It’s easy to get whiplash these days, especially if you believe in data. This morning, you can learn from Gallup that the country remains ideologically slanted to the right:
“As Americans continued to lean more Democratic than Republican in their party preferences in 2019, the ideological balance of the country remained center-right, with 37% of Americans, on average, identifying as conservative during the year, 35% as moderate and 24% as liberal.”
You can also learn from Daily Kos Elections that Donald Trump’s reelection prospects have never looked worse:
We've swapped in some new @Civiqs polls on the @DKElections home page. One is Trump's re-elect vs. a generic Dem, which just ticked up to its widest spread ever, 49 D, 43 Trump. The trend overall has not been good for Trump https://t.co/pTyjiBqJ9S pic.twitter.com/HKSPR2945o
— The Downballot (@downballotnews) February 18, 2020
You can read Eric Levitz’s big piece in New York magazine that explores the hard-left leanings of Millennials and Generation Z.
Blue America’s gaping chasm of a generation gap has been a — if not the — defining feature of the Democratic primary race thus far. An Economist/YouGov poll released this week found that 60 percent of Democrats younger than 30 support either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren; among those 65 and older, the progressive candidates’ combined total was 27 percent. Before the Vermont senator’s strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, surveys showed an even wider age divide: In late January, Quinnipiac had Joe Biden leading the field nationally — even as he trailed Bernie Sanders among voters 35 and younger by a margin of 53 to 3 percent. Exit polls from New Hampshire affirmed this generational split, with Sanders winning 47 percent of voters 18 to 29, but just 15 percent of those over 65.
Technically, it’s possible for all of these things to be true at the same time despite the fact that they seem to tell contradictory stories. If you’re trying to put together this puzzle to see what it portends for the upcoming election, it seems like a very daunting task. We’re accustomed to seeing a gender gap and voter preferences starkly divided by region and race, and we know that the Electoral College is very capable of rendering a different verdict from the popular vote. We’ve never seen generational splits like this, however, and pollsters aren’t giving us the information in a way that really allows us to understand how it might shape the outcome in November.
For example, we don’t know if the youth vote is as divided by region as the rest of the electorate. Are the kids in Oklahoma as socialist friendly as the left-leaning kids in Oregon? How about in the rural areas of the Rust Belt? Can Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren hope to outperform Hillary Clinton in small town Pennsylvania because folks under thirty there will vote differently from their MAGA hat-wearing parents? How would these same kids feel about Joe Biden or Michael Bloomberg? What would this age difference look like with Pete Buttigieg on the ballot? Finally, how much youth turnout would be necessary to overcome the natural tendency of older votes to hit above their weight in the voting booth?
We can ask similar questions about the folks over sixty-five. The data suggest that they’d be far more likely to back a candidate perceived as moderate than a strong progressive. To what degree is this true, and at what point would it overwhelm any surge in voter participation from younger voters? We might only need the answer to this question in a small handful of swing states.
I tend to focus more on the urban/suburban vs. rural/small town split, as it helps me model what it will take to win in the traditionally blue states that Trump carried in 2016. Sanders-style Democratic socialism doesn’t play well in the affluent suburbs outside Philadelphia where I live. My county voted for George W. Bush twice before splitting between Obama, Romney, and Clinton. Clinton actually did the best of the bunch, but there’s a lot of potential swing depending on the candidates on offer.
And there’s some reason to believe the youth vote here will act differently from the youth vote in less wealthy areas. Eric Levitz looks at the recent results out of New Hampshire in the context of data showing that real median income for college grads looks much different for kids that attend elite vs. ordinary colleges.
A vulgar Marxist looking at Bloomberg’s chart might predict that the college students and graduates of less prestigious, public universities — who have been most disserved by the “knowledge economy” myth — would be even more inclined toward left-wing politics than their Ivy League peers. And the results of the New Hampshire primary lend credence to that view: While Pete Buttigieg held his own in the town of Hanover, home to Dartmouth, Sanders cleaned his clock in the precincts surrounding the University of New Hampshire.
Since the popular vote doesn’t determine the winner of the presidential election, it matters a lot how sentiments in the youth vote differ by state, and also how turnout might differ by region. It’s quite possible that one Democrat could create a successful distribution of votes while another would not, despite them both getting about the same number of total votes across the entirety of the country.
Yet, regional and urban/suburban vs. rural/small town polarization seems to be the most immutable and growing phenomenon of the Trump Era. It’s hard to bet on any Democrat being able to stem or especially reverse this trend. A candidate who we can expect to underperform Clinton among the over-30 crowd in the suburbs and among voters over 65 would need to make up for it by over-performing by a bigger amount with the under-30 crowd and in Trump’s rural areas of strength. And they’d have to do this in clearly defined states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.
It’s hard to gamble on this happening when the more natural and obvious road to victory is to roll up bigger margins in the suburbs than Clinton did, which seems to be the trajectory we’re on, while hoping that any Democrat will do better than Clinton with the youth vote in rural areas.
The surest road to defeat seems to be entering the contest with a badly divided Democratic Party where there are folks who actually prefer Trump to their own party’s candidate, and also a large contingent of people who will sit it out because they’re angry at how their preferred candidate was treated during the primaries.
It seems obvious that a more progressive kind of politics is on the horizon, but I don’t know if we’ll be there yet in 2020.
“As Americans continued to lean more Democratic than Republican in their party preferences in 2019… 37% of Americans, on average, [identify] as conservative”
Since things like universal health care are pretty overwhelmingly popular, I conclude that lots of Americans don’t have a clue what conservative really means.
