Tag Archives: Republicans

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.

Route to primary win for Republicans in Illinois governor’s race runs through the Chicago suburbs

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A pattern has emerged as Republican candidates for Illinois governor: each ticket includes someone from a Chicago collar county.

Wheaton City Council member Evelyn Pacino Sanguinetti will be Republican governor hopeful Bruce Rauner’s running mate, he announced this morning.

The daughter of an immigrant from Ecuador and refugee from Cuba, Sanguinetti is in her first term on the Wheaton council and worked as an assistant attorney general under Republican Jim Ryan…

His pick puts a suburban name on every Republican ticket for governor.

State Sen. Bill Brady of Bloomington chose former Long Grove Mayor Maria Rodriguez as his running mate, and Illinois Treasurer Dan Rutherford chose businessman Steve Kim of Northbrook. Dillard picked state Rep. Jil Tracy of Quincy.

Additionally, the main Republican primary candidates (Rauner, Brady, Rutherford, and Dillard) are all white males who selected a running mate who is not a white male: three women and a man who is “potentially the first Asian American to hold state office.”

So the strategy appears clear: try to win the suburban Republican vote, particularly in the populous Lake County and DuPage County, and appeal to various demographics (Illinois is now 71.5% white, 15.8% Latino, 14.5% black, and 4.6% Asian American). Expect to see the Republican candidates plenty in the Chicago suburbs in the months ahead…

Religious nones vote overwhelmingly for Obama in 2012 presidential election

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A number of commentators have pointed out the advantage for President Obama among the religious “nones,” people who have no religious affiliation who now make up almost 20% of the US population, in the 2012 election. Here is another look at the voting gap:

— In Ohio, Obama lost the Protestant vote by 3 points and the Catholic vote by 11, but he won the “nones” — 12 percent of the state’s electorate — by 47 points.— In Virginia, Obama lost Protestants by 9 points and Catholics by 10 points, but won 76 percent of the “nones,” who were 10 percent of the electorate.

— In Florida, Obama lost Protestants by 16 points and Catholics by 5 points, but captured 72 percent of the “nones.” They were 15 percent of the electorate.

Similar results were seen in states including Michigan, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania…

Nationally, Obama lost the Protestant vote by 15 points, won the Catholic vote by 2 points, and captured 70 percent of the “nones.”

If the late 1970s and 1980s were about the rise of conservative religious voters, the Moral Majority and all that, are the 2010s going to be about the rise of the “nones”? While the article cautions at the end that religious switching is common in the United States, I haven’t seen commentators or political types address this question: how could Republicans change their pitch to attract more of the “nones”?

How Republicans became the party against cities

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After noting Republicans barely mentioned the word “city” at the Republican National Convention, the rest of a review piece in the New York Times looks at how Republicans became anti-urban:

IT could hardly be otherwise. The Republican Party is, more than ever before in its history, an anti-urban party, its support gleaned overwhelmingly from suburban and rural districts — especially in presidential elections.

This wasn’t always the case. During the heyday of the urban political machines, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Republicans used to hold their own in our nation’s great cities. Philadelphia was dominated for decades by a Republican machine. In Chicago — naturally — both parties had highly competitive, wildly corrupt machines, with a buffoonish Republican mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, presiding over the city during the ascent of Al Capone. In the 1928 presidential election, the Republican Herbert Hoover swept to victory while carrying cities all across the country: Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Detroit; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Houston; Dallas; Omaha and Los Angeles…

FOR Republicans, cities now became object lessons on the shortcomings of activist government and the welfare state — sinkholes of crime and social dysfunction, where Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” cavorted in their Cadillacs. The very idea of the city seemed to be a thing of the past, an archaic concept — so much so that Gerald R. Ford seriously considered letting New York go bankrupt in 1975…

In short, they promise to rip and tear at the immensely complex fabric of city life while sneering at the entire “urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” There is a terrible arrogance here that has ramifications well beyond the Republicans’ electoral prospects.

