionals, single women, and minorities held. Clinton increased the Democratic margin among white college-educated voters by six points from Obama\u2019s victory in 2012. But white working-class voters are far more numerous than their college-educated counterparts, particularly in the midwestern states where the election was decided. And Clinton\u2019s deficit among these voters became the most important factor in her completely unexpected defeat by Donald Trump. In the country as a whole, the Republican advantage among white working-class voters increased six points to a staggering 31 points. <\/p>\n\n\n\nWhere We Went Wrong <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Losing the Heartland <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Trump\u2019s Telling Victory <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n