Real America

Here's a county level map of presidential voting in 2004:















Here's a similar map for this election:












Not that much changed, though Obama made incremental progress in many places. Here, however, is where McCain did better than Republicans in 2004. Arizona and Alaska make sense, and of course southern Lousiana lost a lot of black Democrats. But McCain made his pickups almost exclusively in a particular geography--the upland south.



This is a rough breakdown of that region. It's a pretty distinctive part of the South. Slavery was never big here; there is virtually a total complement between this and the following graph.










The share of African-Americans.












Similarly, this is also where Bill Clinton won his votes in the Democrat primary (purple is where he won > 65% of the vote). Hillary Clinton did very well here in those areas as well.
















This gets at ethnic breakdown in this area. This is be a bit hard to read, but basically the plurality ethnic group reported to the census here is "American"--these people are Scotch-Irish who predominately identify by nationality. The regions where such groups are numerous map very strongly to those places where McCain/Palin grew the Republican vote share. Household incomes tend to be fairly low, with some of the biggest pockets of isolated poverty anywhere in the country.

Presumably this reflects the impact of adding Palin to the ticket. You have cultural identification by "real Americans," a strong evangelical turnout, and racism, though I suspect Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell would do well here. Further South, record turnout of black voters pushed Obama's share upwards, while further North, social conservatism, broadly, is a smaller force.

This illustrates the point that the South is both "larger" and "smaller" than people think. The Deep South plantation economy was restricted to the far southern geographies where that was economically viable, while broader southern culture is shared by a larger community of Scotch-Irish that stretches into Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Politically, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense in retrospect for Republicans to double down on this demographic. One of the post-election quotes from MN governor Pawlenty caught my attention. The original Sam's Club Republican was caught saying that his party needs to focus on attracting women, Hispanics, blacks, and young people. Well. What demographics was your party targeting to begin with?

The young vote doesn't bode well for them, as young people these days are fairly liberal on a range of economic and social issues. Some of this will obviously fade away over time, but the social liberal bit will probably stay; roughly, every generation moves out a step more liberal than the previous one and stays there. The cost of catering to the real Americans is felt in the plummeting support Republicans see among young voters, minority voters, and the educated. Obviously, these groups are pretty large and growing, while whole communities of Rockefeller Republicans are going extinct. The electoral benefits are pretty slim, as the bordering states were Republican anyway. The Republicans faced a very bad fundamental position and were probably going to lose barring some crisis. But McCain's decision to head even further right after winning the Republican nomination, target this crowd through a VP pick, and then run a campaign centered on inconsequential right-wing dogma points and attack ads did little to endear him to the broad swaths of American independents who swing randomly from party to party, and for whom McCain is actually fairly popular. It's enough to make you nostalgic for some Rovian tactics. At least he realized that you need more than half of the population to win, even if hubris over statistically dubious "political realignments" did them in.

The New South

There is no guarantee that the following makes any sense.  

Many people are interested in the notion of economic convergence.  Economic theory predicts that in the long-run, all economies should move to the frontier of development.  So Japan meets the West, expands a lot, and now has has the same standard of living as other rich countries while growing at the same rate.  Obviously this doesn't happen everywhere, and the question is whether the sources of those differences lie in genetics, culture, institutions, policy, or something else.  

One such convergence situation is the post-WWII behavior of the American South.  The South had always lagged the North in development, but this was earlier a geographical issue as the Southern plains attracted the Barbados-based plantation elite while the North pursued trade and manufacturing.  This gap continued.  The geographical barrier to convergence disappeared with a higher level of technology, and the fact that the South and the North are in the same country mean that a lot of other barriers to convergence were not a big deal.  The main barriers to there being similar economies in the North and South became institutional and related to the quality of governance.  

My argument is that ultimately changing institutions created the "New South," and that this really started to change with the political dominance of a group of socially conservative Democrats and Republicans in the '60s with a constituency broadly in favor of different economic ideas.  The shape of this new ideology--Goldwater Republicanism--was formed by many things.  There was an influx of Northerners.  Broadly, there were push and pull dynamics creating essentially a new party.  On a more national level, this is covered negatively by people like Krugman, who sees a basically racist Southern strategy, and more positively by people like Brooks or Douthat.  