Fascinating.  A sociologist adds an addendum through a letter to the editor several days later:

While I agree with much of Kevin Baker’s article, his statement that in the postwar years “newly prosperous whites and eventually blacks pursued the American dream out to the suburbs” suggests that postwar urban America became the bastion of the poor and minorities.

Mostly true. But in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston, many members of the black middle class continue to live in proximity to their poor and working-class counterparts.

Indeed, in the postwar and post-civil-rights era, blacks have been inheriting urban America, hence the rise of black mayors and other elected officials across all levels of government. Mr. Baker’s analysis of the concerted turn away from urban America by the G.O.P. reveals that a major consequence of this strategy is not just a forsaking of cities but also the alienation of a large swath of poor, working-class and minority voters.

This has all led to the situation today where both parties try to cater to middle-class suburbanites as more exurban and rural voters are in the Republican camp and more urban dwellers are in the Democratic camp.

I have three other ideas about this:

1. Republicans have shifted over the years toward protecting “traditional” American life which sounds often like it can best be lived out in small towns. While the country may still hold on to some small town values (think of President Obama’s talk about Wall Street versus Main Street), the era of Main Street, even in suburbs and towns that have real Main Streets as opposed to the shopping mall kinds (see here and here), is over.

2. This is a bit odd considering that cities and metropolitan regions are massive economic engines. Aren’t Republicans for markets and a growing economy? Most of this is not happening in rural areas but rather in cities.

3. Tied to #2, suburbs are in part made possible by cities. On one hand, suburbs are more independent than ever before but they are still tied to cities for things like major cultural institutions, major financial institutions, airports and other transportation facilities, and sports teams. Additionally, we should be thinking more about metropolitan regions anyway rather than cities versus suburbs

Overall, we aren’t going back to a United States that is primarily small town or rural. The percent of Americans living in non-metropolitan areas in 1910 was 71.6% while over 80% of American live in metropolitan areas today – a complete switch. The population density of the country tripled from 25.7 to 79.6 people per square mile between 1900 and 2000. The United States of today is an urban nation – and both Republicans and Democrats have to adapt to this.

Improving the word cloud: NYT adds rates of word usage and comparisons between groups

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I’m generally not a big fan of word clouds but one of students recently pointed out to me an example from the New York Times that makes some improvements: looking at the rates of word usage at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. (Click through to see the interactive graphic.) Here is how I think this improves on a typical word cloud:

1. It doesn’t display word frequency but rather the rate of the word usage. Thus, we get an idea of how often the words were used in comparison to all the words that were said. Frequencies by themselves don’t tell you much but this helps put them into a context. (A note: I would like the graphic to include the total word usage for each convention so we have a quick idea of how many words were spoken).

2. The display also makes a comparison between the two political parties so we can see the relative word usage across two groups. This could run into the same problem as frequencies – just because one group uses the term more doesn’t necessarily mean they think it is more important – but we can start getting some clues into the differences in how Republicans and Democrats made a case for their party.

Overall, this is an improvement over the typical word cloud (make your own at wordle.net) and helps us start analyzing the tens of thousands of words spoken at the conventions. Of course, we would need a more complete analysis, probably including multiple coders, to really get at what was conveyed through the words (and that doesn’t even get at the visuals, body language, presentation).

Perhaps the 1950s, and not the 1960s, were the really strange decade

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It common to hear that the 1960s marked a shift in American and global culture and social life. Yet, the more I learn about the 1950s, it seems like this is the decade that was really unusual.

I was thinking about this again recently while reading Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History. Coontz describes how Victorian views of marriage started unraveling at the turn of the 20th century and changes accelerated in the 1920s. Women were more free to work, be aggressors in seeking out intimate relationships, and conservatives worried that divorce rates and levels of premarital sex were rising. But after World War II, traditionalism made a comeback: millions of women who had worked in jobs that helped the war effort returned home as housewives, the country had an unprecedented baby boom, and many Americans sought out single-family homes in the suburbs in order to fully realize their familial potential. This bubble burst in the 1960s but this highlights the short course of the 1950s world; Coontz suggests this idyllic world lasted for only about 15 years.

