In addition to prognosticating and spouting off on a daily basis, I’ve decided to post some in-depth interviews with campaign officials, politicians, policy wonks, and others with something worthwhile to say. The first one, which you can read in full below, is with Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for Economic Progress and at the Century Foundation.
An expert on demography and polling data, Teixeira co-authored a very influential 2002 book titled “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which argued that the Republican era that started in the late nineteen-sixties was coming to an end.
Many of the things that Teixeira and his co-author John Judis identified ten years ago—the rising number of Hispanic voters, an emerging gender gap between the two parties, and a shift to the Democrats among urban professionals—played into Obama’s victory in 2008. Despite Republican gains in the 2010 midterms and Mitt Romney’s recent rise in the polls, Teixeira believes that Obama is still well placed on the basis of demography and geography. “All the trends we identified that helped lead to Obama’s 2008 victory have continued apace,” he told me.
The rapidly growing Hispanic vote is particularly important, Teixeira insists. In Nevada, for example, it is now approaching twenty per cent, and the overall minority-vote share is close to forty per cent. And Mitt Romney, after taking a hard line against illegal immigration during the primaries, has no credible way to reach Hispanics. “I think they’re stuck, and I think they know they are stuck,” Teixeira said.
With the gender gap also holding up, and with popular attitudes to things like gay marriage steadily becoming more liberal, Teixeira says that the election is shaping up as a contest between demography and economics. “All majorities are contingent,” he said. “Just because there’s a potentially dominant coalition emerging, one that has a secure vote and demographic foundation, doesn’t mean it’s going to win every election.” Romney’s strategy is to exploit popular unease about the economy. For Obama, “the question for him is whether he can leverage those demographic advantages and turn them into a victory in a situation that’s really quite difficult for the incumbent.”
I spoke to Teixeira on Tuesday, grouping my questions under three headings: demography, geography, and public opinion/campaigning. Here is the Q. & A. (For the sake of clarity, I’ve edited it a bit here and there.)
DEMOGRAPHY
Hi Ruy, and thanks a lot for agreeing to talk with me. The obvious question is this: Is that emerging Democratic majority you wrote about still there today, and how far is it going to help with Obama’s reëlection campaign?
Yes, not only is it still in place, it’s still growing. All the trends we identified that helped lead to Obama’s 2008 victory have continued apace.
Let’s go through a few of those. The three main demographic groups you identified were Hispanics, women, and urban professionals. How’s it looking on each of those?
O.K., well let’s start with minorities. Now, we argued in the book that the growth of minorities would benefit the Democrats. We certainly saw that in 2008 when you had twenty-six per cent of voters being minorities and eighty per centof them voting for Obama. Now, if we look at the data since 2008, we see the eligible minority voter pool is continuing to grow at about the rate seen in the last period of time, which is roughly a half percentage point a year, or two percentage points over a Presidential election cycle. So we would expect, based on that, twenty-eight per cent of voters in 2012 would be minorities. The minority population is growing in general, though [it’s] primarily driven by Hispanics, who probably account for roughly sixty per cent, or more, of the growth in minority eligible voters. So that’s a huge deal, to have a group like that growing at that rate.
Obama’s recent gambit on illegal immigrants—saying the government won’t deport minors and people who grew up here. Is there any evidence yet on how that is playing with voters?
We actually have some polling data that just came out. We know that Latinos back it like crazy, so the point number-one of doing this was to solidify the support of Hispanics, most importantly in making sure they get out the vote, which is so important for him in putting together a winning electoral coalition. The second point that they [the Obama campaign] hoped was true was that it would not alienate, unduly alienate, any of the voters they’re trying to reach. The polling that just came out, and this is from Bloomberg, shows that something like sixty-four per cent of likely voters approved of Obama’s move. So that is a good sign. Now, they didn’t break it up by white college, white non-college, and so on. But the fact that “independents” in the poll supported it as well would lead me to infer that there’s unlikely to be overwhelming opposition among white working-class voters. That’s typically not the way it works. So, I think that that looks pretty good, but we’ll have to wait to see the numbers on this.
Is there anything Romney can do to reach Hispanic voters? We’ve heard him saying, off the record, that they’ve got to do something. Is there anything the G.O.P. can do about this, or are they stuck?