The push factors include the racial fallout of the Civil Rights movement, which both increased Democrat votes from black voters and shifted many white voters into the Republican Party.  Liberal judicial decisions were another factor, from busing (again, more racial stuff, but one that lead to more private schooling, which was Christian, and so led to more evangelicalism) to Roe v. Wade.  The growing Christian gap would become a larger factor later on.  There were pull factors as well, as the newly constituted Republican Party was better able to attract natural conservatives, with their focus on law and order issues, taxes, welfare, cultural topics, and so forth.  I can imagine tipping effects, in which more and more conservatives join the Republican Party, which markets itself as more Republican, and so forth.  It's easy to call this racism, but it seems to me a more basic consequence of a pluralist society.  Societies riveted by ethno-linguistic divisions display much less social trust as a whole, and tend to have less redistributionist institutions.  This is not necessarily linked to race, look at India, in which caste divisions behave politically much like ethnic rivalries, and really hamper coherent policies.  

The product of these forces was to yield a much more ideologically consistent and partisan set of political parties in the south.  With a median voter that's conservative in the South, you end up with rotating conservative Democrat and staunch Republican governance.  The traditional base of the new conservatives consisted exactly of the sort of people open to a more upwardly mobile, free enterprise system of government, so an economic conservative approach became a natural fit to this program.  

Of course, the development of the "New South" had to do with many things, among them the rising importance of service industries not linked to geography, technology, AC, highways, and the positive impacts of Civil Rights bills in desegregating the population.  But many of the proximate causes of the convergence between North and South needed to take place in a tolerable institutional environment, which was then supplied by the new Republican governors.  Low-tax regimes, opposition to union labor, State subsidies, spending on infrastructure, education, and research, and so forth attracted an array of manufacturing (car manufacturing) and service (banking, telecom) interest; even as many economic fundamentals were in long-term decline (textiles, furniture, cotton, agriculture).  

With the recent transformation of the Republican Party into the Party of the South, it's popular to talk about how the social hangups of Southerners have become the stuff of national cultural wars.  But it's interesting to see that the institutional barriers between North and South has largely revesed itself with the South in an arguably better position.  There have been some attempts to take on the old guard in blue areas--especially by moderate Republicans like Romney, Bloomberg, Giulianni, and Schwarzenegger, and some moderate Democrat responses like Daley, Spitzer, and Cory Booker (Are these attempts to be a Clinton Democrat on a more local level?).  But largely, Blue states continue to hemorrhage people and jobs to the Sun Belt.  This election continues in many ways that trend, with the choice between a Chicago politician who promises more regulation, higher taxes, and a host of industrial policy technocrat intitiatives to solve problems in health care, energy, and education and an Arizonan politician who combines sufficient deferrence to the socially conservative wing of the party with a support for lower taxes and less regulation.

The ultimate consequence of this state variation in development policies is the Housing Bubble.  In some sense, it's a myth that we had a "national Housing Bubble"; it remained in many ways a regional problem with certain areas like California, New York, Chicagoland, and (yes, somewhat counter to the point) Florida.  Tight land regulations in these areas artificially inflated the value of land, creating the actual housing "bubble" that encouraged poor lending tactics and eventually the securitization problem.  Places like Texas, Georgia, Arizona or othern Southern areas that don't have quite the zoning regimen had a flexible response to demand in housing and so never suffered quite the price movement up or down.  These places are really being spared the worst of the current problems, while continuing to attract more corporate headquarters and operations.  Another housing implication is that since Democrats generally run cities, and since Democrats generally favor regulations, you have city-level housing markets that are absolutely horrible, with the attending higher housing prices diminishing to a large extent the value of a College degree (since of course you don't attend a top-tier school and move to Nebraska).  

Of course, the old Democrat holdouts are still home to some of the most amazingly productive sectors of the economy (Sillicon Valley, New York) with the associated Universities and so forth.  So the combination of highly productive people with an increasingly pushed middle class yields greater inequality issues in Blue States, and then of course that's all they talk about.  You could probably make the case that what Blue States now need is Republican governance, and Red States some Democrat policies.  