Of course, there were a host of other factors that made the 1950s unique in the United States. The US was the only major country that hadn’t been ravaged by war. America became a military, economic, and cultural powerhouse as other countries struggled to rebuild. There was enough prosperity across the board to help keep some of the very real inequalities (particularly in terms of race) off the radar screen for many Americans. There was a clear enemy, Communism, and no controversial wars to get bogged down in. America moved to becoming a suburban nation as many become occupied with buying and maintaining single-family homes and stocking them with new appliances. There was a real mass media (just check out the TV ratings and shares for that decade) and an uptick in church attendance.

This is still a relevant issue today. After the Republican National Convention last week, President Obama suggested the Republicans want to go back to the 1950s. If the 1950s were indeed a very unique period that would be difficult to replicate and we know the decade did indeed have real issues, then this may indeed be a problem in 2012 when the world looks very different. Perhaps we could even argue that Republicans want a world that carries on the 1950s and Democrats would prefer one that carries on the legacy of the 1960s.

Argument: Democrats opposed to suburbs

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A new book from a conservative writer suggests Democrats and President Obama are opposed to suburban life. Here are a short excerpt from the introduction:

While public attention has been riveted on high-profile congressional battles over the stimulus, health care, and the debt ceiling, Obama has been quietly laying the regulatory groundwork for a profound transformation of American society. The founders would not approve. From the Pilgrim fathers to the frontier settlers to the post-World War II exodus to the suburbs, Americans have enjoyed the freedom to move and to govern themselves as they have seen fit in their new homes. Yet the spirit of enterprise and self-government that made our country great looks very different to Obama.

In the eyes of Obama’s community organizing colleagues – close followers of Saul Alinsky, the leftist radical who founded the profession – America’s suburbs are instruments of bigotry and greed. Moving to a suburb in pursuit of the American dream of an affordable family home and quality, locally controlled schools looks to Obama and his organizing mentors like selfishly refusing to share tax money with the urban poor.

Obama means to fix that with regulations designed to force Americans out of their cars and into high-density urban centers, squeezing the population into a collection of new Manhattans. Obama also aims to force suburbanites to redistribute tax money to nearby cities while effectively merging urban and suburban school districts so as to equalize their funding. If you can afford to move to a suburban all, there will no longer be a point. In effect America’s cities will have swallowed up their suburbs. The result: your freedom of movement, America’s tradition of local self-rule, the incentive to better your circumstances, and therefore national prosperity all will have been eroded.

Rush Limbaugh gets in on the conversation here.

So the Republican dreamland is the suburbs? It would be interesting to look at the history of this politically. Couldn’t more rural areas appeal more to conservatives where people truly have more space to spread out and live a more frontier life?

I don’t think there is much question that the Obama administration would like to promote some pro-urban policies such as improved gas mileage, better mass transit, and more integrated schools and neighborhoods. One could argue that the US government has spent the last 80 years primarily promoting suburban growth through the overhaul of mortgage system from the 1930s onward, federal funding for the interstate system, and more. And the move to the suburbs certainly has hurt cities even if the suburbanites themselves are happy about the moves – to argue that there are no negative consequences of suburbanization is simply silly.

But this is a larger issue for conservatives who also think that the UN is after the suburbs through Agenda 21.

h/t Instapundit

Santorum claims college pushes people away from religion, experts push back

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Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently suggested that going to college pushes people away from the church and faith. Those who study the subject disagree:

Santorum told talk show host Glenn Beck on Thursday that “62% of kids who go into college with a faith commitment leave without it.”

Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources, a Nashville evangelical research and marketing agency, said, “There is no statistical difference in the dropout rate among those who attended college and those that did not attend college. Going to college doesn’t make you a religious drop out.”…

The real causes [of leaving the faith]: lack of “a robust faith,” strongly committed parents and an essential church connection, Rainer said.

“Higher education is not the villain,” said sociologist William D’Antonio of Catholic University of America. Since 1986, D’Antonio’s surveys of American Catholics have asked about Mass attendance, whether they rate their religion as very important in their life, and whether they have considered leaving Catholicism. The percentage of Catholics who scored low on all three points hovers between 18% in 1993 and 14% in 2011. But the percentage of people who are highly committed fell from 27% to 19%.