I think they are stuck and I think they know they’re stuck. Not that they have admitted defeat, but just that I don’t think there’s anything in particular they can do, because they are so boxed-in on issues that are of concern to Hispanic voters, especially issues concerned with immigration. They don’t have a lot of degrees of freedom to change Romney’s stance. Whenever I’ve seen his Hispanic outreach coördinator quoted, and people relating to that part of the campaign, their message is always, “Well yes, Hispanics have many concerns, but their chief concern is the economy.” The message for Hispanics, as far as I can figure out, is no different than the message for everybody else, and I think that they don’t, in fact, have a plan that could work on Hispanic-specific issues.
I think I heard you saying somewhere that if Obama wins eighty per cent of the minority vote, which seems possible, the minority vote is now so big that he could actually lose among white voters by a large margin and still come out on top. What’s the arithmetic there?
Ok, there’s a number of different ways to look at it. But just taking the scenario where twenty-eight per cent of voters are minorities and he gets eighty per cent of the (minority) vote…Now, if that happens, he could lose white working-class voters by twenty-eight points, or something like that— pushing close to the level that congressional Democrats lost them in 2010 —and he can lose white college-graduate voters by something close to the nineteen points the Democrats lost them by in 2010. In other words, almost as bad a performance among both groups of white voters as in 2010, and he could still squeeze by. And that’s a lowball estimate—he’s doing much better than that right now among both these groups. In fact, he’s doing way better among white college-graduate voters. He’s almost running even with Mitt Romney.
And how’s he doing with the white working classes?
That continues to be his worst group in pretty much all the polls. Very rarely do you see him doing as well as he did in 2008 with this group. We’d expect some slippage. The question is how much slippage is he going to get? And so far, it’s not the worst. For example, here’s the latest Pew poll. Well, it looks like he’s basically losing by twenty-one or twenty-two points among white non-college voters. That sounds bad, and it is bad, and [the Obama campaign[ would love it if it was better. But the fact of the matter is that, especially given the state of the minority vote that we were just discussing, he can clearly live with that.
You said he can lose the white non-college vote by twenty-eight percentage points and still win?
Yes. He could, I think, if the minority vote is strong enough. But that’s not anything they [Obama’s campaign managers] want to see happen. And they’re obviously working very hard to try to get as many of these white non-college voters as they can.
What about the white vote overall—if you put the non-college with the college-educated together? What sort of target does he have to aim for there? (In 2008, Obama trailed John McCain by twelve points among white voters: fifty-five per cent to forty-three per cent)
Right, ten to twelve points is basically not a problem. He can live with that. I think Ron Brownstein (of the National Journal) always puts it at around thirty-nine per cent of the white vote he could live with. I could even see him under certain circumstances winning with thirty-eight of the white vote. But that’s, of course, including all the different flavors of white voters, both college and non-college.
So if the white vote splits sixty-forty—he could live with that?
Yeah, this is making it kind of close, but he could live with it. I mean, again, it’s not their desired scenario, but this is to illustrate the degrees of freedom they have given the state of the minority vote.
And among women? How’s the gender gap looking now?
It’s still out there. It really ballooned there for a while, maybe six weeks ago. It’s still quite substantial. And, of course, it’s not just all women that are equally good for Democrats: in particular, it’s single women and also more educated women.
Obviously, the Romney campaign, one of their big efforts is trying to close that gender gap, and leave behind some of the social issues they got wrapped up in during the primaries. Do you think they have any chance of doing that?
I don’t think there’s much. I mean, clearly, they’ve succeeded somewhat in closing the gap with Obama overall, but I would attribute that more to the Romney campaign getting its act together, no longer having to fend off the crazy Republican primary challengers, and, of course, most importantly, the faltering of the economy, or the perception of a faltering economy that’s appeared. So, Romney’s making progress and he’s running and he’s sticking to his message. He wants to reassure the people about social issues whom he thinks he can reach, but I think it’s less by taking positions than by not talking about them at all, and trying to say, you know, “Did I mention the economy is bad, and I can actually fix it and the guys in office can’t?” This is the simplest challenger message that there is.
You put out a paper in November of last year talking about demography versus economics in 2012. And that tension now seems to be shaping up as one of the most important factors, perhaps the most important, in the campaign.
