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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?"
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Let's consider what's not new in this election.
There's a lot. The last five or six elections have been pushed along by trends that have been in place since the mid-1970s. Despite the extraordinary circumstances this year, the basic political contours of the country haven't changed (or haven't changed yet!).
If anything, 2008 appears to be more an extension of the 2006 midterms, an election that changed little in the country's basic political makeup from 2004—except, of course, for the name of the winning party. More on that tomorrow. Today, let's consider how static our politics have been.
Churchgoers Are Still Republicans
Thirty years ago, how often you went to church didn't mark you as a Democrat or a Republican. Evangelicals didn't have a party.
As the parties sorted according to lifestyle instead of class, weekly churchgoers and evangelicals became reliably Republican voters in presidential races. There's no evidence this is changing. Oh, there have been plenty of stories about the breakup of the evangelical vote. I'd read the stories, but the more hardheaded pollsters and religion scholars would find, as John Green did last month, that "Barack Obama's attempt to reach out to Christian voters ... is failing."
In the fall of 2004, George Bush had a 60.4 percent to 19.6 percent edge over John Kerry among evangelicals. This year, Green found, McCain leads Obama 57.2 percent to 19.9 percent. Maybe that will change, but it hasn't yet, according to Gallup. Evangelicals and churchgoers may be "lukewarm" about McCain, but they are still supporting him in numbers just a smidgen below 2004 levels.
Women Voting Democratic
In the 1970s, more women voted Republican than men. Over the past 30 years, they have increasingly voted Democratic. Again, there was a spate of stories about a reversal in this arrangement, but by late September Gallup had women supporting Obama 52 percent to 39 percent.
Fewer Genuine Independents
Political reporters love the story about the rise of the independent voter and the "decline of parties." But over the past 30 years, the number of true independents has declined, and allegiance to party has grown stronger. (Princeton's Larry Bartels wrote the most important paper on this phenomenon.)
Yes, there are more people who register as independent or tell pollsters they are independent. But almost all these people vote reliably for one party or the other. People tell pollsters that they are independents, but when pressed, they admit that they almost always vote for the same party.
Split-Ticket Voters Disappearing
Split-ticket voting has been declining for the past 30 years, too. We are less inclined to pick and choose between parties. People are picking sides and voting that way up and down the ballot. That was especially true in 2006, when Democrats, especially, cast large numbers of straight-ticket votes in New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Rural Is Still Republican
Rural voters have been moving toward the Republican Party since the '70s. That trend continues, too.
Replay 2006
Democrats thought the 2006 midterms were a turning point. They weren't. All these trends stayed in place. Just the results changed. Tomorrow we'll see why 2006 is a good model for 2008.
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