Category Archives: Politics

Growing American political divide between urban and rural areas

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The urban/rural political divide has grown in the last few decades:

As Democrats have come to dominate U.S. cities, it is Republican strength in rural areas that allows the party to hold control of the House and remain competitive in presidential elections…

The U.S. divide wasn’t always this stark. For decades, rural America was part of the Democratic base, and as recently as 1993, just over half of rural Americans were represented by a House Democrat, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Conservative Democrats often represented rural districts, including Ms. Hartzler’s predecessor, Ike Skelton, who held the seat for 34 years before she ousted him in 2010.

That parity eventually gave way to GOP dominance. In 2013, 77% of rural Americans were represented by a House Republican. But in urban areas—which by the government’s definition includes both cities and suburbs—slightly less than half of residents were represented by congressional Republicans, despite the GOP’s 30-seat majority in the House…

In 1992, Bill Clinton won 60% of the Whole Foods counties and 40% of the Cracker Barrel counties, a 20-point difference. That gap that has widened every year since, and in 2012, Mr. Obama won 77% of Whole Foods counties and 29% of Cracker Barrel Counties, a 48-point difference.

And with this divide between cities and rural areas, the suburbs, particularly ones in the middle between exurbs and inner-ring suburbs, are where politicians fight for votes.

The profiles of a suburban county outside Kansas City and a rural county in Missouri suggests that most people make conscious choices about where they want to live. In other words, everyone in America can live wherever they want and they make these choices based on culture and politics. A common illustration for this is the plight of high school and college age adults and fears of  a rural “brain drain“: they can leave their small town for the big city where they see there is more excitement. To some degree, this is true: Americans are a mobile people yet it is a more complicated process than simply selecting a cultural milieu and parking there for the rest of their lives. On one hand, people can make much more finer-grained decisions than on a county by county basis (particularly in denser areas where there are plenty of communities to choose from) and on the other hand people are pushed and pulled by particular places through race and ethnicity, social networks, economic opportunities, and life changes. The article mentions cultural factors quite a bit but says little about race and ethnicity, a long-standing factor in where people live and evidenced today by continued residential segregation.

Just a note: the second author of this piece is Dante Chinni, also the co-author of Our Patchwork Nation. His analysis could be contrasted with sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s recentl book on small-town America.

Crimean crisis for cartographers: is it part of Ukraine or Russia?

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Maps today are updated often so Russia’s actions in Crimea have left cartographers with a decision to make:

Online mapping tools from Google and Bing, as well as Mapquest, all list Crimea as a part of Ukraine. Wikipedia’s community is embroiled in a fierce debate over whether or not to recognize Russia’s annexation of the region.

National Geographic still has not yet reached a decision on the matter, and is waiting for annexation to be formally approved. They said in a statement:

Most political boundaries depicted in our maps and atlases are stable and uncontested. Those that are disputed receive special treatment and are shaded gray as “Areas of Special Status,” with accompanying explanatory text.

In the case of Crimea, if it is formally annexed by Russia, it would be shaded gray and its administrative center, Simferopol’, would be designated by a special symbol. When a region is contested, it is our policy to reflect that status in our maps. This does not suggest recognition of the legitimacy of the situation.

Rand McNally, on the other hand, takes its mapping data from the State Department, and so will leave its data as it currently stands. It could be a long time before the U.S. formally recognizes Russia’s takeover.

It sounds like this comes down to: (1) which authority each cartographer relies on plus (2) the perceived legitimacy of Russia’s actions. While maps may simply reflect these political realities, they also have the potential to shape current and future perceptions of the area.

If only we could go back to the good old days (20 years ago?) where it took some time for maps to be updated. As a kid, I loved maps and I remember the shift in the early 1990s to a fragmented Yugoslavia (the National Geographic Geography Bee seemed to like focusing on this rapidly changing region as well) as well as emerging post-Soviet states. It takes some time for all these maps to be updated, from online sources to printed atlases to school textbooks and maps that hang on classroom walls. Cartographers in the past might have had more time to wait out a situation like this to see what happens while today people want the newest information now.