One reason for the general success of the Republican method is that state-level government has many different spending priorities and issues than on the national level.  And since state governments can't hold a deficit; national-level Republicans have of course run up the national debt, while state-level Republicans have not.  So while the national level assessment of Republicans is mixed--they might have saved the economy from turning into Europe, but they also messed up a lot of stuff on spending--the state-level economic assessment tends more positive.  

I think the crucial point is not that the Republicans are smarter, but that the people who vote for them are generally social aspirers open to new business with little personal stake in bureaucratic pork, which leads to broader support of a certain free-enterprise economic agenda, combined with the fact that the Republican talent pool is incorporating business-minded people.  Look at the ranks of prominent Southern state-level Republican politicians, and you see both a bias for religion and business.  Bush fit this model rather well, what with his MBA and so forth.  Of course you still have the lawyers (in America and Britain, politicans are chosen from the stock of lawyers, while in Korea and Germany it tends to be engineers), but it still seems to me a contrast between the sorts of people who have run Democrat machines in other parts of the country.  Edwards, Hillary, and Obama were all of course lawyers (on the other side, you have Romney a businessman-turned-governor, Huckabee a rather effective preacher-turned-governor, and so forth) and the primary race at times really felt like a battle between the UNC-educated lawyer who specializes in court cases and the Ivy-trained lawyers who focus a bit more on the academic stuff.  Arguably, neither group is really set to run an economy.  Corruption seems like an inevitable outcome, but really no one cares about corruption paired with actual development. 

I guess one of the things this is a reaction to is the notion that economic conservatism is just a really bad idea that was pushed on the Americd toan people, with universal devastating consequences.  I hear this from a lot of people, who just can't imagine that the Regan/Bush gang were really anything but absolutely horrible.  I ten push a little against this idea.  

Update:  There is also the cultural change in the South where more people become evangelical Christian and that starts to matter.  Is that another factor?

I'd love feedback on this to figure out whether to actually pursue this idea.  

My Dad the Political Analyst

He emailed Kerry to advise him to do the following strategy: Promise to not seek re-election unless he caught Osama bin Laden.  In general, I think that since people expect so little of politicians, genuinely selfless behavior is taken as proof of authenticity.  It's a good part of the appeal of the current Republican ticket; the prisoner of war and mother of a child with Downs syndrome.  Of course the "maverick" image, as well as the "putbull with lipstick" persona, are manufactured, but they really resonate with many people and will continue to do so despite all evidence.  At one point, McCain was considering a one-term pledge, and while clearly political self-interest prevailed, it would have been a great gesture.  

Rumor Has it Obama is Popular in Other Countries

There happen to be many good reasons to vote for Obama over McCain, and I would probably make use of one if I were not currently disenfranchised. But there are even more bad reasons to vote for Obama, such as this idea that Obama is popular overseas while McCain is a Republican.

Take the example of France. As has been pointed out, though France overwhelmingly supports Obama, they made a different choice in their own curiously familiar election. A forceful, pro-American conservative from the unpopular ruling party battles a hopeful liberal in an election focused on transition and the economy. Sarkozy's success was based on his talking point that both parties want change, but conservative change is better and he can deliver it. Several people have pointed out that McCain needs to do something similar, and his convention speech was a step in this direction. But to the extent we care about the French, we should care about how they behaved when it come to a decision for which they bore consequences. On that choice, the French choose McCain.

But maybe overseas popularity is important because it suggests that people will like America again and bloodshed will stop. There are several issues with this. One, people just don't like America in general, as it's a unilateral power. People hated America when Bill Clinton was in office, and Obama signs on to the same platform of humanitarian intervention. Two, it doesn't seem like popularity among the masses matters as much as connections with leaders and geopolitics. That article discusses a bit how American policy towards Europe shows significant continuity between Clinton and Bush against popular wishes by local residents. Third, terrorists, like countries, behave on the basis of fundamentals, not Presidential identity. The candidate with better policies will face less animus. Last, Bush has been surprisingly effective in foreign policy his last few years. From improving relations with Japan, to nuclear deals with North Korea, to shoring up relations with China, to signing a Nuclear Deal with India--this is not what reasonable people expected to happen in Bush's lame-duck years. An Obama administration may very well turn out to be more effective on foreign policy than a McCain administration. But there are other issues at play.

