Women, Millennials, College Graduates Increasingly Align with Democratic Party

As the 2018 midterm elections approach, a new Pew Research Center survey reveals data that ought to make the Republican Party very fearful especially in the long term.   The GOP base is increasingly less educated, rural, aging and more religiously extreme.  The Democrat base in contrast is urban, better educated, younger and non-religiously affiliated, with Millennials being sharply more aligned with the Democrat Party.   One take away is that if Democrats can get Millennials - now the largest generation - to the polls, GOP prospects dim significantly.  Ironically, leading Christofascists (hate group leader and pathological liar Tony Perkins has a rant here) who drive the GOP's anti-woman, anti-knowledge, racist and religiously intolerant agenda blame the phenomenon on "indoctrination" by public schools and "liberal colleges" rather than looking at themselves in the mirror and realizing that they themselves are one of the largest problems for the GOP going forward and that they have been key in driving Millennials from religion in general.  Here are highlights from Pew's long article:

As the 2018 midterm elections approach, women and especially college graduates have moved toward the Democratic Party. By contrast, the Republican Party’s advantage in leaned party identification among white voters without a college degree has never been greater, dating back more than two decades. 

A new analysis of party identification, based on more than 10,000 interviews of registered voters conducted by Pew Research Center in 2017, finds that 37% of registered voters identify as independents, 33% are Democrats and 26% are Republicans. Since 2014, the last midterm election year, there have been notable changes in party identification among several groups of voters. And as we noted in our 2016 report on party affiliation, the composition of the Republican and Democratic electorates are less alike than at any point in the past quarter-century.

Persistent gender gap. For decades, women have been more likely than men to identify as Democrats or lean Democratic. But today, a 56% majority of women identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, while 37% affiliate with or lean toward the GOP. The share of women identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic is up 4 percentage points since 2015 and is at one of its highest points since 1992.

Record share of college graduates align with Democrats. Voters who have completed college make up a third of all registered voters. And a majority of all voters with at least a four-year college degree (58%) now identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, the highest share dating back to 1992. Just 36% affiliate with the Republican Party or lean toward the GOP.

Continued racial divisions in partisan identification. . . . . African American voters continue to affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic by an overwhelming margin (84% Democrat to 8% Republican). Hispanic voters align with the Democrats by greater than two-to-one (63% to 28%), while Asian American voters also largely identify as Democrats or lean Democratic (65% Democrat, 27% Republican).

Millennials, especially Millennial women, tilt more Democratic. As noted in our recent report on generations and politics, Millennial voters are more likely than older generations to affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic. Nearly six-in-ten Millennials (59%) affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic, compared with about half of Gen Xers and Boomers (48% each) and 43% of voters in the Silent Generation. A growing majority of Millennial women (70%) affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic; four years ago, 56% of Millennial women did so.

Education Gap. When race and education are taken into account, white voters who do to not have a college degree make up a diminished share of Democratic registered voters. White voters who do not have a four-year degree now constitute just a third of Democratic voters, down from 56% two decades ago. By contrast, non-college white voters continue to make up a majority of Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters (59% now, 66% in 1997).

Millennials. Millennial voters (born 1981 to 1996) have had a Democratic tilt since they first entered adulthood; this advantage has only grown as they have aged. Democrats enjoy a 27-percentage-point advantage among Millennial voters (59% are Democrats or lean Democratic, 32% are Republican or lean Republican).

Religious Affiliation. White evangelical Protestants remain one of the most reliably Republican groups of voters, and the GOP’s advantage among this segment of the population has continued to grow in recent years: 77% of white evangelical voters lean toward or identify with the Republican Party, while just 18% have a Democratic orientation. . . . . The religiously unaffiliated, a growing share of the population, have shown steady movement in orientation toward the Democratic Party. In 1994, about half (52%) of religiously unaffiliated voters leaned toward or identified with the Democratic Party. Today nearly seven-in-ten (68%) do so.

Urban versus Rural. Voters in urban counties have long aligned more with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party, and this Democratic advantage has grown over time. Today, twice as many urban voters identify as Democrats or lean Democratic (62%) as affiliate with the GOP or lean Republican.

Who Will Save the Democratic Party From Itself?