Microsoft hoping to sell lots of political ads on XBox Live, video games

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Ads in video games are not new but Microsoft is looking to use more recent technology and information to sell political ads in its online spaces:

Microsoft is trying to persuade politicians to take out targeted ads on Xbox Live, Skype, MSN and other company platforms as midterm elections begin heating up around the country. To plug the idea, Microsoft officials handed out promotional materials Thursday at CPAC, the annual conference for conservatives.

It’s the latest move by tech companies to seize a piece of the lucrative political ad market. The ads, which would appear on the Xbox Live dashboard and other Microsoft products, combine Microsoft user IDs and other public data to build a profile of Xbox users. Campaigns can then blast ads to selected demographic categories, or to specific congressional districts. And if the campaign brings its own list of voter e-mail addresses, Microsoft can match the additional data with individual customer accounts for even more accurate voter targeting.

The image of white male teens as the stereotypical average gamer is something of a myth; Microsoft says that of its 25 million Xbox Live subscribers in the United States, 38 percent are women. Forty percent are married, and more than half have children. Those numbers are important, because they represent key demographics that are among the most contested in political races. Microsoft is particularly aggressive in selling its ability to reach women, Latinos and millennials; across the company’s other platforms, such as MSN, Microsoft has developed consumer categories like “Ciudad Strivers” and “Nuevo Horizons” that attempt to describe a set of characteristics including age, type of residence and income level. At a time when virtually all politicians are resorting to microtargeting, this technology could help Microsoft become a major player in the advertising space…

Microsoft has made successful pitches to political campaigns before. In 2012, President Obama agreed to advertise on Xbox Live for his reelection campaign. The effort sparked some complaints among Xbox users who disliked the ad appearing on their dashboards. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, meanwhile, opted not to participate. Obama has also advertised within games themselves. With the release last year of the Xbox One, it’s safe to expect Xbox Live to become another important platform in the political ad wars.

It will be interesting to see how users respond and then how effective such ads are. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise to users: we shouldn’t be surprised if we volunteer data online and then it is used for targeted ads. Plus, given the time people spend playing video games (particularly for demographics that might not be accessing more traditional media as much), this seems like a relatively untapped market compared to television. Yet, it is harder to argue this has many benefits for users. While some might argue targeted ads for consumer goods show people what they might want, what average XBox Live user wants to be presented with political content while trying to play a game?

Computer models of the effects of gerrymandering on urban and rural voters

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A new computer simulation of voting patterns by geography in the United States suggests gerrymandering may not be the cause of Republican majorities in the House:

To examine this hypothesis, we adapted a computer algorithm that we recently introduced in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. It allows us to draw thousands of alternative, nonpartisan redistricting plans and assess the partisan advantage built into each plan. First we created a large number of districting plans (as many as 1,000) for each of 49 states. Then we predicted the probability that a Democrat or Republican would win each simulated district based on the results of the 2008 presidential election and tallied the expected Republican seats associated with each simulated plan.

The results were not encouraging for reform advocates. In the vast majority of states, our nonpartisan simulations produced Republican seat shares that were not much different from the actual numbers in the last election. This was true even in some states, like Indiana and Missouri, with heavy Republican influence over redistricting. Both of these states were hotly contested and leaned only slightly Republican over all, but of the 17 seats between them, only four were won by Democrats (in St. Louis, Kansas City, Gary and Indianapolis). While some of our simulations generated an additional Democratic seat around St. Louis or Indianapolis, most of them did not, and in any case, a vanishingly small number of simulations gave Democrats a congressional seat share commensurate with their overall support in these states.

The problem for Democrats is that they have overwhelming majorities not only in the dense, poor urban centers, but also in isolated, far-flung college towns, historical mining areas and 19th-century manufacturing towns that are surrounded by and ultimately overwhelmed by rural Republicans.

A motivated Democratic cartographer could produce districts that accurately reflected overall partisanship in states like these by carefully crafting the metropolitan districts and snaking districts along the historical canals and rail lines that once connected the nonmetropolitan Democratic enclaves. But such districts are unlikely to emerge by chance from a nonpartisan process. On the other hand, a Republican cartographer in these and other Midwestern states, along with some Southern states like Georgia and Tennessee, could do little to improve on the advantage bestowed by the existing human geography.