That was the frame we put in our paper. If you went with the underlying changes in the electorate over the last four years—what put Obama in office in the first place—they are clearly on his side. All the changes we’ve talked about are continuing, and they advantage him overall in basically all the key states. What he doesn’t have on his side is even more obvious—the state of the economy, which, while it has improved, has improved at a relatively slow pace and is clearly the main point of vulnerability for him. So the question for him is whether he can leverage those demographic advantages and turn them into a victory in a situation that’s really quite difficult for the incumbent.
Just because the Democrats have the demographic wind at their back, doesn’t mean they’re going to win every election and doesn’t mean they’re immune to the crosswinds that typically affect any incumbent party elected for any reason. So, there’s no logical reason to think the Democrats would not be hurt, and hurt badly, by the state of the economy
One group that has emerged as an important part of the Obama base, which wasn’t in your original book, is the ”millennials”—young people, basically. The Obama campaign is making a big push to generate the same sort of enthusiasm he had in 2008. How do you think that’s working with young voters?
The age group we have data on is eighteen to twenty-nine, and you can tell two things basically. One is that he’s running better among that age group than any other age group, suggesting a continued leaning in his direction among these voters. The second thing is that the gap in his favor is not as large as it was in 2008. For example, in this Pew poll I was just mentioning, he had an eighteen-point lead. Now that sounds good. That is good, right? But thirty-four points, it’s not. So, I think they’re concerned about that.
GEOGRAPHY
Okay, let’s switch to geography. Earlier, I was thinking back to the original states you identified in 2002 as the states most likely to swing to the Democrats and comparing them to the electoral map of Jim Messina (Obama’s campaign manager) and his various ways to get to two hundred and seventy electoral votes. One of Messina’s paths is the western path: Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, and Iowa. In your book, you also had the West as a great opportunity for the Democrats. How’s that western strategy looking, and are the demographics still running in Obama’s favor?
Obama’s looking very good, generally, in the region, I’d say. New Mexico is looking very, very good for him. I think that’s always going be the easiest state of the three. Nevada, I would put next in terms of the likelihood of Obama carrying it. One thing that’s remarkable about Nevada is the rate of change that it’s experiencing demographically. The shift towards minority voters is just occurring with such stunning speed. I have some new data here that I’ve been working on with Bill Frey of Brookings and it looks like … eye-popping data.
What we’ve got from our data is that between 2008 and 2012 [the minority eligible voter share] grew at a rate of roughly two percentage points a year: so an eight-percentage-point shift over the four-year period. And we’re winding up roughly today with thirty-nine per cent of eligible voters being minorities in Nevada. That’s not of the entire population. These are people who are citizens and eighteen and over. That’s huge, and so I think Nevada is very accessible for Obama.
Colorado is the most competitive of the three. The big question there is with the white voters. Obama did exceptionally well among white college-educated voters in Colorado, in 2008. I haven’t seen any data, and we don’t know the extent to which he’s able to repeat that, but one would infer that probably the gap in his favor is smaller because of how close the polls have been. They’ve been roughly even between Obama and Romney. But, here too, we see the same sort of demographic changes we’re talking about. This data I’ve been talking about that Bill Frey and I have been working on: it looks like over a four-year period, we might be looking at an increase of about three-and-a-half percentage points of minority eligible voters driven heavily by Hispanics, in fact almost entirely by Hispanics.
And what does that take the minority vote share up to Colorado?
According to our data, it should take it up to twenty-two per cent of eligible voters being minorities.
And what about Arizona?
The Democrats did lose it by eight points or so, in 2008: you wouldn’t expect that winning it would really be too plausible (for Obama). I wrote an article in The New Republic in which I tried to cite some of the data showing that it is, at least, possible. I’d say the odds are against Obama. But if there is any state he did not carry in 2008 that he might be able to carry in 2012, I think it would be Arizona. For example, if you look at the Hispanic vote in Arizona in 2008, it was only fifty-six to forty-one Obama, at least according to the exit polls. And obviously they [the Republicans] don’t have a local favorite running in Arizona in 2012, which would probably be a huge difference. So I think there’s a basis here. And then, when you add in the rate of demographic change there, which is huge, it just starts to sound like something that’s not completely crazy.
