Opinionator: How Fragile is the New Democratic Coalition?

Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.

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Bishop, Bill, Cushing, Robert G, Democratic Party, Florida, Richard, Gelman, Andrew, Presidential Election of 1988, Presidential Election of 2012, Voting and Voters

Last December, Jennifer Duffy, an election analyst at the Cook Political Report, came up with a particularly tantalizing set of data points, the kind that demand further exploration.

In 1988, the Democratic presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, carried 26 percent of the nation's counties, 819 of 3144, on his way to losing the Electoral College 426-111 and the popular vote by seven percentage points. In 2012, President Obama won fewer counties, 690, but he won the popular vote by four points and the Electoral College in a landslide, 332-206.

The forces behind this shift illuminate the internal realignments taking place within the two major political parties. But first let's look at how a candidate could carry 129 fewer counties but come out way ahead on Election Day.

In the simplest terms, Democrats started to win populous suburban counties in big states with lots of Electoral College votes beginning with Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign in 1992, at the same time that they began to lose sparsely populated rural counties, many of which lie in small states with very few Electoral College votes.

Take two states as an illustration of this phenomenon: small, thinly populated West Virginia and populous, relatively suburban Pennsylvania.

In 1988, Dukakis won West Virginia's 5 Electoral College votes 52-47, carrying 31 of 55 counties, 10 of them with more than 60 percent of the vote. In 2012, Obama was crushed in West Virginia by Mitt Romney 62-38, losing in all 55 counties.

In Pennsylvania in 1988, Dukakis lost the state's 25 Electoral College votes to George H. W. Bush, 51-48. The four major suburban counties surrounding Philadelphia — Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery — backed Bush over Dukakis by a landslide margin 62-38.

In 2012, Obama beat Romney 52-47 to win Pennsylvania's 20 Electoral College votes. In the four suburban Philadelphia counties, Obama won by a decisive 55-45 margin.

This pattern of gains for Democrats was visible in the red-to-blue shift from 1988 to 2012 in Long Island's Nassau and Suffolk counties; in California's Orange, Sacramento, San Bernardino and San Diego counties; in Michigan's Macomb and Oakland counties; and in Illinois' DuPage, Will and Lake counties. In 1988, DuPage county had been the backbone of the Illinois Republican Party, choosing Bush over Dukakis by better than two to one, 69-30; in 2012, DuPage county voters backed Obama over Romney 50-49.

Bill Bishop, who wrote "The Big Sort" with Robert G. Cushing, noted in an email to the Times:

A big part of the political sorting that's been going on has taken place between these densely populated areas and the rest of the country. It's a way-of-life decision that matches up with political choice. So, in 1976, the average Democratic county had fewer voters than the average Republican county.

Bishop provided Figure 1, which was constructed by Cushing, to show how much the base of the Democratic Party had shifted to densely populated metropolitan areas by 2008:

"The Big Sort" focuses on one of the key factors behind these geographic trends: people are increasingly choosing to move into neighborhoods and communities of like-minded people who share their political views, creating what Bishop and Cushing call "way-of-life segregation."

Americans, in their view,

have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into homogeneous communities — not at the regional level, or the red-state/blue-state level, but at the micro level of city and neighborhood.

Other analysts, including Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, have produced evidence of an additional factor encouraging increased local homogeneity: individual voters are becoming more consistently liberal or conservative in their views on a range of issues from abortion to safety net spending to gun rights.

Over the past three-and-a-half decades these mutually reinforcing trends have resulted in a surge in "landslide" counties, meaning counties in which one of the candidates won by 20 points or more, a trend documented by Bishop and Cushing. At the time of the 1976 presidential election, 26.8 percent of Americans lived in landslide counties; by 2000, that had grown to 45.3 percent. By 2012, the percentage of people living in landslide counties shot up further still to 52 percent. That's double what it was in 1976.

Such fundamental shifts in voting don't occur in a vacuum.

Following a parallel line of inquiry, Ron Lesthaeghe and Lisa Neidert of the University of Michigan Population Studies Center have developed a composite measure of how far along a state or county has moved toward what they call the Second Demographic Transition, which they define as

postponement of marriage, greater prevalence of cohabitation and same sex households, postponement of parenthood, sub-replacement fertility, and a higher incidence of abortion.