Perhaps this introduces a new strategy for political parties: the need to have more evenly distributed support rather than large clusters of support. But, as the bottom of the article notes, certain redistricting strategies like in Illinois or Maryland can provide Democrats some help in spreading out the effects of their urban voters.

Two “cousin” states follow different paths: Minnesota goes Democrat, Wisconsin goes Republican

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A look at the twin ports of Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin highlights the political differences between the two states:

In 2013, Wisconsin’s lawmakers cut income taxes. They approved an expansion of school vouchers. They passed a requirement, portions of which are now being contested in court, that abortion providers have admitting privileges at local hospitals and that women seeking abortions get ultrasounds. They rewrote iron mining rules to ease construction of an open pit in Northern Wisconsin.

In Minnesota, lawmakers sent more money to public schools, raised income taxes on the highest earners, increased the tax on cigarettes and voted to add new business taxes. They allowed some undocumented immigrants to get in-state tuition for public universities. They legalized same-sex marriage.

“It’s staggering, really, like night and day,” said Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “You’ve got two states with the same history, the same culture, the same people — it’s kind of like they’re cousins. And now they’re looking across the border and seeing one world, then seeing something else entirely on the other side.”

This sounds like a good natural experiment for social scientists to look at. If the states share similar backgrounds and geography, perhaps the differences in outcomes over the next few years can be attributed to the different political parties in control. Unfortunately, the article is pretty impressionistic thus far and doesn’t offer too many concrete differences in life. Perhaps not enough time has passed – or perhaps the differences in daily life still might not change that much for most residents.

Are America’s most admired simply America’s most powerful?

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Peter Beinart looks at the most recent Gallup’s most recent Most Admired poll and notices a trend:

Nor is it true that Gallup merely measures celebrity, since athletes and Hollywood icons are largely absent. Looking at the winners across the decades, the most common denominator is power. Indeed, the only female winners not in close proximity to political power are Mother Theresa in the 1980s and 1990s and Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian nurse who gained fame treating polio, in 1951.

The men tell a similar story. Presidents almost always win. When they’re deemed weak or unpopular, the public anoints another strong political figure: Douglas MacArthur supplants Harry Truman in 1946 and 1947; Dwight Eisenhower tops Lyndon Johnson in 1967 and 1968; Henry Kissinger replaces Richard Nixon between 1973 and 1975. Even the religious figures who do best are the ones closest to power. Although he never wins, the Reverend Billy Graham—famous for pastoring to presidents—makes the top-10 list more than other man between 1948 and 2005. The other highest-scoring religious figures are popes. Missing are any of the clergy, like William Sloane Coffin or Daniel Berrigan, who made their names fighting the Vietnam War.

In fact, activists protesting injustice rarely rank highly. That includes Martin Luther King. He doesn’t make America’s top 10 most admired men in 1963, the year of the March on Washington. King comes fourth in 1964 and sixth in 1965 but then falls out of the top ten again in 1966 and 1967. The same is true for Nelson Mandela. By the mid-1980s, the global anti-apartheid movement had made Mandela a household name. But as far as I can tell, he doesn’t crack Gallup’s top-10 list until he is elected South Africa’s president in 1994. (To be fair, I was only able to check 1983, 1984 , 1986, 1987, and 1992. For 1993, I could only find the top five. After 1994, Mandela becomes a top-10 regular. But by then, the Cold War is over, the controversy surrounding his communist sympathies has evaporated, and he’s become safe.

I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised at this. Part of it could be that people get to vote for some of the political positions so they feel like they had a voice. Additionally, the media tends to cover the most powerful a lot. Celebrities may get a lot of attention but they tend not to do too well, whether star athletes or Hollywood stars, in job prestige rankings.

Beinart suggests the American public should pay more attention to activists, people fighting for justice rather than people holding the reins of justice. These two things are not mutually exclusive: powerful leaders can be good leaders. But, this could be a problem if people are admired simply for the power they command rather than for what they actually do with that power.