Another area you originally identified as a bright spot for the Democrats was the upper Midwest, which seems to be turning into a bit of a problem area for Obama now: Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin. How do you interpret what’s happening there?
I think these states will be competitive. The issue for Obama in these states has always been whether he can hold his losses among white working-class voters to a level that would make it possible for him to take them. Michigan, I’m not sure I believe that it’s really that accessible for the Republicans. There have been some outlier polls recently. Rasmussen actually had Obama ahead by eight points, which, knowing Rasmussen, is pretty impressive. The Pollster.com estimate is a five-point lead. And I think if you look at Nate Silvers’s sort of souped-up model of this stuff, I think he still has Obama as a very heavy favorite.
And I think the same thing could be said of Wisconsin. The polls are closer there, but if you look at the underlying situation in Wisconsin, it’s not so clear that it’s really that much in play. It’s in play, but it’s not quite as close as the Republicans want to put it. The pollsters asked people in the recall electorate who they would vote for in the Presidential election, and Obama won by seven points. The recall electorate was skewed demographically towards the Republicans. You would think that was kind of a weird result, indicating that the anti-Walker recall sentiment doesn’t necessarily play into, you know, voting for Romney.
So, you don’t think it’s too alarming what’s happening in that region, from Obama’s perspective?
Well, I think it’s alarming in the sense that yes, there’s a narrowing, and we pretty much know what to attribute it to: Romney getting his act together and just running a more tight, disciplined campaign, focussing on one issue and one issue only and that’s the economy. It’s not a state secret that the road to glory if you’re a Republican in that area is to build on that issue, and by building on that issue, try to jack up your margins among white non-college voters.
But if you are Republican, isn’t that one place you can fight back against the demographic trends, potentially anyway? If you had to pick one area of the country, wouldn’t that be it?
That’s where some of the opportunities are. I think the most obvious places to push back against the Obama coalition are in the South: Florida and North Carolina. At this point, [it’s] more probable than not that [the G.O.P. will] take those two states. Now, you could argue that that’s just the foundation: that doesn’t put them over the line. Some of their best opportunities (for gains) will occur in some states in the Midwest. The most important, by far, is Ohio, because if Obama takes Ohio the arithmetic just becomes so difficult for the Republicans. Whereas, Obama can lose Ohio and he can make up all those electoral votes, and then some, by carrying Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.
How do you read the Ohio situation? Obama’s numbers appear to be holding up a bit better than in some of the other Midwestern states.
The economy is doing better there, that’s right, and that should help [him]. There’s been a lot of academic tussle over whether a particular state’s economy matters to a Presidential vote. I think the upshot of that is, yeah, it matters some. But the national economic situation still looms quite large in the calculus of voters in those states.
So what’s your take on Obama’s chances in Ohio at this moment?
It’s looking like a true tossup at this point. The polls we’ve seen are roughly tied. The trend has been a little bit towards Romney, as we would expect based on the way things have gone in terms of the economy and the Romney campaign consolidating itself. The minority vote isn’t nearly as large there. African-Americans support [Obama] at really high levels, but the minority population is not as large as in most states—and also, as far as we can figure out, it isn’t really growing. It’s one of the states where there’s been the least amount demographic change.
In 2008, Obama basically split the white college graduate vote, so that’s pretty important, to keep that somewhere near that level. But the white working class he lost by ten points. And the white working class is exceptionally large there, so I think the white non-college voters are really the key. Minus ten points is something he can live with among that group. But if it’s minus twenty, minus twenty five—the farther down it goes, the worse his chances become, and I think that’s really the key to the whole thing.
The Obama campaign has been pushing the auto bailout as a way of boosting support among working-class and middle-class voters, not just in Michigan but also in other Midwestern states, like Ohio. Is that a reasonable argument do you think?
I think it’s a reasonable argument. It should have effects on the adjoining states to Michigan, and it may be helping him now. But against the overall economy, it’s not enough in and of itself. It doesn’t automatically deliver any state for Obama, far from it.
Last one on geography: the South: Florida and North Carolina…
I think, realistically, both North Carolina and Florida are tough carries for the Obama campaign. North Carolina in particular seems pretty unlikely at this point, but I could be wrong about that, obviously. Florida, also at this point, I think you’d have to say Romney is favored in the state.
