Consider the Evidence

Lecture slides for the “Politics” section of my Social Issues in America course:

Polarized America?

The collapse of the New Deal coalition

A new Democratic majority?

Poor red states and rich blue states

What difference can a president make?

My two favorite dailies, the New York Times and the Financial Times, offer divergent takes today on prospects for the Obama administration’s proposed economic stimulus package.

According to the NYT,

To a degree that would have been unimaginable two years ago, economists and politicians from across the political spectrum have put aside calls for fiscal restraint and decided that Congress should spend whatever it takes to rescue the economy.

But with the Congressional Budget Office projecting a federal budget deficit of 8% of GDP in 2009, the FT suggests

The president-elect … will now find it harder to achieve broad bipartisan support for the package. In addition to rising Republican concerns about the size of the stimulus, which has not been factored into the CBO’s 2009 fiscal deficit projection, fiscally conservative “blue dog Democrats” are now more likely to drag their feet on the measure.

Has the 2008 election ushered in a new era of Democratic hegemony, akin to those enjoyed by the Democrats beginning in 1932 and the Republicans beginning in 1980? Two considerations suggest yes.

First, a Republican president is presiding over a deep economic crisis. The early-1930s and late-1970s crises scarred the party in power for a generation, and this one has the potential to do the same (John Judis makes a similar point).

Second, Barack Obama won big among young voters; according to exit polls, he got 66% of the votes of those age 18 to 29. This is important because while our party preference can in principle change at any time, we tend to stick with the party we identified with when we first became politically aware.

The following two charts show the role this played in the partisan shift that occurred around 1980. Both use data on party identification from the National Election Study (NES) and the General Social Survey (GSS). In the first chart, we see that among all American adults Democrats held a large advantage until the late 1970s, after which their edge diminished sharply. The second chart shows the trend for people who turned age 20 between 1978 and 1990. The formative political years for this cohort were ones of economic crisis under Democrats in the late 1970s followed by improvement (after 1982) under a Republican president and Senate in the 1980s. Among this group the party identification gap started small and had virtually disappeared by the mid-1980s. Through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s this cohort has slowly replaced an older generation of Americans who continued to identify with the Democrats. This process of cohort replacement is a key driver of the shrinking partisan gap among all adults that we see in the first chart.

Are we in the midst of an enduring shift in favor of the Democrats? We’ll only be able to tell in retrospect, of course, and I suspect much hinges on what the Obama administration can accomplish. But the groundwork appears to have been laid.

Vote choice in presidential elections is strongly influenced by voters’ perceptions of their financial situation, according to exit poll data available since 1992. More than 65% of those who feel their situation has gotten better typically vote for the incumbent party’s candidate, versus fewer than 35% of those who say their finances are worse.

A key factor in election outcomes, then, is how many voters feel their financial situation has gotten worse. As the following chart suggests, when that share reaches about a third of voters, as it did in 1992 and 2008, it spells trouble for the incumbent-party candidate.

Two good posts: here and here.

Arizona stayed red in this year’s presidential vote. It is, after all, John McCain’s home state.

But like southern California, Arizona has been shifting steadily from red to blue as urban areas — especially Tucson, which went for Obama — and Hispanics increase their population shares. McCain won the state only 54% to 45%. And five of Arizona’s eight House members will now be Democrats, up from one of six during the 1990s and two of eight in the early 2000s.

If Barack Obama wins the election, many analysts will attribute his victory to campaign strategies and events: Obama’s money advantage, the Obama campaign’s superior organizing effort and execution, the candidates’ debate performances, McCain’s choice to go negative relatively early, McCain’s message incoherence, and McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin for vice president, among others.

Meanwhile, Doug Hibbs’ “bread and peace” model predicts a popular vote share for the incumbent-party candidate (McCain) of 46.25%. This translates into about a 7-percentage-point win for Obama, which is almost exactly what poll averages compiled by Pollster.com, RealClearPolitics.com, and fivethirtyeight.com are suggesting as of today.

The Hibbs model is striking for its simplicity — its predictions are based on a single indicator of economic performance, supplemented by one foreign policy measure (see here) — and its effectiveness. The model’s track record since 1952 and its prediction for this year look like this:

As Brendan Nyhan points out, other predictions based on the “fundamentals” are in the same ballpark.

Campaigns surely do matter, but probably less, in this year and quite a few others, than we tend to think.

