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Anthropologist E.E. Evans-Prichard studied the Nuer, a pastoral people living in the Upper Nile region of Africa, herders who moved with their animals to the tune of the region's rivers. In flood times, Nuer tribes retreated to higher ground, and when the waters receded, the Nuer clans moved to the grassy valleys.
Nuer tribes were constantly crossing paths, and so they could easily fall into conflict over lost animals and scarce forage. Professor Evans-Prichard wrote in the 1940s about the intricate ways the Nuer encouraged cooperation and resolved conflicts.
The Nuer put special faith in a group of arbiters known as "men of the earth." Men of the earth had no formal powers. They couldn't arrest people or make arbitrary decisions. But the Nuer granted these people a kind of local authority to settle disputes. If a fight broke out, a man of the earth could stop the conflict by running between the combatants and hoeing a line in the dirt. If a tribal member was killed in a fight, a man of the earth arbitrated compensation to be paid by the winner to the dead man's family.
The "man of the earth" was a deal-maker, a negotiator, a compromiser. He was the person given the job of representing all the conflicting interests of the tribes.
A man of the earth was a politician.
John McCain and Barack Obama began this campaign running as men of the earth—post partisans who promised to race between the red and the blue, hoeing a line in the turf that would bring the bickering to an end. That's not how these races ended, of course, not just because McCain or Obama changed but because the country didn't.
Over the last 30 years, most communities have grown either more Democratic or more Republican. Through an incremental process of migration and self-selection, people have clustered in like-minded neighborhoods, clubs, and churches.
Migration had consequences. Legislative districts grew more lopsided, and they elected more-partisan representatives. Politicians no longer mediated competing interests in their districts. They represented increasingly one-sided constituencies that grew more extreme in their ideological isolation.
The meaning of politics changed. Voters didn't want men of the earth. They wanted partisans.
Republicans, perhaps, first realized how the country was changing and catered to the division that Americans were creating. By 2008, however, it didn't matter who started it. This was the way we lived. A Guardian reporter in deep-blue Brooklyn found a checkout clerk who wondered, as a "social experiment," what would happen if he donned a McCain button. A nearby shopper admitted she was still concerned about what might transpire on Election Day. "I'm worried about all the ignorant people—I don't mean that pejoratively, I mean uninformed people—who are out there and who will swing it away from Obama," Tamara said.
At McCain rallies, Obama is a "socialist," and a member of the Texas State Board of Education wrote that the Democrat "truly sympathizes" with terrorists and intends to declare martial law if elected. At one East Coast public university, a dean of undergraduate studies sent an e-mail to faculty reporting that there had been "an increase in complaints by students who believe a chilly climate exists for conservative view points. ..." Americans appear ready to end a culture of racism with this election—symbolically, at least—but prejudices based on what others think and where they live run wild.
The earth was what the Nuer had in common. If locusts swarmed or a drought persisted, every tribe suffered. When the grass was thick, they all prospered. They were called "men of the earth," anthropologist Max Gluckman wrote, because "the earth, undivided as the basis of society, (symbolized) not individual prosperity, fertility, and good fortune, but the general prosperity, fertility, and good fortune on which individual life depends."
What do Americans have in common today? Not much. Oh, we share a lot with our neighbors, with the people at our church. Too much, in fact. But we don't know fellow citizens just a few counties over. It takes a "social experiment" in some parts to imagine how it would be to live as a member of a different political party.
The danger the next president faces comes from his single-minded friends as much as his political opponents. Politicians need room to do their jobs. They need the authority to make deals with the other side. This isn't a power that's won on Election Day. It can come only from a people who come to realize that their well-being depends as much on the "ignorant people ... out there" as their like-minded and righteous neighbors.
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Undecideds don't vote on issues. If they were interested in issues—or even in the personalities of candidates—they wouldn't be undecideds. "They are not radical, not liberal, not conservative, not reactionary," C. Wright Mills wrote in 1953, "they are inactionary; they are out of it." Mills was writing about the torpor of Eisenhower-era Americans, but this is also a good description of undecideds a day before the 2008 election.
How do you get "inactionaries" to vote? Mostly, undecideds split evenly. Or, Pew Research Center's Andy Kohut tells us, half of the undecideds don't vote at all.
In the era of the big sort, the strategy for turning out so-called base voters and undecideds is the same. Politics is no longer about convincing individual voters with long lists of proposals and policy papers. Campaigns move communities of people—neighborhoods, congregations, home-schoolers, hunters—to the polls. And as these "peoples" steam to the vote, they pull along the undecideds in their wake.
"Voting research trends have ... shown that independents are very susceptible to social influence, often turning to others in their local environment for advice on political matters," University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel wrote at the Christian Science Monitor Web site Patchwork Nation. That makes sense. After all, if you don't know much about HD television, you turn to the neighborhood expert who can guide you through the "dynamic contrast ratios" of a purchase.
"As a result, independents' decision making can be predicted from knowing the viewpoints of those who live close to them," Gimpel continued. "Independents living in neighborhoods and households full of Democrats will be inclined to vote Democratic, and those interacting with Republicans will most often support the Republican. There are, of course, exceptions, but this pattern holds up in highly competitive elections."
A candidate doesn't win independents by moving to the ideological center. A campaign energizes partisans, and they will tow the undecided voters living nearby.
"In this sense, ‘base' and ‘independent' strategies complement one another and are not mutually exclusive," Gimpel wrote. "When independents begin to pay attention to the campaign, they'll typically turn to the partisans they live among for guidance. By playing to the base, a campaign is also likely to reach independent voters situated in the midst of that base."
Excited people increase turnout. Close races increase turnout. In this sense, both campaigns benefit from the sense that the polls are tightening.
Leaving a Red State Behind Might Turn It Blue
Over the past four years, more than 23 million Americans have moved from one state to another. Statistician Bob Cushing (co-author of The Big Sort) has been busy at the computer the last few weeks trying to understand how all those Mayflower trucks and U-Haul trailers might affect state results Tuesday.
We don't know who moved. We don't know their opinions or their party preferences. We do know, however, whether these movers came from a county that voted Democratic or Republican in 2004.* Most counties are overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic. So Bob counted the people moving into and out of the Republican and Democratic counties of swing states. What he found are some interesting changes in state populations over the last four years.
For instance, Republican counties in Ohio lost 101,000 people while Democratic counties gained just over 6,000—a net change of 107,000 people in the Democrats' favor. (Bush's total margin in '04 was only 118,000 votes.)
Nevada was a red state in 2004. But according to Cushing's calculations, the net gain in Democratic counties topped 251,000 people. Meanwhile, Republican counties in Nevada lost 86,511 people.
New Hampshire, blue in '04, is still a tossup, perhaps because Republican counties there grew by 56,000 since 2004 while Democratic counties showed a net outflow of 40,000. Maybe that helps explain why John McCain zoomed to Peterborough on Sunday.
Virginia is trending Democratic partly because the Democratic counties in Virginia are growing faster than the Republican counties—a net increase of 32,000 people since the last election.
Some states showed little change at all. Indiana, for instance. Florida and Arizona showed huge increases in the population of Republican counties.
People move. When they do, they bring their politics with them. Over the last four years, there's been enough internal migration to change the vote in a half-dozen states. Those are the places both campaigns are visiting during these last few hours.
(*The Internal Revenue Service releases a file every year showing the number or returns and dependents who moved from one county to another during the previous years. This is a good count of how many families and people left one county and moved to another.)
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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.
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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.
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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.