Why is Florida so hard for Obama? Gore virtually took it in 2000, and there must have been demographic changes favoring the Democrats since then?
And there’s more demographic change coming up. Florida, according to our data, has actually been accelerating its shift toward a minority voter electorate by about a percentage point a year from 2008 to 2012, which brings Florida to about thirty-five per cent minority eligible voters. So that’s good for Obama. And the growth in the minority population has been driven not by Cuban Hispanics but by non-Cuban Hispanics. That helps him.
But then if you look at the other data in Florida…outside of the big metro areas in the south [Obama] doesn’t typically do well with even with white college voters. The typical M.O. for the Obama coalition is to not do that well among white working-class voters but to have a much more respectable performance among white college-educated voters. And according to our data, I think he lost white college voters by almost as much as he lost (non-college whites). Let’s see here … yeah, white college graduates, he was minus thirteen in Florida in 2008; white working class, minus seventeen. There’s not that much difference.
And the local economy is doing quite badly.
The economy is quite bad, and it hasn’t been improving that fast, so that gives the Romney campaign a lot to work with. In terms of geography, the I-4 corridors are where the real battle will be fought. Obama managed to carry the I-4 corridor in 2008. It seems quite plausible that he won’t carry the I-4 corridor in 2012.
Do you think Romney selecting Marco Rubio as his running mate would have much impact? I mean, he’s not an I-4 corridor guy, is he?
He’s not really. There’s always been some debate about how much a Rubio selection would help Romney, even in Florida. I guess you’ve got to believe that, at the margin, he would be somewhat helpful, but not determinative necessarily. But they may be thinking, since they’ve been running pretty well in Florida, they have a pretty good chance of taking the state anyway. There’s not as much of a compelling need to select Rubio, and his attraction to non-Cuban Hispanics is clearly exaggerated in any state but Florida—it may even be exaggerated in Florida.
PUBLIC OPINION/CAMPAIGNING
One of the other interesting things you’ve done over the years, Ruy, is the stuff on public attitudes to major policy issues. You’ve argued that there’s a “progressive center.” Is that progressive center still intact?
I think the potential progressive center is certainly still there. First of all, let’s talk about the ideology thing. The number of [self-defined] “conservatives” really hasn’t changed very much. There was some decline in “moderates” there for a while and some slight increase in “liberals.” But the American ideological spectrum doesn’t really change much over time in that sort of three-point way.
And if you look closely at those categories, it’s always been the case that “moderates” are not just people who are totally in the middle, but actually tend to lean toward what you might call a progressive view on policy attitudes. Moderates reveal this by their voting preferences, which are typically substantially more Democratic than Republican. So I’ve always thought it strange to say, because “conservatives” are bigger than “liberals,” it’s a center-right country. When you actually put together “moderates and “liberals” you have a substantial majority. And “moderates” are more plausibly thought of as “liberals” than “conservatives.”
If you look at policy attitudes, a lot of the attitudes people have about what they’d like to see the government do, what they’d like to see accomplished, and even the spending they’d like to see done in certain areas, really hasn’t changed that much. There’s still a lot of appetite for positive actions by the government for what you might think of as progressive change, that the government needs to do more … they just don’t really believe the government is capable of doing it.
Can you give me a couple of examples?
Here’s an example. It’s just one data point, but there are many others. We did this poll at the Center for American Progress on what Americans want from government, as part of this project that we call “Doing What Works”—it’s basically how to make the government function better and more efficiently. This was done, I think, about the middle of 2010. Not a great time for Democrats: the backlash was gathering. The economy was still in the toilet and things had really swung against the Democrats.
At this point, we found that people said on the one hand that they didn’t have much confidence in the federal government’s ability to solve problems. Only thirty-three per cent said they had a lot or even some confidence in the federal government’s ability to solve problems, the lowest that had ever been measured since the questions started being asked in the nineteen-nineties. Fifty-seven per cent said the government is doing things better left to business and individuals. At the same time, if you asked them if they wanted federal government to have more involvement in several areas, you got sixty-one per cent saying we need more government involvement in developing clean energy; sixty per cent in improving public schools; sixty per cent in making college more affordable; fifty-seven per cent in reducing poverty; fifty-one per cent in ensuring access to affordable health care—this was after the health-care reform bill passed. So that’s pretty indicative.