“Obama prepares for quick transition,” reports Edward Luce in the Financial Times.

Good. Even in the most favorable scenario in terms of congressional support, a President Obama’s window of opportunity for getting major things such as health care reform done might well be short. Rick Perlstein has a nice piece on this in The American Prospect.

Frank Rich and Paul Krugman each have columns in today’s New York Times suggesting that voters’ movement toward Obama in the past several weeks stems from their finally “getting it.” Rich says Americans now recognize Republicans’ coded racial rhetoric as the cynical ploy it’s always been, while Krugman thinks the economic crisis has encouraged attention to seriousness and policy positions rather than impressions of elitism and likeability.

I suspect a simple “fundamentals” interpretation is more likely right. The economy is in crisis and Americans are unhappy with the current administration’s foreign policy. In this type of situation, independents tend to want a change of course. This is 1980 revisited. In fact, it’s 2006 revisited, though with the economy and foreign policy swapping places as the central issue.

In the cover story of the current issue of Newsweek, Jon Meachem argues that Barack Obama, if he wins the election, will have a difficult time pursuing a progressive agenda. This is a right-of-center nation, according to Meachem, and the experience of Democratic presidents from FDR to LBJ to Bill Clinton suggests that bold moves to the left bring electoral punishment and thence a shift back to the center. The current disappointment with the past eight years of Republican rule and the depth of the economic crisis may make it seem as though anything is possible, Meachem says, but Americans remain fundamentally conservative in temperament (dislike of change) and ideology (wary of government), so an Obama administration would do well to avoid overreach.

I think this is wrong. It’s not that I disagree with the claim that the United States is a right-of-center nation; compared to other rich countries, we clearly are. Nor do I think Meachem is mistaken in suggesting that progressive initiatives by an Obama administration might contribute to electoral reaction. But it does not follow from either or both of these suppositions that the wise course of action is to proceed cautiously.

A president’s chief goal should be to make the country a better place, not to win the next election. Even if it were true that the Democrats’ defeat in 1968 owed to liberal overreach in LBJ’s early years, would the country have been better off had Johnson and his congressional allies not pushed through the Civil Rights Act, Medicare/Medicaid, and Food Stamps? Perhaps they would have been passed a bit later and thereby generated less controversy, but it’s also possible that the moment would have been lost for a long time.

More important, presidents and parties don’t merely respond to public opinion; they can actively shape it. Despite their ideological conservatism, Americans are “programatically liberal”; they strongly favor a range of government programs, from public schools to Social Security and Medicare to the minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credit. When government creates programs that work, Americans tend to support those programs (similar points made here and here). The United States may be an ideologically right-of-center country, but its center has steadily shifted left. That shift is in large part a consequence of government activism.

Bold action can also pay dividends politically, especially in periods of crisis. Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 to do something about the depression, though most who voted for him probably weren’t sure exactly what they wanted him to do. Roosevelt and the Congress moved quickly to put in place a set of programs that enhanced economic security for ordinary Americans — Social Security, unemployment insurance, and a minimum wage, among others. These programs were widely perceived as helpful. And though the American public inevitably moved back toward Republicans in both congressional and presidential elections, the Democrats dominated American politics for a generation.

In the late 1970s the country again faced a perceived economic crisis, this time coupled with a foreign policy one (defeat in Vietnam followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and anti-American revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua). Like FDR, Ronald Reagan was elected because he proposed to change course. He cut taxes and sharply increased military spending. Rightly or wrongly, a significant share of Americans viewed this as helpful. Republicans suffered some setbacks in congressional elections and eventually lost the presidency for a while. But due in part to Reagan’s aggressive response to the crisis, the party improved its standing among the American public, which in turn contributed to its electoral success. The following chart shows the share of Americans identifying as Republicans and Democrats according to the main sources of such data, the National Election Studies and General Social Survey. The key thing to note is that the rise in Republican identification comes after the 1980 election, not before. (Unfortunately, these surveys began well after Roosevelt’s era.)

If Barack Obama is elected president, he’ll have no choice but to address the economic crisis. Beyond that, my guess is he’ll focus on health care, energy, economic security (perhaps pegging the minimum wage to inflation and reforming unemployment insurance), and taxes. History suggests that both he and his party might well benefit if he moves quickly and boldly, rather than cautiously. That’s the lesson of FDR and Reagan. The Clinton (health care) lesson is that whichever issues Obama chooses to prioritize, it’s critical that he get something done.