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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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The model for the modern political campaign is the evangelical megachurch.
This isn't a partisan observation. Both George Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama adopted the basic organizing techniques that many ministers have been using since the 1970s to grow their churches to stupendous size. And why not? They work.
The megachurch was built on an idea born in India by an American missionary. Donald McGavran spent half a century overseas, and he used much of that time to discover the way churches could convert large numbers of people to Christianity. McGavran observed that converts didn't come to the church one by one. They came in groups. And those groups were socially coherent—castes, villages, or families. The key to church growth wasn't in bringing individuals to Christianity but in converting groups, peoples. And these groups would come if they were appealed to as a "homogenous unit."
"The individual does not think of himself as a self-sufficient unit, but as a part of the group," McGavran wrote in this 1955 book, The Bridges of God. People don't want to come to a church where they hear a different language or eat strange foods. "Men like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers," McGavran wrote. McGavran said ministers needed to understand the culture of their constituents and recommended that they use the insights of anthropology to tailor their appeals to homogenous groups.
The church establishment largely ignored McGavran. The missionary arrived in the United States at a time when the pews were crammed with parishioners. The mainline churches needed architects and builders in the 1950s, not some bearded missionary who had spent the last several decades in India. But church membership began to decline quite suddenly in the mid-1960s, and by the ‘70s a new generation of young ministers was looking for a way to stimulate church membership, to fulfill the Great Commission's call to "make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:16-20). They discovered Donald McGavran and began to use his ideas to create churches in the "homogenous units" (i.e., suburbs) being created on the edges of cities.
One of those young ministers was Rick Warren, who stumbled across an article on McGavran in an old Christian magazine. "As I sat there and read the article on Donald McGavran," Warren wrote in The Purpose-Driven Church, "I had no idea that it would dramatically impact the direction of my ministry."
Rick Warren's story is now megachurch legend. He founded his Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., and he used McGavran's techniques to attract members. Warren did his market research, even creating an anthropological composite of the target Saddleback member. He's "Saddleback Sam," a Docker-clad, cell-phone-carrying white guy who doesn't like organized religion and doesn't like neckties. That was the prototype for Warren's "homogenous unit," and so he built a church where Sam wouldn't have to cross many "barriers" to join. Sam wouldn't have to dress up for church, and he could look into the sanctuary and see more Sams, a "homogenous unit" of churchgoers. Warren stocked up on flowered shirts.
Ministers building these churches realized friends and neighbors were the best recruiters of new members. Like attracted like, which was an organizing tradition among evangelists. When supplicants answering the Rev. Billy Graham's altar call streamed to the foot of the stage, each would be met by one of the evangelist's helpers. The pairings weren't random. Graham insisted that young women meet young women. Older men greeted older men. Graham understood that the best way to cement the conversion was to show new believers a reflection of themselves within the church.
And the most effective recruiting tool was for friends to "witness" to friends their personal stories of salvation (Acts 1:8).
The marketing techniques all turned inward—friends talking to friends about their experiences in a church built for "people like us," which was the title of a popular book on church growth. The church wasn't designed to transform but to mirror a way of life. And the techniques worked.
It took until 2004 for what was common knowledge among megachurch chaplains to become the latest gimmick for selling a president. The Bush campaign in 2002 had experimented with different techniques to increase voter turnout, from door-to-door canvassers to the noxious (and utterly ineffective) robo-calls. Their tests found that personal contact with a voter was good but that an appeal coming from a friend or neighbor worked best. If it was clear to voters that the canvasser came from the same social hive, Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd told me, turnout jumped.
The Republican campaign in ‘04 recruited neighbors to contact neighbors, and it enlisted respected community members to serve as Bush "navigators," local surrogates for the president. The Bush organizers I talked with in Oregon and Minnesota instructed their all-volunteer canvassers to "witness" their support for the president. "We weren't there to convince anybody," one Oregon organizer told me. "We were there to give testimony of why we were for George Bush. And that's very religious."