And then, we asked them what was more important to them in improving government performance: improving efficiency and effectiveness, or reducing the size of the federal government. A sxity-two to thirty-six margin [was] in favor of improving the function of government.
So I think a lot of the issue about whether there’s a progressive majority out there, in policy terms, really hinges on this question of the role of government. I think people really want the government to do a lot of things that you would describe as being progressive. The problem, and it’s been very much accentuated by the economic downturn, is that people lack the confidence that the government can, even if it had the resources to address problem X, to do it well and be effective. I think is the nub of the problem. The problem isn’t that people embrace what you might call the standard Republican conservative view about the role of government, which basically is we shouldn’t have much, that things will be just fine if we unleash the market, and in the end we’ll all be richer. I think that’s actually very much a minority view.
And from this perspective how do you think Obama is doing?
Well, I think in an objective sense he’s accomplished a lot, and I think history may judge him well. But the most important thing that people look at when they judge the effectiveness of government is the state of the macro economy. The economy is still limping along, and that doesn’t exactly restore people’s faith. And I don’t think it’s just here actually. I think in developed countries in general, these kinds of situations, this kind of economic performance is really bad for the left, for the parties of active government. I think it just shows, if we didn’t know before, that a key ingredient in attaining and sustaining a progressive majority is the performance of the macro economy. It’s not an option. It’s not just something that would be nice if it happened. It’s central.
So it’s sort of a reversal what happened in the nineteen-thirties? Bad times used to be good for the left.
You might say that’s the exception that proves the rule. You might say that things were so bad that there was actually no alternative in the public’s eye, and that was, in a sense, good for the left. But it seems that in anything short of that, typically, bad times are bad for the left—labor markets are looser, nobody’s got bargaining power, everybody’s scared, there’s not enough to go around. Benjamin Friedman’s terrific book, “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” makes this argument in a sustained fashion. Economic growth, tight labor markets—all very good for the left. And when things slow down and unemployment goes up, far from turning to the left saying, “Guys, show us the way,” people say “Who are you guys? You got us into mess,” or “You can’t do anything,” or “You’re corrupt,” or whatever.
Even if they didn’t cause the mess?
Even if they didn’t—the perfect example. You don’t have to be Paul Krugman to connect the dots between conservative economic policy and the mess we’re in today. And the public, to this day, still blames Bush more than anybody else for the recession. But that does not make them want to embrace the left.
Putting all of this together, Ruy, what’s your prognosis for Obama? How do you see things?
Well I’d say he’s a slight favorite. Overall, and on a state-by-state basis, I’d say Obama is more likely than not to get reëlected. That said, it’s not a done deal. So much depends on the level of economic growth and performance in the next period of time. If there’s a serious slowdown he’s in big trouble. Right now, the projections, if I’m understanding them right, are for 2.2 per cent or a bit higher growth for the year. I think he can live with that. Even with two per cent, he can live with it.
When it comes to interpreting elections, it sounds like you’re a fundamentalist, Ruy, but what about the campaign itself? How important is that?
I was about to get to that. I think the campaign is really important, and I think that Obama finds himself in a situation where, in a sense, he’s the insurgent battling the advantage the bad economy gives his opponent. He’s got to run a smart campaign that bolsters his strengths. He’s got to deal with the economy in a way that puts onus as much as possibles on the other guy. You’re in office and it’s your bad economy, and you want to basically confuse the issue as much as possible. You want to say the other guy’s party has gotten in the way of improving things. You’ve got to talk more about his plans, like tax cuts for the rich and deregulating Wall Street, and so on. You want to complicate the conversation about the economy, and I think that’s a big part of what (Obama) has been trying to do, and I think somewhat successfully. But we have to face the fact that the incumbent will always get a lot of the blame for the bad economy. You don’t want to get a hundred per cent, you want to get only maybe sixty-five per cent.
