‘On paper, the election is the Democrats’ to lose’
By Thomas B. Edsall
With more than a year and a half to go before the 2020 elections, Republicans can take comfort in a number of factors.
The result of the Mueller investigation has set back Democratic hopes for an easy victory; the history of presidents running for a second term favors incumbents; and the economy under Trump is booming.
Trump, however, has stepped on his own re-election prospects. His 2020 budget proposal calls for a $845 billion cut over 10 years in Medicare, a $25 billion cut in Social Security and a $1.5 trillion cut in Medicaid — programs that benefit the old, the disabled and the poor.
More recently, the Department of Justice announced its support for a suit brought by a group of Republican attorneys general seeking to have the entire Affordable Care Act — which currently provides medical care for 8.5 million Americans — declared invalid. This foreshadows Trump’s gamble on his continuing ability to sell the dark issues of racial resentment and cultural alienation that dominated the 2016 campaign.
But what is the current state of play in the American electorate?
Two major studies released this month, the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, reveal some generally positive trends for Democrats: defections in the Midwest among Trump voters, as well as a shift to the left among all voters on issues of race, immigration and spending on the poor.
G. Elliott Morris, a political analyst for The Economist, examined state-by-state data in the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. In an email, Morris wrote that the 2018 results make it clear
that the president has lost a significant amount of support across the nation, both among his “core” or “base” supporters and the rest.
While millions of suburban whites who voted for Trump in 2016 cast ballots in 2018 for Democratic House and Senate candidates, “the defection runs much deeper than that,” Morris said. Not only did better-off suburbanites defect, “but more important so did working class whites.”
“My analysis of the 2018 C.C.E.S. data,” Morris continued, “finds that 7 percent of white voters without a college education left Trump’s side.” These non-college whites were crucial to Trump’s Electoral College victory, and “small numbers of defections could make a big difference,” especially in the Midwest, where, according to Morris, they make up 57 percent of the voters, compared with 47 percent nationwide.
In 2016, Trump capitalized on hostility to immigrants and minorities. Tom Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State, examined the General Social Survey data and found a noticeable, albeit modest, increase in social and cultural tolerance in 2018 among all voters. That a rise in tolerance is a negative for Republicans speaks for itself.
“Quite contrary to popular concerns,” Wood wrote in an email, “it seems that the American public has only grown more tolerant and inclusive over recent decades,” before adding, “There’s been meaningful improvement, or stability, in each of these measures of tolerance since the early 1990s.”
The General Social Survey found, for example, growing numbers in favor of federal spending for the poor. Among all those surveyed, the percentage saying that too little is spent on the poor rose from 70 percent in 2014 to 86 percent in 2018 among Democrats and from 38 to 56 percent among Republicans.
“I’d be reluctant to infer too much about this for the electoral stakes for 2020,” Wood wrote,
but it does suggest that much anguishing about the U.S. electorate — that it’s growing more adverse to minorities, and is becoming scientifically uniformed on issues of high political charge — is basically wrong.
In another development with substantial political consequences, the national religious landscape is changing in a direction favorable to the left: Americans with no religious affiliation — a disproportionately Democratic constituency — have now become the largest religious group, edging past evangelical Americans and Catholics by the slimmest of margins.
The rise of nonbelievers is even more politically significant if white evangelicals are considered separately from their heavily Democratic black, Hispanic and other minority counterparts.
White evangelicals, according to Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, now make up 18.6 percent of the population, 4.4 percentage points less than the 23 percent of the population who profess no religious commitment.
Among white evangelicals, Republicans outnumber Democrats 61.1 percent to 21.7 percent, according to Burge. Among those without religious affiliation, Democrats outnumber Republicans 53 percent to 21.5 percent.
Robert Jones, the C.E.O. of the Public Religion Research Institute, and Paul Djupe, a political scientist at Denison University, observe that the edging out of white evangelicals by the nonreligious — known to pollsters as “Nones” — is almost certain to drive remaining white evangelicals further into the ranks of the Republican Party.
Jones wrote in an email that, according to the new General Society Survey data, “today, the religiously unaffiliated outnumber white evangelical Protestants” by nearly 7 percentage points.
The decrease in the percentage of white evangelicals began, Jones continued, during President Barack Obama’s eight years in power. According to Jones,
the anxieties that produced about a changing country and white evangelicals’ place in it were actually integral to pushing white evangelical Protestants toward support for Donald Trump in 2016. So these changes are not just now upon us; they’ve been an engine driving the political dynamics for some time. But the new G.S.S. data shows them continuing unabated.
In other words, in the short term, as they feel they are being eclipsed, white evangelicals become more politically engaged, more assertive — and more dangerous to their opponents.
Burge claims, however, that the long-term future of the conservative evangelical movement could be in doubt:
It’s going to run into a demographic brick wall going forward. 81 percent of evangelicals in 2018 were white, compared to 72.4 percent of the overall population.