The strategy was to reflect voters' beliefs and ways of life back on to themselves, so that the 2004 campaign wasn't as much about the re-election of a president and his policies as it was an affirmation of a local way of life.
The Democrats learned their lesson—they used paid workers who obviously were "not from around here" to do their canvassing in ‘04—and so this year the Obama campaign recruited an "army of persuasion" based on the Bush neighbor-to-neighbor model. In Wisconsin, the Obama campaign has hunters talking to hunters, women talking to women. At training sessions, "Obama Organizing Fellows" were taught to develop short, personal narratives that will explain to their neighbors how they came to support the Democrat—to witness.
Neighbors witnessing to neighbors is a marketing technique suited to Americans, who are increasingly sequestering themselves in communities, churches, and clubs with those who share similar ways of life and politics. The churches created over the last three decades have become some of the most politically segregated institutions in the country, a result of an organizing strategy built on the intentional molding of a "homogenous unit."
These tactics aren't designed to "sell" people something new or different but to show that the product (a church, a new concoction of PowerBar, a candidate) embodies the community's beliefs and lifestyle. "The message you've got to send, more than any other message, is that Barack Obama is just like us," Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill told the Obama fellows, according to the Washington Post. Exactly.
Politicians have been packaging image from the beginning: McKinley sitting on the front porch, Truman speaking from the back of a train, Madison Avenue selling a new Nixon. In the end, however, the message was the same: "Vote for me." Campaigns today are doing something different. They attempt to manage behavior by creating a social environment that encourages people to vote for themselves. The most important message a campaign has to convey is one of flattery, that the candidate is "just like us."
Self-government, however, is the opposite of self-love. Democracy is about meeting and coming to terms with people who look, talk, believe, and think differently from us. Government might work better if that democratic exercise began for voters during the campaign rather than the day after inauguration.
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Before last week, every time Valdis Krebs mapped the reading habits of those buying political books through Amazon.com, he found a few volumes read by both the left and the right.
Krebs used data from Amazon to discover the patterns among readers of the top-selling political books. He would find the other books that readers of, say, Liberal Fascism, would buy from Amazon. As he accumulated data, Krebs found that most books were connected to others. People who bought Liberal Fascism also bought The Obama Nation.
The pattern was always the same. There was one group of readers who bought conservative books and another that supported liberal authors. The maps Krebs made of Americans' book-buying patterns pictured two swarms: liberals on one side and conservatives on the other.
There were always one or two books in the middle-books both sides read, connector books between readers who otherwise had little in common. In Krebs' first map in 2003, the connector book was What Went Wrong, Bernard Lewis' book on the Islamic world. The books in the middle would change with the times, but there was always something both sides were reading in common.
Until last week.
Krebs did another run on his Amazon book project, and the swarms flew onto the page, left and right, but the connectors were gone. The two sides read nothing in common. Readers came to the week before the election isolated, separated by walls made out of books.
Krebs' map is worth a few minutes of study. You can see there are fewer books on the red side. That doesn't mean conservatives are buying fewer books, just that they are concentrating their purchases among fewer titles. And look at the book on the bottom left of the red web-Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky's book on community organizing. (Conservatives are studying their opponent.) There's a separate cluster of readers of Obama books, people who aren't connected to any of the Bush-bashing books clustered nearby. There are no books about McCain that seem to interest either the left or the right.
Given a choice, people will go to places where their beliefs are reinforced. In a recent study of Yahoo Finance discussion boards, three University of Texas business professors found that stock-pickers cluster. Those who think Apple is going up talk to each other on one thread. Those who think GE will fall even more find their way to the same little spot on the Web. Technology doesn't help people find new ways of thinking or seeing the world -- even when it might be in their financial interest. We still hunker down with those who hold our opinions.
(See "Melting-Pot or Homophily?: An Empirical Investigation of User Interactions in Virtual Investment-Related Communities," by Hsuan-Wei Michelle Chen, Bin Gu, and Prabhudev Konana.)