After its disastrous experience in the 2014 midterm elections, some think that the Democratic Party needs to refocus itself and return to some of its historic roots as a champion of the working and middle classes.  One such person is former Virginia Senator James Webb who has announced an exploratory effort on a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.  There are positive aspects to Webb's vision, but the question is whether he or anyone else can cause the party to recalibrate itself and/or force Hillary Clinton to do so.  The Democrats need a stirring theme and agenda and just saying that they are not crazy and/or a bunch of hate merchants like the Republicans - true as that may be - isn't enough to recapture the battered middle class.  We need to reignite social mobility for the younger voters and give parents an ability to once again believe their children have a better future.  Here are highlights from a New York Times editorial:

Not everyone agrees that Hillary Clinton’s selection as the Democratic nominee is unstoppable. The first to challenge her is Jim Webb, a one-term former senator from Virginia.

Here is the case for the Democratic Party renegade.  When Webb, who served as secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, announced the formation of a presidential exploratory committee on Nov. 19, he sought to capitalize on Democratic discontent. Taking a swipe at both Wall Street and Clinton’s potential bid for the nomination, Webb declared:

Our Constitution established a government not to protect the dominance of an aristocratic elite, but under the principle that there should be no permanent aristocracy, that every single American should have equal protection under the law, and a fair opportunity to achieve at the very highest levels.

Webb suggested that he could bring working class whites back into the Democratic fold and restore the biracial Democratic coalition:

We have drifted to the fringes of allowing the very inequalities that our Constitution was supposed to prevent. Walk into some of our inner cities if you dare, and see the stagnation, poverty, crime and lack of opportunity that still affects so many African-Americans. Or travel to the Appalachian Mountains, where my own ancestors settled and whose cultural values I still share, and view the poorest counties in America – who happen to be more than 90 percent white, and who live in the reality that “if you’re poor and white you’re out of sight.”

Webb’s exploration of a presidential bid is based on the premise that he can tap into a crucial but alienated segment of the electorate.

This bloc includes voters convinced that Wall Street owns both parties, voters tired of politicians submitting to partisan orthodoxy and voters seeking to replace “identity group” politics with a restored middle- and working-class agenda.

Webb is one answer to the weaknesses of today’s center-left, the so-called “upstairs-downstairs” coalition described by Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University. Kotkin argues in his recently published book, “The New Class Conflict,” that the Democratic Party has been taken over by what he calls “gentry liberals,” an elite that has undermined the historic purpose of the Democratic Party.  Kotkin contends that

The great raison d'être for left-wing politics – advocating for the middle- and working classes – has been refocused to attend more closely to the policy imperatives and interests of small, highly affluent classes, as well as the powerful public sector.

I asked Kotkin what he thought of the themes Webb intends to raise, and he wrote back “I think he’s onto something.”

Al Hunt, a Bloomberg columnist, warned that Webb “could be Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare,” noting that Webb

seems an improbable candidate. He has taken illiberal positions, was President Ronald Reagan’s Navy secretary, has few relationships within the Democratic Party, and has no serious fund-raising network. What he does possess is a long-held and forceful opposition to U.S. interventions in Iraq and Libya, and potentially Syria, as well as solid anti-Wall Street credentials. In Democratic primaries, these may be Clinton’s greatest impediments to rallying a hard-core activist base.

To gauge Webb’s prospects, I looked at the exit poll data for the 2006 Virginia Senate race, when he unseated George Allen, the favored Republican. I then compared Webb’s performance among key constituencies to the performance of all House Democrats running nationwide in the same year.

The results of this comparison do not support the portrayal of Webb as a candidate equipped to win over key white constituencies.

What are the prospects of winning the presidential nomination for a candidate who challenges current Democratic Party strategic orthodoxy? This strategy calls for identity group, rather than class-based, mobilization, on the assumption that turning out single women, the young, and racial and ethnic minorities is more effective than an uphill struggle to revive support in the recalcitrant white middle and working class.

As much as such a shift to a class-based strategy might result in economic policies more beneficial to less affluent Democratic constituencies, and therefore to more votes in the long haul, so far there has been insufficient intraparty pressure to force a change in strategic orientation.

It is not lost on Democratic strategists that President Obama won twice deploying a group-based rather than a class-based strategy. Even if the next Democratic nominee does not inspire the high minority turnout levels of 2008 and 2012, the 2016 electorate will be less Republican than it was in 2012. Every four years, the heavily Republican white share of voters drops by a little over 2 percent, and the disproportionately Democratic minority share grows by the same amount.

Insofar as the Republican Party tempers its retrograde stance on social-sexual and moral-racial issues, Democratic campaigns stressing alleged threats from conservatives — the threat to freedom and privacy posed by the Christian right; the threat to Hispanic family unity posed by anti-immigrant activists; the threat to programs serving the poor posed by deficit hawks — will run out of gas.