Among younger voters 18 to 25, “only 60 percent are white,” according to Burge.
Ultimately, Burge argued,
hitching their wagon to Trump may stave off some losses now, but it may be a fatal strategy in ten or twenty years.
While the trends highlighted in the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and General Social Survey are generally favorable to the Democratic Party, they also point to obstacles Democrats face.
Stephen Ansolabehere, a political scientist at Harvard, noted that more than two thirds of sitting presidents have been re-elected. He went on to point out that “presidential second term elections are driven strongly by the economy.” Ansolabehere maintains that
if the economy is steaming along Trump will have the wind in his sails. The presidents who faltered in recent memory are Carter and Bush senior, both of whom faced weak economies.
Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, raised another issue. “There is certainly some good news for Democrats,” he wrote, but “the caveat seems to be that opinion is mostly moving for the people who were already inclined to support Democrats,” before adding: “What we don’t see is much movement among Republicans.”
Schaffner, who serves along with Ansolabehere as a principal investigator at the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, also cautioned in an email against putting too much stock in the data showing that some voters who had cast ballots for Trump switched to Democratic House candidates in 2018.
“The C.C.E.S. data do show that about twice as many Trump voters flipped to supporting Democrats in 2018 as Clinton voters switched to Republicans,” Schaffner wrote, “which suggests that a lot of those ‘blue wall’ states from 2016 may be leaning against Trump slightly as we head to 2020.”
He warned, however, “that all of these shifts are relatively small in the aggregate, which means we aren’t necessarily too far from where we were in November, 2016.” While Trump in 2016 benefited from “a decent amount of luck” in losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College, “it is certainly possible that it could happen again absent some larger shift in opinion.”
“On paper, the election is the Democrats’ to lose,” Zach Goldberg, a political scientist at Georgia State University, contended in an email. The problem for Democrats, in Goldberg’s view, is that the party and its candidate
lack a coherent immigration policy or message that addresses the reasonable concerns of non-cosmopolitan voters. They’ve yet to grapple with the serious tension between supporting chain-based immigration and advocating for the enlargement of the welfare state. Moral appeals (“we’re a nation of immigrants”) will only take them so far, and often backfires.
Goldberg has developed his own tolerance measure that points to a significant internal conflict among Democrats. What Goldberg found is that among whites, young liberals between the ages of 18 and 29 had the lowest levels of tolerance for racist speech, with a 1.31 score. In contrast, those with the highest tolerance scores were white liberals over the age of 50 (1.84) and young white conservatives (1.94).
The 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study raises another question about the validity of pro-Democratic predictions based on these large-scale surveys.
Alexander Agadjanian, a senior research associate in the political science department at M.I.T., pointed out that Democrats make up the largest share of those moving in a liberal direction on racial issues, while independent voters showed much smaller movement in a liberal direction.
“Wow,” Agadjanian declared on Twitter, “white Democrats continue huge movement left on issues of race into 2018.”
These findings suggest that there are two reasons Democratic strategists should be wary of overreliance on rising levels of racial liberalism.
First, most of the shift is among voters who are already loyal Democrats and therefore it does not represent major additional support for the party. Second, the shift is as much or more a response to Trump’s racism as it is a genuine shift in opinion.
An article of faith among political professionals is that incumbents are helped by a strong economy. It is, however, not clear that this will apply to Trump, whose appeal in 2016 was strongest in sections of the country suffering economic distress.
Another unknown is whether support for Trump’s re-election by the members of the white working class will be diminished — and turnout constrained — by any success the administration has in ameliorating their economic suffering. Put another way, insofar as anger over economic conditions motivated high turnout and approval among a key segment of Trump voters in 2016, it may be less of a motivating force in 2020.
Jed Kolko, chief economist at Indeed, an online job site, produced graphics from the G.S.S. survey suggesting that unless the economy goes south, Trump’s white base will be far less discontented in 2020 than it was in 2016. Kolko found that in 2016, 31 percent of white Republicans said they did not expect their standard of living to improve; in 2018, only 8 percent were that pessimistic. Pessimism about future living standards declined only slightly for Democrats, from 24 to 21 percent.
Trump’s explosive persona, the investigations underway in the House and by state and federal prosecutors, not to mention the quality of the Democratic nominee, will all play a crucial role in 2020 — along with much we cannot yet imagine.
While many political analysts believe that the presidential contest favors the Democrats, Republicans have some advantages. Most important, at this point none of the Democratic presidential candidates has developed an authoritative and credible strategy to turn out loyal constituencies in large numbers while attracting persuadable but less liberal voters torn between left and right. Furthermore, the very diversity and heterogeneity of the Democratic coalition — one of its core strengths — has attracted an extraordinary range of candidates, which in and of itself breeds a diffusion of focus — what The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein calls tough competition for “almost every group of voters imaginable.”
Along those lines, Democrats have demonstrated a spectacular talent for tripping themselves up over the years, for losing when victory is in reach.
(From The New York Times)