Morningside Analytics has developed its Political Video Barometer to discover the YouTubes being linked to by liberal and conservative bloggers. Who'd a-thunk the Batman vs. Penguin debate would be a liberal clip (linked to by 82 liberal bloggers but only 14 conservatives)? The 2001 Obama radio interview, in which the candidate talked about the "redistribution of wealth," was linked to by 262 conservative columnists but only 20 liberals.
When the YouTube videos are charted, they swarm, too: liberal YouTubes in one group and conservative videos in another.
And that's the way we live, in more ways than are imaginable. Full-size pickup drivers support John McCain at the same rate as white evangelicals (66 percent), according to a survey by Kelley Blue Book. Seven out of 10 Mini Cooper owners back Barack Obama.
We read apart, live apart, watch apart, blog apart, and drive apart; we are one country that lacks any shared experiences or, it seems, common purpose.
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Enough already with the words. Think of this as The Big Sort scorecard for the election, several different ways of seeing how the geographic clustering of like-minded citizens plays out in presidential elections.
First, the sort itself. Here we compare the "landslide counties" in the 1976 and 2004 elections. (Landslide counties are those in which one candidate won by 20 percentage points or more, counting only Republican and Democratic votes.) Both '76 and '04 were close contests, but the distribution of the vote changed dramatically over those 28 years.
In 1976, 26.8 percent of voters lived in a landslide county. (Democratic landslide counties are in black; Republican landslides are gray.) In close elections, the percentage of voters living in landslide counties rose steadily. By 2004, 48.3 percent of voters lived in a county where the contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry wasn't close at all. About six of every 10 counties were won by landslide margins in '04.
In 1976, Democrats won the vote in rural America. Bill Clinton broke even in rural America in 1996, and then rural counties went solidly Republican. So did the exurbs. Cities—particularly cities that produced loads of technology and patents—swerved Democratic.
Basically, the more dense the population, the greater the Democratic vote.
One way to track the election is by this rural/exurban/urban breakdown in each state. Thanks to Tim Murphy and the Daily Yonder, we do that in the chart below for the 2004 election. You can see that rural and exurban votes were essential to President Bush's victory.
(For those who wonder about such things, "rural" here are what the OMB and the census classify as "non-metro." "Urban" counties are called "metro" by the feds. Geographer Tim Murphy created an "exurban" category from "metro" counties where 40 percent to 50 percent of the residents live in rural settings. On the bottom line, you can see that rural counties had 17.4 percent of the vote, exurban counties had 9.2 percent of the vote, and urban counties had 73.4 percent of the vote.)
Given The New Yorker's recent interest in the political significance of ancestry, I wondered why we shouldn't go straight to the source. This map comes from our friends at the U.S. Census. It shows the ancestry group with the largest population in each county. (Ancestry is self-reported.) It's sort of fun to switch back and forth between the 2004 landslide map and the ancestry map. You can see that Democrats didn't do well where the dominant ancestry group was "American." Maybe these are the folks Gov. Sarah Palin had in mind.
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While the rest of political journalism continues to parse the electorate by ways of life described by the U.S. census—Matt Bai gets up close and chummy with "white guys" in the Times over the weekend—we at The Big Sort will consider two measures that are much more telling:
Spanking and shacking.
Yes, if you really want to know how people will vote, forget "white working class" or "single, college-educated women" and find out the important stuff—like whether a potential voter thinks it's OK to give the kiddo a swat.
Mark Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler have done some remarkable (and fun) research into the relationship between child rearing and politics. They saw that the National Election Studies surveys in 1992, 2000, and 2002 presented voters with pairs of attributes. The surveys ask, for example, if voters thought it more admirable if a child was independent or showed respect for elders. Should a child be obedient or self-reliant? Curious or well-mannered? Considerate or well-behaved?
George Lakoff described American society as being divided between "two different forms of family-based morality," the "strict father" and the "nurturant parent." The two political scientists realized these questions essentially fell on either side of Lakoff's division—and given the nature of the survey, they could see if there was a political connection between parenting styles and party choice.
There was. Republicans favored respect, obedience, good manners, and being well-behaved. They were strict fathers. Democrats, meanwhile, were nurturant parents.