In many respects, the S.D.T. is a measure of the extent to which a county, state or metropolitan area has adopted liberal views and behaviors with respect to the sexual revolution and other cultural transformations of the past half century, which are in turn central to the trend toward secularism.

Lesthaeghe and Neidert ranked geographic areas on the basis of this composite measure and found that some of the strongest correlations were with voting behavior. On a county-by-county basis, their analysis is illustrated by the map of the United States in Figure 2. The darker the blue, the more advanced the area is into the "Second Demographic Transition;" the darker the brown, the less advanced into the S.D.T.

You may recognize the similarities of the map in Figure 2 to Election Day maps from last year. In terms of state voting patterns – displayed in Figure 3 — Lesthaeghe and Neidert found an unusually high correlation between the margin of support for the Democratic or Republican presidential candidate (vertical axis) and the extent to which a state's population had moved into the Second Demographic Transition (horizontal axis):

(The location of each state is indicated by a small circle.)

In an Atlantic magazine essay earlier this year, Richard Florida of the University of Toronto, the author of "The Rise of the Creative Class," compared the 2012 voting results in each of the 364 metropolitan areas in the lower 48 states to the percentage of "creative class" workers in each of the metro areas. This creative class is made up of those employed in "science and technology; business and management; healthcare, education, and arts, culture and entertainment."

Florida's result shows (see Figure 4) that the share of creative class workers is positively correlated with the share of Obama voters (.40) and negatively correlated with the share of Romney voters (-.41).

Florida pointed out in the Atlantic piece that

for all of Obama's union endorsements, metros with larger shares of blue-collar workers in manufacturing, transportation, and construction voted for Romney (with a correlation of .46) and against Obama (-.45).

"Republicans may still be the party of the rich," Florida writes, "but most of the country's more-affluent metros lined up squarely in the Obama camp." He notes that this voting pattern was identified by Andrew Gelman of Columbia University in "Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State." Gelman famously found that "while rich voters continue to trend Republican, rich states trend Democratic."

As traditional economic divisions in politics have weakened, other factors are helping to determine partisan affiliation.

Lesthaeghe and Neidert have found, for example, that the higher the non-Hispanic white birthrate of a state, the stronger its vote in 2004 for Bush. Figure 5 shows the striking correlation:

Neidert and Lesthaeghe are looking at voting behavior both as a driver of the contemporary demographic transition and as stemming from it — from the differences, that is, between states and other localities in the embrace of new behavioral norms. Factors shaping political choices are less tied to classic class distinctions and increasingly related to values conflicts regarding family formation.

Writing with Johan Surkyn, Neidert and Lesthaeghe consider the impact on voters of same-sex households, cohabiting households, births to teenagers, births to unmarried women, divorce and separation, the percentage of two-parent households, fertility postponement, fertility decline brought on by contraception and abortion, the percentage of women without children in the household, rates of early or late marriage, the disconnection between marriage and procreation, and so forth.

These topics both feed and reflect what social scientists call "ideational" transformation, which is emerging from trends towards "secularization and the subsequent accentuation of individualistic expressive values," as well as from the backlash against such trends.

Democratic strength is now concentrated in fewer but more heavily populated areas. Polarization has intensified as voters in over half the nation's counties cast landslide margins for one presidential candidate or the other. These tendencies are intensifying and have spilled over to Congressional elections, leading to legislative paralysis. Self-perpetuating clusters of the like-minded lead voters and their representatives away from the center.

It isn't just that it's getting harder to compromise — or that a lack of compromise is what many voters want — but that the topics that divide us are among the most difficult on which to achieve consensus: matters of personal intimacy – not only sex, love and children, but freedom and individual autonomy. This has not always been the stuff of politics; it is now.

Political commitments are molded by a wide-ranging array of forces from economic security to the type of job a voter holds to his or her place in a status hierarchy or a community. This complexity, and the built-in potential for new fissures, means that any political coalition — whether it's constructed on the model of a big tent or of a working partnership — is inherently fragile. How well equipped is the Democratic party to smooth over differences between its wealthiest and its poorest supporters, its most culturally liberal and its most culturally traditional voters? Does the Republican Party have the ability to fracture this new Democratic coalition?