I read somewhere that out of 33 developed countries only one does not have universal health care. I wonder who that one is?
Thanks to our creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 and the financial services additions in 1998 which forbid new reguations in financial services except temporarily in the dozens of countries that signed onto them, we’ve successfully prevented the “contagion” (that is how they think of it in high places here in the US) from spreading into any new countries. <–satire but true.
This allows new "efficiency gains" (increased profits frequently associated with job losses) from trading jobs for markets, more highly profitable markets and formery risky now more stable investment and claimed larger future marketsin the developing world. Another big part of it is tying developing countries to "our system" by making them dependent on us for jobs. (in exchange for very low cost high skill labor) For an example, see this https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/nativedocuments/2017-4-12-PM-602-0143-Matter-of-I-Corp-Adopted-AAO-Decision.pdf One might debate whether establishing that 8.50 an hour for an engineer could be legal in the face of a proposed wage of $6.47 an hour, but we should remember that they were contesting our right to demand they pay any particular wage at all. Claiming that the right to work here, coming as it did from a treaty, was not to be subject to additional conditions (or quotas) These deals are the real reason why we have seen so few increases in the minimum wage. It seems that the ideology embedded in the WTO and similar bodies of international law is operating on an assumption that wages and all labor standards, will always fall, will invaraiably shirink, and regulations of any type are required or predestined to all be harmonized to the least common denominator of all trading countries unless they all agreed to go higher which seems to have been made impossible by how they work, requiring all countries to agree on changes. The concept of "not more burdensome than necessary " (near the end of this video) also is very important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY2tUTA4mzM
Its explained really well, in what must be a record for shortest time, most information conveyed in shortest time, , which is in legal testimony to the California Legislature by a real trade expert from Georgetown university. he does this very well and very engagingly, Note how he mentions that its not a conspiracy theory.. its fact. He deals with this all the time.
Also, This (what he describes in the video) all applies to a great many areas including healthcare, higher education, housing and many other services, unless they are exempt from the scope of GATS by the "governmental authority exclusion" by virtue of being completely free, noncommercial and lacking even one single competitor. A very hard bar to reach. So you see, we've given away the right to compromise on things, unless they are the absolute minimum possible, not just somewhere in the middle. Where does that leave Democrats? In a very very bad position,as we're likely to be hated for being responsible for 95% corporate policies every time. (or they have to be limited in scope in other ways, time, say or only in an emergency. Which as we all can see is what has always happened since 1995.
How do we get out of this? We'd either have to reject the deal by claiming it and those who made it had exceeded the scope of their authority, (unlikely given the naivete about GATS now) or thats the deal is unconstitutional since it successfully attempted to set up this new body of law above the US Consitution. as well as a totally undemocratic body to enforce it..or acept it and buy our way out by trading away concessions, thats likely to be jobs, lots of jobs. This is likely what they will opt to do, it having been the plan all along, many of them would see it as 'killing two birds with one stone' so to speak.
It would be a different kind of job loss than any before, too.
One that protects internationall investors but totally decimates the life choices and physical investments of an entire class of perhaps millios of people bit by bit as sector after sector was "liberalized". But of course the lower wages would be exceptionally profitable for big multinational corporations. They would also decimate a great deal of their competition as small and medium sized businesses were closed..
Also, people should be aware that the way its structured (people training their replacements over nine months) they are considered to have gotten warning so no retraining or other benefits seem to apply. So basically this would be the "services liberalization" that has been planned (and hung up in negotiations, like the failed Doha Development Agenda) for more than two decades. Another paper thats worth reading is Disciplining domestic regulation: the World Trade Organization and the market for professional services by Patricia J. Arnold This is basically about the Track 2 of the GATS. Which you can read a bit more about at the ABA's site
http://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibility/policy/gats_international_agreements/track_two.html
(about legal services but much of it applies to other professions, also if you go one level up they have some more info about it generally.)
An NGO that has a lot about GATS is Policy Alternatives, the policy arm of the Council of Canadians. For example, this is about GATS and Canada's postal services.
https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/National_Office_Pubs/return_to_sender.pdf
You are 100% right. We get this right-leaning country canard shoved down our throats year after year. Yet poll after poll show overwhelming support for liberal ideas time and time again. I’ve posted the list many times here and I’m done.
Basically we live in a nation of greedy spiteful oligarchs that have succeeded in turning the general public into a bunch of blithering idiots too busy trying to make ends meet to have a clue about pretty much anything.
We should just call national health care “ConservaCare.” Then it would get passed.
Well if Dems want to make sure no one under 30 votes the they should nominate Bloomers
You ask about young voters in other states, and there are differences from state to state, but it’s still pretty consistent. Even in Alabama he’s -9 among 18-34’s.
My suburb in western NY swung hard left starting in 2017 and is now middle of the road from being quite conservative. While it’s anecdotal, at last summer’s 4th of July celebration put on by our town, the Democratic Party tent had a much younger and more diverse group around it than the Republican tent. That has shown up in more diversity on the town board and on the school board.
I share Martin’s concerns but since my crystal ball doesn’t provide clarity, I’m not going to oppose Sanders out of fear. Did that in 2016 and it didn’t lead to my preferred result.
My sense is voters are craving authenticity above all else. Ironically, that’s why Trump was elected. Enough morons thought him authentic. An authentic asshole and clown but authentic nontheless. It would not shock me if Bernie ate substantially into Trump’s support.