“The Last Taboo”: Atheists still face uphill battle in American public life

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Here is an overview of the hurdles atheists face in American society:

For starters, consider that there is not a single self-described atheist in Congress today. Not one. It wasn’t until 2007 that Rep. Pete Stark, a Democrat from Northern California, became the first member of Congress and the highest-ranking public official ever to admit to being an atheist. (And even he framed it in terms of religious affiliation, calling himself “a Unitarian who does not believe in a supreme being.”) Stark was elected twice after this, but when the 20-term congressman lost his seat last year, it was to a 31-year-old primary challenger who attacked him as irreligious, citing, among other things, Stark’s vote against our national motto: “In God We Trust.”

Indeed, the same year that Stark came out, the Secular Coalition of America was able to identify only five atheist public officials in the entire United States. After Stark and a Nebraska state senator, the third-highest ranking atheist was a school-board president from Berkeley, Calif.—this despite the fact that, according to a 2012 Pew report, 6 percent of Americans say they don’t believe in a higher power. That leaves at least 15 million Americans without any elected officials to represent their point of view. Basically, atheism is still as close as it gets to political poison in American electoral politics: A recent Gallup poll found (once again) that atheists are the least electable among several underrepresented groups. Sixty-eight percent of Americans would vote for a well-qualified gay or lesbian candidate, for example, but only 54 percent would vote for a well-qualified atheist. Seven state constitutions even still include provisions prohibiting atheists from holding office (though they are not enforced). One of those is liberal Maryland, which also has a clause that says, essentially, that non-believers can be disqualified from serving as jurors or witnesses…

The Cold War changed all that. Atheism began to seem almost treasonous amid tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, because the Soviets were officially and emphatically against religion. Sen. Joseph McCarthy famously used the phrase “godless communists” to bash the political left and others he considered his enemies. In this context, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed laws in the mid-1950s inserting “God” into our Pledge of Allegiance and putting it on all our money. (It had been on most coins earlier, but Eisenhower made “In God We Trust” our national motto, henceforth to appear on all bills.)…

In fact, the fastest-growing religious category in the United States is what are called the “nones”—people who say they have no religious affiliation. One-fifth of Americans are in this group today, according to Pew Research Center polling. Among adults under age 30, a full third count themselves as religiously unaffiliated. Some of them believe in a god or gods; some do not. They are not going to want to be pushed around by any sect one way or another, and as their numbers increase, they won’t have to allow it.

Surveys consistently show Americans are more opposed to atheists than other groups (such as voting for President) even as organized religiosity declines and atheists look to form megachurches. Read more of the Pew report on religious nones which suggests the numbers are growing even as some still have more traditional religious beliefs and practices.

Describing the 20% of temporary rich (“mass affluent”) Americans

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New survey data looks at new rich Americans who draw a lot of attention from companies and who might have outsized political influence:

Fully 20 percent of U.S. adults become rich for parts of their lives, wielding outsize influence on America’s economy and politics. This little-known group may pose the biggest barrier to reducing the nation’s income inequality…

Made up largely of older professionals, working married couples and more educated singles, the new rich are those with household income of $250,000 or more at some point during their working lives. That puts them, if sometimes temporarily, in the top 2 percent of earners…

Companies increasingly are marketing to this rising demographic, fueling a surge of “mass luxury” products and services from premium Starbucks coffee and organic groceries to concierge medicine and VIP lanes at airports. Political parties are taking a renewed look at the up-for-grabs group, once solidly Republican…

In a country where poverty is at a record high, today’s new rich are notable for their sense of economic fragility. They’ve reached the top 2 percent, only to fall below it, in many cases. That makes them much more fiscally conservative than other Americans, polling suggests, and less likely to support public programs, such as food stamps or early public education, to help the disadvantaged…

As the fastest-growing group based on take-home pay, the new rich tend to enjoy better schools, employment and gated communities, making it easier to pass on their privilege to their children…

Sometimes referred to by marketers as the “mass affluent,” the new rich make up roughly 25 million U.S. households and account for nearly 40 percent of total U.S. consumer spending.