Hetherington and Weiler could see this split widen over time. (Thirty years ago, after all, nearly everyone was a strict father.) By the time of the latest survey, parenting styles were a better indicator of political affiliation than income.
The two academics also measured those who favored spanking as discipline for children. They found that the "correlation between traditional parenting practices—the 'spare the rod, spoil the child' approach—and voting for President Bush in 2004 is remarkably strong."
And those styles had a geography. Massachusetts has the lowest percentage of people who favor the switch and the lowest percentage of voters for Bush. Those in Vermont, Rhode Island, and New York were also unlikely to spank and were very likely to vote for John Kerry.
Meanwhile, the spanking states—Idaho, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Montana, Alabama, Kansas, Tennessee, and Indiana—are, for the most part, reliably Republican even in this year's Democratic-trending election.
OK, how about shacking?
Demographer Ron Lesthaeghe was mapping changes in family formation in the U.S. when he noticed that "blue" states were different from "red" ones. White women in Democratic Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, California, Maryland, Illinois, Minneapolis, New Hampshire, and Delaware were both marrying and starting families later in life, more like women in Nordic countries than those in Utah, Kansas, and Wyoming. In particular, Lesthaeghe found, the higher the rates of cohabitation before marriage—i.e., shacking—the higher the vote for Kerry.
The demographer said that he "could find no better way to predict the vote for Bush" in 2004 than how people were creating families. The more American families formed like the Dutch, the greater the vote for Democratic presidential candidates. (Here is one of Lesthaeghe's papers.)
Lesthaeghe, Weiler, and Hetherington aren't saying propensity to spank or to shack cause people to vote one way or the other. Their point is that family formation and child-rearing attitudes are part of a worldview. Our politics today are divided by worldview, not by demographic type. And those divisions are real and deep, as this increasingly bitter campaign attests.
"Little wonder our politics today are polarized," Hetherington and Weiler concluded. "The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds. We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues."
Nor do we live in the same places. Spankers to this side, please. Shackers over here.
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Political polling parses data according to broad demographic categories—by sex, age, education, race, religion. The polls have been run this way for years, which makes it easy to compare results from election to election. It doesn't matter that these demographic descriptions are only a faint approximation of how people define their lives and politics. This is the tool political reporters have, and so they use it. (What's the line about having a hammer makes everything look like nails?)
Marketing people tell me they use demographic data only when they can't get the good stuff—the polling that much more precisely identifies how people will buy (or vote) based on more detailed lifestyle preferences. But when they can't get the lifestyle data, then sometimes demographic data provides an approximation of what's really happening.
So it is with women, who over the past generation have become more likely to vote Democratic. The numbers go up and down with the dynamics of a particular campaign, but the trend is there. To stop with gender is to stop too soon.
Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson wrote The Cultural Creatives in 2000 based on polling they had conducted over the years. They identified a cultural shift taking place, a change in values. A growing number of people were more concerned with protecting the environment than with expanding the economy. Cultural creatives sought deep relationships and were rolling their own spiritual lives rather than turning religion over to the establishment church.
Other researchers were finding the same trends. Daniel Yankelovich in the marketing world saw the ascendance of values over class, education, or work. Ron Inglehart wrote about a "culture shift" from his perch at the University of Michigan. Ruy Teixeira and John Judis predicted a new Democratic majority coming out of the culture being created in the fast-growing tech cities.
What Ray and Anderson realized is that this culture shift was taking place faster among women than men. More women were interested in alternative religions, holistic medicines, individual rights, and environmental protection than men. When the two researchers counted up the core group of "cultural creatives," they found that two-thirds were women.
More single women are Democrats because more single women are cultural creatives. "It's not 'the demographics,' " Ray and Anderson wrote. Sure, it's simple to separate people by gender, education, income, and the color of their collars, they wrote, but "those conventional categories show only a thin slice of people's lives." To understand why people act and vote the way they do, you had to find their values.