Overall, the President seems to be following your mosaic strategy—mobilizing the Hispanics, aiming at liberal urban professionals, mobilizing college students…
At the same time trying to have a somewhat credible performance among groups that are less sympathetic. I think they well understand the role of key states, and the role of, for example, white non-college voters. I think they’re also trying to keep that in play as much as possible. But they’re being realistic about where to concentrate their mobilization efforts.
The President’s decision to come out in favor of legalizing gay marriage: Is there any data yet on how that’s playing in, say, North Carolina or the Midwest?
The data I’ve seen do not suggest gay marriage has been much of a factor either way in terms of support levels or mobilization.
The overall national number: Is that still going in Obama’s favor? Most people approve of what he said, right?
Oh yes, absolutely. And most people now approve of same-sex marriage. It’s a huge change. This is what powered Obama’s announcements. When I was originally writing about this stuff, I was saying how fast I thought this would change. At one point, people were basically seeing a percentage point a year increase (in support ) for same-sex marriage. That’s accelerated in the last five or six years, to two points or more a year, even higher among African-Americans. It’s almost like we’ve reached a tipping point on this issue and there’s no going back. So Obama is, in that sense, on the side of public opinion.
Even if you look at white non-college voters, which is what people said might be the most difficult part of this for Obama; young people would like it, but he’d lose support in the white working class. Not that we have specific tests of this, but it is a fact that support for same-sex marriage is higher among white non-college voters today than support for Obama is. So, how much could he possibly lose?
Obviously we’re all waiting for the Supreme Court ruling on health-care reform. Do you see that as a big variable, politically?
Gosh, you know, that’s just so complicated. Do they throw out the whole thing? I don’t know. There are so many variables swirling around there that I find it difficult to assess whether it will be good, bad or indifferent for the campaign.
Basically, it seems that what you are saying is that the long-term trends, most of them, are going in the Democrats’ favor, but this is a special election because of the state of the economy. So even if Obama loses, things still will look good for the Democrats in 2016 or 2020?
Now that’s what I call a long-range question.
But there’s a new Democratic majority, right? I mean, is it there or isn’t it there?
All majorities are contingent. Just because there’s a potentially dominant coalition emerging, one that has a secure demographic foundation, doesn’t mean it’s going to win every election. They may not win the next election. But you would have to say that over the course of the decade current trends look pretty good for the Democrats and pretty bad for the other side. It doesn’t guarantee the Democrats are going to win every election, but I think it does probably guarantee the politics of the country are going to have to change.
In other words, the Republican strategy—relying strictly on white votes, especially the white non-college vote—is not sustainable over the course of this decade and the next. They will have to change. Yes, they can be competitive with the Democrats. In a sense, I’ve never argued anything else. Even when one party has an ascendant majority, the other party adjusts to try to deal with that problem. But I think the Republicans will have to adjust. I think they’ll have to move to the center. I think they’ll have to become more friendly to minorities, and particularly Hispanic, voters, the younger generation, professionals. They will have to become more moderate.
George W. Bush and Karl Rove recognized that didn’t they—what with “compassionate conservatism” and outreach to Hispanics in Texas and other places? It seems to me that Republicans sort of bought into that idea ten years ago, and then, for whatever reason—the rise of the Tea Party, the financial crisis, or whatever—they decided to go back to the old-fashioned Nixonian “southern strategy,” for this election at least.
Yeah, yeah—it’s sort of back to the future for them. Clearly the people you’ve mentioned were very aware of these trends, and they had a more inclusive strategy. [The G.O.P. has] given up on that due to the rise of the populist right, regional swings within the party, the decline of the geographical base of moderate Republicanism. They have become in some ways a hard-right party, and this is why it’s at least possible, though we don’t know for sure, that their tremendous success in 2010 could wind up hurting them over the long run, because of that point of view: “What could possibly be wrong? We’re as conservative as we want to be. We took sixty-three seats in the 2010 election. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That’s where they’re coming from today. They feel they’ve got the wind on their back. They feel there’s nothing to do but press the accelerator.
And if they were to defeat Obama, that message would be reinforced?
They’d be happy campers. Of course, if they lose the recriminations will begin. But I predict it won’t necessarily be an automatic consensus in favor of “Let’s be a bit more moderate.” A huge section of the party will say, ”We never trusted Romney. He wasn’t a real conservative.”
Photograph by Matthew Staver/The New York Times/Redux.
