Are Republican Voters Vanishing ?

David Frum, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who is hardly a liberal by any means and who at times is down right reactionary, has an interesting column in the New York Times Magazine which looks at an apparent trend that ties failed Republican polices with the shift in party allegiance from Republican to Democrat. To me the column is especially interesting because some of the regions Frum looks at are in Virginia, a state that is rapidly changing in terms of political party alliances. Fairfax County for instance is now a bastion for the Democrat Party whereas once it was solidly Republican. I truly believe that there is a significant chance that Virginia will go for Obama this year if he can carry the urban areas and Fairfax County and Arlington County

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Frum's basic premise is that the GOP policies over the last decade or so have ignored the needs of the middle class and instead catered to either the ultra-wealthy in terms of economic policies and conservative Uber-Christians on social policy. It is social policy, not economics that has held members of the latter group to the GOP even though they typically are not as well educated and often earn lower incomes in the GOP column. Everyone else is or is susceptible to trending to the Democrats. As an aside, I looked at this later issue in a post back in May of this year (See: Biblical Literalism or Low IQ: Which Came First?) which referenced a study that seemed to demonstrate that Christians have lower IQ's in direct correlation with the level to which they accept of Biblical literalism (NOTE: Per the study, Sarah Palin's religious background puts her in the low IQ category). Interestingly enough, Frum sees gay marriage as a GOP distraction from more important issues. I believe that Frum's analysis is correct. Hopefully, the GOP will ignore his advice and hasten their own political demise. Here are some selected highlights from Frum's article:

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As a general rule, the more unequal a place is, the more Democratic; the more equal, the more Republican. The gap between rich and poor in Washington is nearly twice as great as in strongly Republican Charlotte, N.C.; and more than twice as great as in Republican-leaning Phoenix, Fort Worth, Indianapolis and Anaheim. My fellow conservatives and Republicans have tended not to worry very much about the widening of income inequalities. . . . . As America becomes more unequal, it also becomes less Republican. The trends we have dismissed are ending by devouring us.

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As long as all Americans were becoming better off, few cared that some Americans were becoming better off than others. But since 2000, something has changed. Incomes at the middle have ceased to rise. The mood of the country has soured.

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STEP ACROSS THE COUNTY line between Washington and suburban Fairfax County, Va., and you see the forfeiting process at work. A third of a century ago, Fairfax had only recently evolved from farm country to bedroom community. Some rich families clustered in the village of McLean, where Robert Kennedy had his Hickory Hill estate. Otherwise, Fairfax housed middle-class families looking for inexpensive housing and excellent schools. These middle-class families voted Republican, leading the Old Dominion’s political transition away from its reactionary segregationist past to a modern business-oriented conservatism.

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Today Fairfax boasts an economy bigger than Vietnam’s. Fairfax households earn among the highest average incomes of any American county, more than $100,000, but that high average conceals wide variations between the highly educated and new arrivals speaking in 40 different tongues. With wealth comes diversity — and what is inequality but diversity in monetary form?

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As Fairfax has evolved toward greater inequality, it has steadily shifted into the Democratic column. The Democrats Tim Kaine and Jim Webb won almost 60 percent of Fairfax’s votes in, respectively, the 2005 governor’s race and the 2006 U.S. Senate election. Democrats dominate Fairfax’s local government. In 2004, Fairfax voted for John Kerry over George Bush, 53 percent to 45 — the first Democratic presidential victory in the county since the Johnson landslide of 1964.

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Till now, conservative strength in the vast American middle more than compensated for any losses at the top and for the immigration-driven expansion of the bottom. Indeed, the Democratic tilt of the very richest Americans could be exploited as a powerful conservative recruiting tool. Resentment of “elites” is a major theme of conservative talk radio.

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For most of the Bush administration, G.D.P. grew strongly, the stock market boomed, new jobs were created. But the ordinary person experienced little benefit. The median household income, which rose in the ’90s, had only just caught up to its 2000 level when the expansion ended in 2007. . . . Out of their flat-lining incomes, middle-class Americans have had to pay more for food, fuel, tuition and out-of-pocket health-care costs. In the past few months, they have suffered sharp tumbles in the value of their most important asset, their homes. Their mood has turned bleak. Almost 70 percent disapprove of the policies of George W. Bush.

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TO WITNESS THE SLOW-MOTION withering of the G.O.P., drive a little farther west into the Washington metropolitan area, to Prince William County. Here is exurban America in all its fresh paint: vast tracts of inexpensive homes, schools built to the latest design, roads still black in their virgin asphalt. . . . [I]n the past couple of cycles, the once-tight Republican hold upon the county has loosened. Prince William voted (very narrowly) for Gov. Tim Kaine in 2005 and then (slightly less narrowly) for Senator Jim Webb in 2006. A big vote for the 2008 Democratic senatorial candidate Mark Warner seems almost certain, and a victory for Barack Obama seems very possible.

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IN SHORT, the trend to inequality is real, it is large and it is transforming American society and the American electoral map. Yet the conservative response to this trend verges somewhere between the obsolete and the irrelevant. Conservatives need to stop denying reality. The stagnation of the incomes of middle-class Americans is a fact. And only by acknowledging facts can we respond effectively to the genuine difficulties of voters in the middle.

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What the middle class needs most is not lower income taxes but a slowdown in the soaring inflation of health-care costs. If health-insurance costs had risen 50 percent rather than 100 percent over the Bush years, middle-income voters would have enjoyed a pay raise instead of enduring wage stagnation. But it remains unfortunately true that the Republican Party as a whole regards health care as “not our issue” — and certainly less exciting than another round of tax reductions.

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Meanwhile, the argument over same-sex marriage has become worse than a distraction from the challenge of developing policies to ensure that as many children as possible grow up with both a father and a mother in the home.

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At the same time, conservatives need to ask ourselves some hard questions about the trend toward the Democrats among America’s affluent and well educated. Leaving aside the District of Columbia, 7 of America’s 10 best-educated states are strongly “blue” in national politics, and the others (Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia) have been trending blue. Of the 10 least-educated, only one (Nevada) is not reliably Republican.

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Inequality, in short, is a conservative issue too. We must develop a positive agenda that integrates the right kind of egalitarianism with our conservative principles of liberty. If we neglect this task and this opportunity, we won’t lose just the northern Virginia suburbs. We will lose America.