This sounds like a group that would call themselves upper middle-class: wealthy enough to enjoy some luxuries and good things for their kids but not wealthy enough to truly compete with the millionaires and CEOs. They resent the idea that they are rich as they think middle-class values, such as hard work and providing for their kids, helped them arrive at their current position.

Yet, when the median household income in the United States is around $50,000 it is hard not see this group as wealthy. To some degree, it is all relative: the mass affluent might not be able to consistently live the high life in Manhattan or San Francisco but they could do really well in cheaper places like the Midwest or Atlanta or Dallas. Perhaps it is the perceived fragility that matters most: losing their job might be enough to move them down back near the median income, though unemployment rates are much lower for the educated and well-trained.

A few questions after reading this article:

1. How big should this group be in the United States?

2. Long-term, which party will capture these voters?

3. Will this group get a lot of negative attention as they are more accessible than the ultra-wealthy who can live more cloistered lives?

Big city mayors discuss why no sitting mayor has ever been elected President

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Watch this video of current big city mayors talking about why no one has ever moved from sitting mayor to American President. The most common reason given: mayors have to make decisions, big and small and often pragmatic, all the time and this doesn’t line up with the gotcha politics of today and keeping all the constituents happy. It may be just me reading into the video but it seems like these mayors give this reason with both a sense of pride and regret: “Hey, we make tough decisions all the time and this can make people mad. Unfortunately, we don’t get rewarded at the highest level for such choices.”

I suspect there is more to this story, particularly if we asked the mayors of the biggest cities, and it would be worth hearing more.

Recent book details the “new swing states” of suburbia

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Richard Florida describes the findings from a recent book titled The Political Ecology of the Metropolis that looks at the swing votes available in American suburbs:

Sellers and his colleagues analyze the political characteristics of cities and suburbs across many advanced nations. Sellers’s own chapter covers the U.S., and it includes some eye-opening insights. While most previous research has looked mainly at states and counties, Sellers has developed a detailed data set on the municipalities that make up America’s metro regions. He tracks the political geography of the 1996, 2000 and 2004 elections across twelve U.S. metros with populations of at least 450,000: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Seattle, Cincinnati, Fresno, Birmingham, Syracuse, Wichita, and Kalamazoo.

Democrats have a “decisive” advantage in dense, urban localities and poorer, majority-minority suburbs. In the affluent suburbs, Sellers explains, “Republicans enjoy an analogous, if less dramatic” advantage. He notes that “a pervasive divide separates the Republican low density areas of metropolitan peripheries from the Democratic urban centres and minority suburbs.” At the broad metropolitan level, votes follow the same red/blue, rich/poor pattern identified by Larry Bartels and Andrew Gelman at the state level. Sellers found that municipalities with educated and affluent voters tended to vote with their state’s winners – they voted more Republican in red states and more Democratic in blue states.

With these bases locked down, the key political footballs – the new “swing states,” so to speak – are the swelling ranks of economically distressed suburbs, where poverty has been growing and where the economic crisis hit especially hard. There are now more poor people living in America’s suburbs than its center cities, and as a recent Brookings Institution report found, both Republican and Democratic districts have been affected by this reality…

America’s new metropolitan geography is overlaid by one additional factor: voter participation. Turnout levels have ranged between 52 and 62 percent over the past several national elections. Even though Democrats have the clear advantage in raw numbers, Republicans dominate the kinds of communities where people are more likely to actually vote. Turnout, Sellers finds, tends to be higher in GOP strongholds – the more affluent, highly educated suburbs and low-density rural and exurban areas, all places with higher levels of home-ownership.

See earlier posts on Joel Kotkin’s analysis of swing votes in the suburbs. The candidates should know this as well and we should see a lot of visits in the future to such suburbs.

These economically distressed suburbs, often inner-ring suburbs adjacent to big cities but also more far-flung places that are more working class and not as dependent on white-collar and professional work, may hold more than just the political key to metropolitan regions. While wealthier residents batten down the hatches in nicer suburbs and trendy urban neighborhoods, what happens to the majority of residents who face fewer prospects?