So, where are all the good men? Demographically, of course, there are just as many men as there have ever been. But when Ray and Anderson examine values, not demography, they find a serious shortage of culturally creative men. "The bad news (for women) is that there aren't enough men to go around," Ray and Anderson write. There are lots of women looking for a new kind of relationship and too many men dropping out of college, watching mixed-martial-arts matches on television, and voting Republican.
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Let's get something straight. There is no "women's vote." Women vote, of course. But reporters write about the "voting bloc" of white women as if it has meaning. It doesn't. Elections aren't about demography. They are about ways of life.
Marketing people have known that large demographic categories like "white women" are meaningless since at least 1973, when a New York adman asked in the Journal of Advertising, "Are Grace Slick and Tricia Nixon Cox the same person?" Both were white, young, urban, rich, former Finch College alums and women. Conventional market research in the early 1970s would have plugged in all this demographic data and concluded that, yes, the blond-haired daughter of the president and the lead singer for the psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane and author of the acid anthem "White Rabbit" were the same.
All of which made conventional market analysis meaningless, wrote John E. O'Toole, president of Foote, Cone & Belding Communications. It was so obvious the two had nothing in common that you didn't even need to go ask Alice. Tricia Nixon married a Republican White House aide on the White House lawn. The one time Slick was invited to the White House (a reception for Tricia's Finch classmates), she brought along her "bodyguard," Yippie founder and Chicago Seven defendant Abbie Hoffman. The two said they intended to spike the iced tea with LSD. The Secret Service didn't let them past the front door.
O'Toole wrote in '73 that statistics on income, age, and education—all the demographic "facts" we still use to divine presidential elections in 2008—had lost relevance because there had been a "Revolution of the Individual." People weren't living according to class or education or age. They were "forming liberation groups: black, feminist, gay, consumer, anything." Marketers had snoozed through the revolution and insulted people by discounting "their intelligence in favor of some vast common denominator."
People didn't define themselves by demographic markers, O'Toole wrote. They lived in groups "united by common attitudes or lifestyles or perceptions of themselves."
Marketing people long ago abandoned most of the demographic data that we still use to talk about politics. I talked with Chris Riley, a Portland, Ore., marketing guy who has worked for both Nike and Apple. Riley said people were forming communities of interest that had nothing to do with categories such as single, white, college-educated women. "I'm not allowed to use market research information, by dictate of (Apple founder) Steve Jobs," Riley said. "They don't trust it."
They don't trust it because demography—classifications such as a favorite from the Democratic primary, the "white working class"—doesn't get at how people live. "There is no (demographic) category for somebody who shapes his entire life around his concern for the environment," Riley explained.
After all, how many white, single women describe themselves that way. A San Diego woman told me recently that she was an "ocean oriented person." That's a more accurate political description in 2008.
Young ministers in the 1970s began designing churches for what one marketer called "image tribes." They created the modern American megachurch by catering to ways of life, not demographic types. Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church wears flowered shirts in part because his "target" audience, "Saddleback Sam," "prefers the casual and informal over the formal." Megachurches tailor their services to lifestyles. One California megachurch advertises different lifestyle venues for its Sunday morning service—a "Country Gospel" hoedown, a gathering known as "The Edge" (with Starbucks coffee and Mountain Dew), and a "Traditions" hall with music from a baby grand piano.
The Bush campaign in 2004 was the first to catch up with marketing techniques that had been refined over the past three decades. Bush identified individuals by how they lived—the cars they drove, magazines they read, television shows they watched, ring tones they downloaded.
John O'Toole in 1973 told marketers they misunderstood society by continuing to "shout at a crowd rather than talk to persons." Bush's campaign was the first to run a campaign aimed at individuals rather than crowds.
Barack Obama has essentially copied the Bush approach, identifying the "image tribes" we travel in rather than the bleak and only occasionally meaningful demographic categories that appear in exit polls and are coughed up in stories about politics.
So why do women seem to like Obama more than men? (Pew had women favoring Obama 54 percent to 37 percent at the end of September, while men backed McCain 47 percent to 43 percent.) We'll take that up tomorrow, and also answer the eternal happy hour question "Where are all the good men?"