Grand New Party Blogging

I've been meaning to write for some time about Grand New Party, a manifesto from two of my favorite conservative bloggers.  They spend a good deal of time trying, with mixed success, to counter claims that Republicans are racists who win elections by distracting poor people with social conservative flim-flam.  Their policy proposals--from wage subsidies to congestion pricing--are intended to refocus the Republican Party on the working class through market friendly, socially targeted policy.  They bear more than a passing resemblance to Clinton's policies--who, by the way, they give some praise.  I'm glad someone appreciates the degree to which Clinton was effective in passing conservative legislation. 

There is an inherent incoherence in a book aiming for both partisan dominance and policy effectiveness, and though it's hard to disagree with any of their policy ideas (thinly laid out as they may be), it can be hard to imagine the Republican Party moving in this direction.  Certainly Bush did much to advance this model of an activist government with faith upgrades, but his failures suggest problems and concerns with this approach.

First, you have the money problem.  Ross and Reihan are right to suggest that independence comes in many forms and their proposals would decrease overall regulation while perhaps increasing nominal government spending.  But as long as raising taxes is apostasy for a certain portion of the Republican base and curbing defense spending unthinkable for another, it's just not going to be possible to balance the budget, no matter how many earmarks you cut (curbing entitlements is a non-starter for both parties).  And even if consumption, carbon, and congestion taxes balance new spending, there is still the current deficit and exploding entitlements.  

Second, you have the tensions between the "destroy the government" and "reform the government" wings of the Republican Party.  It's easy to forget that Bush sold himself as a reformer with results who would work as a bipartisan fixer--a uniter, not a divider.  Many of the failures to follow can be blamed on partisans in the first set; figures such as Rice, Gates, and Paulson are responsible for Bush successes in the last few years.  So getting GNP right is an issue at least partially of competence.  

Healthcare is obviously a big issue, and I suspect Bush's failure to deliver on this will be remembered as among his worst.  There actually turn out to be a number of conservative options on this issue, as Ross and Reihan point out.  Republicans Romney and Schwarzenegger have tried to insure the uninsured, while even Obama's economic advisor praised the outlines of a plan to end the tax-preference for employer provided health care--that is, McCain's plan.  But it doesn't look like it's feasible for Republicans to present more comprehensive reform; even Romney played down his record in the primaries.  

In fact, Romney's downfall marks another failure of a modern conservatism to emerge from the myth of Reagan.  He first caught my attention as a data-oriented, pragmatic, power-point governor and potential nominee.  Then his pro-choice, Mormon, blue-state presence proved to be sufficiently offputting that he was forced on a righward lurch that both failed to properly endear him to the base and marked him as a flip-flopper to everyone else.  I would argue that Romney's predicament was less that he's a "slimeball" than it was structural; it's tough to be a competent executive, survive the base's gridlock vetoes, and appear genuine.    

In the end, as other reviewers have pointed out, many of these ideas are more likely to appropriated by Democrats rather than Republicans.  Ross and Reihan have a curiously outdated view of current liberal thinking.  In fact, as Clinton demonstrated, it's possibly easier to pursue socially liberal goals through market means than combine a fetish for low taxes with a heartfelt concern for the working classs.  Their agenda isn't unthinkable either--Cameron's Tories are set to accomplish something similar.  But in America, such a change will likely require a transforming persona with both right-wing credentials and a capacity for competent governance.  Bobby Jindal, who I don't just like because he's Indian, is one such figure--combining support from Gingrich with an ever mounting list of achievements, including on healthcare and education.  Sarah Palin may also prove to be another.  John McCain is almost certainly not.  

Just a Thought

Suppose McCain wins.  Probably unlikely, but possible.  Then, presumably, Palin is in good shape to run again.  After 12 or 16 years of Republican rule, it's probably unlikely that another Republican would win.  But it's possible, and Palin would certainly top the list of Republican presumptive nominees.  No other Republican who ran this year will have another shot (Definitely not you).  

If McCain wins, Obama loses.  You don't get to miss an opportunity like this and live to try again, so Obama is out for the next one too.  The Democrat next in line will naturally fall to Clinton, as the primary runner-up and scion of the Clinton family.  With her and her husband's speech last week, they plausibly claim they made the effort and wash their hands of the electoral loss, and can instead argue that blame lies with Obama's failure to use Mark Penn-style hardball tactics against the Republican smear-mobile.     

