At the Washington Post Lanae Erickson Hatalsky and Jim Kessler concur with my analysis. Winning 100% of the vote in a handful of counties or even a handful of states is not the path to victory for the Democrats:
“Demography equals destiny†also presumes voters are static beings with unwavering ideologies and consistent voting behavior. But voters aren’t merely reflections of their demographic characteristics, and it’s insulting to treat them that way. Young voters and voters of color aren’t monolithic liberal blocs who will always and reflexively support Democrats. As noted in our report, 44 percent of millennials call themselves independents and only 30 percent are liberals. Among Latinos, 37 percent are Independents and only 28 percent liberals. That means 7 in 10 within these rising American electorate groups consider themselves moderate or even conservative.
That is why we sometimes see dramatic shifts in voting. Independent voters went for Democrats by 17 points in 2006 then supported Republicans by 18 points just four years later. This changeability is evident at the presidential level as well. While Clinton won basically the same number of voters as President Barack Obama did in 2012 (both just under 66 million), there was tremendous voter volatility underneath the surface. A stunning 403 counties that voted for Obama at least once flipped to Trump. In 28 states, the margin of victory for either Trump or Clinton moved decisively from 2012 — by five points or more. Clinton actually outperformed Obama by more than 1 million votes in New York, Massachusetts and California and underperformed him by 3 million votes everywhere else. These are not the presumptively partisan decisions of an electorate driven to vote based on static demographic characteristics. They are the messy result of a push and pull with voters of all demographic stripes who aren’t in the bag for either side.
I believe that the road to relevance lies through good governance. Indiana may be Republican because it’s heavily white but good governance helps to keep it Republican. There are both Democrat-dominated states and Republican-dominated states on the lists of both well-run and poorly-run states. Affiliation won’t prevail forever. Minnesota is even whiter than Indiana and it was run by Democrats. Whatever they were doing worked. Then it stopped working and eventually the people turned elsewhere.
As a famous Illinoisan once said, you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Even in Illinois. I guess the question is whether those you can fool are a majority of the voters.
I’m fairly certain that following the defeat of a Third Way centrist Democrat two pollsters who work at a place called Third Way will be really well received. Anyway, in the eyes of Democrats, Clinton screwed up by reaching out to moderate Republicans and promising good governance, e.g. the high standard of having gone through the first month and not having people question your sanity.
If there’s a big tent it’s going to be the people in rust belt/upper midwest who hate their local conservatives.
The idea of good governance, by the way, should be suspect everywhere. If Trump means anything it’s that. Wyoming, for example, is #2 on a list of well-run states, whatever that means. It’s suicide rate is 3x the national average, and around 15% of its citizens suffer from drug/alcohol addiction.
The metric are set up to favor southern states. How many people move north to retire? That aside, I don’t think your worked/not worked idea works here. Looking at the bottom of the list, hose states seem pretty solidly blue or red. They aren’t changing because things are not working. The GOP has controlled most state governments for a while. Things are not that great, but they aren’t getting voted out.
Steve
As has been pointed out before here, people don’t vote with perfect rationality. There are affiliational reasons for voting habits among others.
But there is no such thing as a perpetuity and even solidly Republican constituencies can become solid Democratic constituencies when Republicans don’t perform. The best example of that is blacks. Blacks voted solidly Republican from Emancipation until 1932 and have voted solidly Democratic since then.
Speaking of demography, I believe Vladimir Putin has a program paying Russian Slavs to have more children.
I suspect any successful Trumpist-like program (accepting his accusers arguments) will ultimately have to legislate something akin to ensure
the Democrats stay out of power.