-
sponsorship
Colorado is turning purple because of migration.
There have been other, longer explanations for why traditionally Republican Colorado is in play this election. Real Clear Politics has all the numbers. Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker has a good article on the ascendance of Democratic politicians in the state. Christopher Beam does the same fine job of parsing the politics of the state on Slate.
But migration tells a better story.
Colorado hasn't become what Stuart Rothenberg calls the most important state in November because of what politicians have or have not done or because of a new array of issues. Colorado has been trending Democratic because the people who have moved there largely come from Democratic counties in other states.
Colorado has imported Democrats.
Bob Cushing tracked the flow of people in and out of Colorado from 1981 to 2005 using migration data collected by the federal government. Some Colorado counties had a lot of flux in their populations. Others were relatively stable.
Cushing divided the state's 63 counties into three even groups based on migration. (OK, Colorado has 64 counties, but Broomfield is relatively new.) The 21 counties with the highest percentage of new population were the most Democratic in the 2004 election. They voted two percentage points more Democratic than the state as a whole. (These were the densely populated counties around Denver and Boulder.)
The middle group was eight percentage points more Republican than the Colorado average. And the last group of counties—those whose populations have been least affected by out-of-towners—voted 15 points more Republican than the state average.
The larger the number of newcomers in a Colorado county, the more Democratic that county voted in 2004.
This change has been taking place slowly, just like migration. But examined over a generation, the politics of the migration have shifted dramatically. The vote for the presidential elections from 1992 to 2004 in these 21 counties was 19 percentage points more Democratic than in the period from 1976 through 1988.
The in-between counties have grown 10 percentage points more Democratic.
The 23 Colorado counties least affected by the outside world have grown one percentage point more Republican.
And, yes, as expected, the people moving into the counties growing most Democratic come from counties that voted blue in presidential elections. The county outside of Colorado that sent the most people to the state over the last generation was deeply Democratic: Los Angeles.
When people move, they sort by political preference. It's happening all over the country. The new people moving into Northern Virginia are turning that area Democratic. Meanwhile, the county clerk in Crook County in rural central Oregon said that eight out of 10 people who registered with a party there since 1995 have been Republican.
Every four years there's a presidential election. But Americans vote with their feet every day.
-
sponsorship
Rural voters in battleground states support John McCain by about the same percentage that they backed George Bush at this point in the 2004 election. In September 2004, Bush held a 13-point lead over John Kerry among rural voters in battleground states. This September, McCain holds a 10-point lead over Sen. Barack Obama.
Despite wars in two countries and a worldwide financial collapse, the 2008 election is static, locked in the divisions, rhetoric, and tactics of 2000 and 2004. The divide between rural and urban voters was among the most dramatic signs of geographic partisanship in 2004. George Bush came out of the nation's cities running 3.7 million votes behind John Kerry. He won rural counties by 4.1 million and then padded his margin in exurbia.
The poll of rural voters is just a bit more evidence that the talk about change and mavericks and a new kind of post-partisan politics is more than overheated. Americans are settling quite naturally into the voting patterns of the past two presidential elections.
The poll surveyed likely voters last week in 13 closely contested states. (They are Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.) Greenberg Quinlan Rosner interviewed 742 likely voters living in rural communities. The poll was commissioned by the Center for Rural Strategies, a nonpartisan rural-advocacy group in Whitesburg, Ky. (As editor of the Daily Yonder, I am an employee of Rural Strategies.)
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner works exclusively for Democratic candidates. Bill Greener, a Republican strategist, helped shape the poll. The full poll can be found here.
Rural voters were clearly enamored with the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin for the Republican ticket, even if they were less certain she was ready to take over the presidency. More than half said the choice of the Alaskan governor made them more likely to vote for McCain. Thirty-one percent said they were less likely to vote for McCain because of Palin.
Rural voters liked Gov. Palin personally more than they were impressed by her qualifications. Some 65 percent of those polled said the Alaskan "represents the values of rural communities." Fewer, 54 percent, said she was "ready to be vice president and assume the presidency if need be."
Rural voters have warmed considerably to McCain since the spring. When asked who would do a "better job" on a range of issues, rural voters were increasingly likely to name McCain.
For example, in May rural voters thought Obama would do a better job than McCain on the nation's economy by a 44 percent to 36 percent margin. In this poll, however, rural voters now say McCain would do better with the economy by a 46 percent to 43 percent margin.
In September, Obama held a 10-point edge over McCain on the question of who would do a better job of "bringing the right kind of change." Now the two candidates are tied.
McCain moved up on every question—who is "on your side," who shares your values, who would do better in Iraq—while Obama lost ground or stayed the same since the May survey.
Fifty-three percent of those polled said their neighbors and their communities were "ready for a black president." Twenty-four percent said their neighbors and the people of their communities were not ready for a black president. A quite large number, 23 percent, answered this question by saying they didn't know, refused to answer, or that neither option was appropriate.
The poll was taken during the economic turmoil of last week, and rural voters named the "economy and jobs" as the most pressing issues facing them. When asked to compare the importance of the economy and values, 61 percent of those polled said the economy was the "most important thing" in the election. Only 36 percent said it was most important that the next president "reflects my values."