Judging a contest between Palin and Clinton four to eight years from now is a stretch, but I'm going to call it for Clinton anyway.  Republican fatigue and lingering Democrat anger should help her (though demographic reshaping after the 2010 census may help Republicans).  Again, when have there ever been three consecutive elected heads of state from a single party serving full terms?

So by voting for McCain now, you help move Bill Clinton into the White House again.  Something to keep in mind this November.  

Experience

It's sad what counts as experience these days.  

Ask George H.W. Bush.  By 1991, he was a: war hero, successful businessman, congressman, UN Ambassador, Envoy to China, Director of the C.I.A., professor, Vice President of the most popular administration in recent memory, president for three years, and commander-in-chief during the most popular war ever.  I think that's pretty good qualification to... keep his old job.

And he still lost the presidential election, to a man from Hope.  Sixteen years later, that guy's wife tries, and fails, to run on a platform of experience, losing to a guy mongering hope.  The hope-monger selects as his running mate another man who had earlier critized him for lacking experience.  The two battle against another war hero, who had earlier lost to the son of the most experienced person ever.  This white-haired dude says the hope-monger lacks experience.  So he picks an attractive moose-hunter as running mate.  

Now we're all wondering whether community organizing, or shooting wolves from a plane, or losing track of your houses, or whatever it is that Joe Biden does counts as experience.  Lost in this mess is the governor from New Mexico, who is rumored to have done quite a few things at some point.  

Everybody needs to stop talking about experience, because no one has any, and even if they did, saying that you have it doesn't help you win.

The DNC, Part II

Here's another phrase we've been hearing for a while:

Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.

Pray tell, what exactly are these "tax breaks to send jobs overseas," and how can I apply for one? Turns out they don't really exist, unless you consider the entire international corporate tax system a loophole. This is much like those horrible tax credits for oil companies, which apparently consist of credits for those "alternative fuels" I keep hearing so much about.

Strange that Obama should bring up McCain into this, since this point is actually one of more sensible parts of McCain's platform (the other is offshore drilling). Corporate taxes make little sense--they don't hit any particular person, but rather manifest in the form of higher prices, lower investment, lower wages, and lower capital returns. Even if you're a liberal, these are not good things. It's fine if you want higher taxes for the rich; just tax the money as much as you want once it reaches an actual person.

Naturally, since this tax makes little sense, the US has one of the highest rates in the world. McCain would lower that rate. Now if only somebody would do something about my ~15.3% payroll tax and 10% sales tax. And I'm in the lowest tax bracket!

The DNC, Part I

Watching the Democrats speak last week was an annoying experience. I know, there's no reason to expect much from any politician, and it's not like the Republicans are any better. But still, it's irrational exuberance over something which is just not that good. It's like watching The Wire all over again.

Here's Obama:

We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was president--when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush.

This reflects the larger trend to equate big-picture economic performance with presidential skill. An economic advisor to Obama was on the Colbert Report last night selling this vision, referrencing Larry Bartels work, which shows that growth is higher under Democrats.

Krugman, of all people, is skeptical Baretels, pointing out that it's difficult to point at any specific policy that's responsible. He figures that partisan-specific monetary policy and different voter behavior in booms and busts are responsible for most of the difference.

But you hear quite a bit about how median incomes are stangant and how we're right to whine. Robert Samuelson is good enough to show how these numbers fail to account for spiraling health costs and immigration. I would add that technology and trade have improved quality of life for a given income level.

But even ignoring all of that, it's hard to link Bush's policies--bad though they may be--to household incomes. Loose monetary policy kept interest rates low, tax cuts and rebates brought money to all income groups, added to which we saw surging domestic discretionary spending. Sure, there's plenty to fault here, and there could have been more redistribution downward. But from the standpoint of raising median household income, it's difficult to think of what Bush should have done. Look at Obama McCain's policies and you see... More of the Same! More tax cuts, more spending.

Whatever. There will be a boom by the time the next president is in office, and in all likelihood we're going to hear that "Democrats are better with the economy." Then there will be some foreign crisis and we'll also hear "But Republicans are better on Foreign Policy."