Democrats, according to Pew, retained an advantage on less tangible qualities such as empathy, honesty and a willingness to compromise.  As attractive as those characteristics are, they are not top priorities for voters. . . . . voters’ top priorities consistently include bread-and-butter issues, jobs and the economy.

The Democrats’ lack of credibility on economic issues will hobble, if not extinguish, the party’s prospects. Unless the Democrats develop a coherent, comprehensive strategy for the have-nots, it won’t matter whether the party’s nominee is Clinton, Webb or anyone else.

Will Elizabeth Warren Transform the Democrat Party?

In most instances Democrats ran from Barack Obama and the liberal policies of the Democrat Party in the campaign leading up to the disastrous 2014 midterm elections.  Far too little was said about the progress made under Obama - improved economy, dropping unemployment, dropping gas prices, and so forth.  Playing moderate, in short, did nothing to stop losses.  Some are suggesting that had these failed candidates done more to talk up successes and embrace popular liberal policies, the results might have been different - and might have motivated more of the base which stayed home. A piece in Salon raises the question of whether Elizabeth Warren can lead the Democrats back to liberal issues that find wide popular support out side of Christofascist circles.  Here are excerpts:

Twenty years from now, assuming climate change has not yet ended the world as we know it, most American liberals won’t think of this fall as the time when Republicans finally retook control of the U.S. Senate. And they won’t think of it as the brief pause that separated the era of Barack Obama from that of Hillary Clinton. Instead, when the liberals of our near future look back on the current moment, they’ll remember it as the hour when the Democratic Party began to move decisively to the left, thanks in no small part to the continued ascendance of Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

At this point, it’s not entirely clear what the folks nominally in charge of this infamously disorganized party are trying to do by elevating Warren. Because the former Harvard Law professor has been prominent in liberal circles since the launch of her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it can be easy to forget that she’s only been in Congress for a couple of years. And coming as it does after a truly disastrous midterm showing, this seeming vote of confidence from Democratic bigwigs has the risk of being a “glass cliff” situation. My former colleague Brian Beutler, for example, has guessed that Senate Dem leadership may have opted to bring Warren into the fold because they’ll need a popular spokeswoman to deliver the next two years’ worth of bad news to the “professional left.”

After many years of kvetching about their paltry influence — and following decade after decade of enviously watching the conservative movement refashion the GOP in its own image — lefty ideologues and organizers now have the chance to turn Warren into a kind of trojan horse for a resurgent politics of economic populism (or, as it used to be called, liberalism). And if they adapt and adhere to the script used many years ago by visionary right-wingers, who famously responded to an electoral drubbing in 1964 by staying the course and propelling a true believer to the White House less than 20 years later, it just might work.

I still think the conservative example offers activist liberals unhappy with the Obama record –which is most of them — some valuable lessons.For one, if left-wing troublemakers want to make Sen. Warren a Goldwater of their own, they’ll have to ignore the 2016 presidential race as much as possible. That doesn’t simply mean giving up on the lost cause of forcing Wall Street favorite Hillary Clinton to reinvent herself as a true progressive. And it certainly doesn’t mean wasting resources on a quixotic primary challenge, which in the present circumstances will do little more than help Clinton get back in the swing of triangulation. Instead, it means building institutional support from the bottom up by creating funding networks and community spaces outside of the Democratic Party’s reach, so lefties can feel personally invested in their cause without having D.C. grandees step in and tell them to be “serious.” 

[T]he success of right-wing activists from the past and present indicates that there can be long-term benefits in a short-term stint as the minority. To be clear, it’d be taking things too far to say that it’s a good thing Democrats now only control the White House. As the last four years have taught us, the powers of the imperial presidency don’t seem to extend very far into the realm of the domestic (at least not yet). So having a majority in Congress is vital, still. At the same time, there’s value, to a degree, in having a party with ideological coherence — increasingly so, I’d argue, in an era of institutional failure and partisan polarization. Most of the Democrats dissolved in the red tides of ’10 and ’14 were “blue dog” conservatives,

[W]hat lefty activists should learn from their right-wing counterparts is this: In a dysfunctional two-party system such as ours, in which voters are perpetually unhappy and ready for any excuse to throw the bums out and start all over, it’s only a matter of time until the losers of yesterday are once again ascendant. And as the GOP has shown in the years since its back-to-back wipeouts in ’06 and ’08, responding to electoral defeat by moderating is no longer necessary, while moving further away from the center is no longer a death sentence. Now that they have a political superstar and ideological true believer as their behind-the-scenes agent, lefty activists with an eye on the long term have a chance to, in the words of Warren, “frame the issues for the next few elections” and ultimately make the Democratic Party truly progressive.