Pollster Anna Greenberg said she was surprised McCain's lead wasn't larger. She said the sample in this poll was slightly more Republican than the rural poll taken in May. And although rural voters were seeing McCain more favorably, that was not translating into decisions to vote for the Republican.
Republican Greener interpreted the poll as more evidence that Democrats have been unable to cross the cultural division that has been defined by the geography of rural and urban America. "When Sen. Obama says that people living in small towns cling to their guns and religion due to bitterness, or his supporters attack Gov. Palin for not being qualified to serve by making light of her background as the mayor of a small city, this all contributes to separating the Democrats from voters in rural areas," Greener said.
Democrats have told themselves that they were able to win U.S. Senate seats in Montana, Missouri, and Virginia in 2006 because they put up candidates who could attract votes in rural areas. (Missouri's Claire McCaskill, Virginia's Jim Webb, and Jon Tester from Montana were nicknamed the "redneck caucus.") When you look at the county-by-county results, however, these races were won because Democrats increased their turnout in the cities.
Obama has been hustling in rural places, but this poll shows that over the past four months, rural voters in swing states have not moved his way. They have, however, found more to like in John McCain.
George Bush won in 2004 because he was able to turn out voters in rural and exurban communities. The tactical question this year may be whether Obama can pull the same trick in the cities.
-
sponsorship
Five thousand Mormons have moved out of downtown Salt Lake City in the last five years. They haven't left the SLC metro area, according to a July story in the Salt Lake Tribune. They've left the city. The Mormon population is "shifting north, south and west" out of Salt Lake City, wrote Peggy Fletcher Stack. And as Mormons move to the suburbs, "downtown Salt Lake City has grown more religiously diverse—and often more attractive to outsiders."
Mormon families who have exited downtown SLC have clustered. Eight out of 10 residents from one of these developments are Mormon, according to Stack. "There are 28 children under 12 within nine houses on our cul de sac," one Mormon mother, an urban refugee, told the reporter. "We are all stay-at-home moms and all Mormons. It's great."
Mormons load up house and hound in Mayflower trucks and U-Hauls and move out to developments with uplifting names like Daybreak and Bountiful. A more "diverse" group takes their place downtown. Over time, the city grows more liberal—the last two SLC mayors have been left-leaning Dems—and the suburbs become more Republican.
Welcome to the big sort—the social, cultural and economic phenomenon that has now taken the reins of the 2008 election and steered it back into the (depressing and divisive) pattern of 2000 and 2004.
Most U.S. communities have grown increasingly Republican or Democratic over the past 30 years. The numbers are clear-cut. Bob Cushing (the stats powerhouse in this operation) studied voting patterns at the county level in presidential elections since 1948. He found that since 1976, the trend has been for Republicans and Democrats to grow more geographically segregated. In the contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, about a quarter of voters lived in a county where a candidate won by more than 20 percentage points.
The last five presidential elections have been closer than any comparable period in the last century. At the same time, an increasing number of communities have developed overwhelming, and stable, local majorities. In 1992, Cushing found, 37.7 percent of American voters lived in counties where the margin was greater than 20 points. By 2000, it was 45.3 percent. The 2004 vote between John Kerry and George Bush was one of the closest in history nationally, but where people lived, the election wasn't close at all. In six out of 10 U.S. counties, the margin (for one party or the other) was 20 percentage points or more. And nearly half of all voters lived in a community where the local results were a landslide.
Bob Cushing and I thought that a good deal of this political segregation was created by migration. The entire country was sorting—in the same way Salt Lake City was sorting. If this were true, Cushing figured a community that tipped Republican or Democratic would keep tipping as it collected more like-minded residents.
That's exactly what he found. Once counties grew solidly Democratic or Republican, the local margins would increase in presidential votes. One half of U.S. voters live in counties that have remained unchanged in their presidential preference since 1980; 60 percent live in counties that haven't changed since 1988; and nearly 73 percent live in counties that haven't changed since 1992.
One early objection to our findings was that people didn't check local voting records before they moved. That is largely true. People didn't want neighbors who had the same opinion about single-payer health plans. They wanted to be around people who lived like they did. Who thought the way they thought. Who had the same kind of lifestyle.
And these days, lifestyle predicts political party.
When asked to explain how people choose a political party, Donald Green at Yale described two social events. Imagine you are walking down a hall, Green said. There are two doors leading to two different social gatherings. You look in at both, and then you ask yourself some questions. "Which one is filled with people that you most closely identify with?" Green asked. "Which ones would you like to have your sons and daughters marry?" You don't pick your party by position paper. You get a vibe. You pick the group with your kind of people. And you join—and, most likely, you join for life.
That's the way we've chosen where and how we live. Opposites don't attract. Psychologists know that people seek out others like themselves for marriage and friendship. That the same phenomenon could be taking place between people and communities isn't all that surprising to social psychologists. "Mobility enables the sociological equivalent of ‘assortative mating,' " social psychologist David Myers explained. At the same time, the social insularity created in these increasingly homogenous communities, churches, and clubs reinforces political partisanship. We hear and believe what our group hears and believes. Dissent is squelched, extremism is rewarded and allegiance to the group is enforced.
So, despite all promises and predictions of a new kind of post-partisan politics, this election has been jimmied back into the pattern of 2000 and '04. Really, who should be surprised? Elections are a reflection of how and where we live.