Recent research also disputes this: several 2011 studies found that those with education are actually more religious than those with less education.

So what was Santorum getting at with his statement? Three thoughts:

1. Conservative Christians commonly cite alarmist statistics to show that the church needs to redouble its efforts or to demonstrate that the church is under attack. See this classic article “Evangelicals Behaving Badly with Statistics,” a good article titled “Curing Christians’ Stats Abuse,” and the book Christians are Hate-Filled Hypocrites…

2. He is hitting back against “elitist academia,” responding to but also feeding the perception college classrooms are filled with atheists and agnostics who want to disabuse students of their faith. Of course, there are many people of faith in academia. This is a larger battle over a perceived liberal, atheist elite versus a faith-filled “average America.”

2a. If Santorum were correct, does this mean that people of faith should not send their kids to college? Or alternatively, do these ideas continue to boost attendance at religious colleges?

3. To compound matters, Santorum was talking to Glenn Beck and this argument was aimed at Beck’s audience. At the same time, it appears Santorum made this a more general argument on the campaign trail:

“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob,” Santorum said Saturday at a campaign stop in Troy, Mich. “There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor that [tries] to indoctrinate them.”

In the end, this seems like another plank in a moral argument, rather than a political or social argument, for Republicans.

Santorum (and other Republicans) to stop using the term “middle class”?

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Here is an interesting observation: Rick Santorum and possibly other Republicans don’t like using the term “middle class.”

In American politics, praising the middle class is generally uncontroversial. But over the weekend Rick Santorum chided his GOP primary competitors, and Mitt Romney specifically, for using the formulation. Here’s his complaint:

I don’t think Governor Romney’s plan is particularly bold, it — or is particularly focused on where the problems are in this country. And the governor used a term earlier that I shrink from. It’s one that I don’t think we should be using as Republicans, “middle class.” There are no classes in America. We are a country that don’t allow for titles. We don’t put people in classes. There may be middle-income people, but the idea that somehow or another we’re going to buy into the class-warfare arguments of Barack Obama is something that should not be part of the Republican lexicon. That’s their job — divide, separate, put one group against another. That’s not the language that I’ll use as president. I’ll use the language of bringing people together.

He has previously attacked President Obama with the same talking point. “You’ll never hear the word ‘class’ come out of my mouth,” he said. “Classes? We specifically rejected that. Look in the Constitution.”

The Constitution talks about social class?

On one hand, this is not terribly surprising: Republicans have argued that even talking about class is “class warfare,” trying to pit the interests of one class against another. Talk about class invokes conversation about people like Karl Marx, who is generally anathema to conservatives. On the other hand, to act like the category “middle class” doesn’t exist is silly. This is not simply a term made up by academics; there is plenty of research to show that Americans have certain perceptions about class and that your class standing (made up by things like income and education levels) does influence individual lives (see a recent example from elementary school classrooms here). It would be interesting to hear Santorum talk about the differences between “middle-income people” and “middle-class people” if he does indeed prefer the first term.

This reminds me of something I have thought for several years: Republicans have to find better ways to engage with ideas like social class and race instead of simply acting like the issues or terms don’t matter. Even if Republicans don’t think they matter, enough voters do and they need to find ways to connect with those voters.

Learning about the Republican presidential contenders from their (McMansion) homes

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Perhaps showing that drawn out process for nominating a Republican candidate has gone on long enough, the New York Times takes a new angle in looking at the possible candidates: looking at their homes. And the topic of McMansions comes up:

Where better to look than their homes, to get a sense of their style, and what it might tell us about what they value and how they live? …

The New York Times enlisted interior designers and a design psychologist to scrutinize photos and share their thoughts, political leanings aside, on what the homes reveal about the candidates.

Some points are obvious to an untrained eye. There are a lot of big new houses, for example. “I hate to call them McMansions — it gives McDonald’s a bad name,” said Thad Hayes, a New York designer whose many projects have included restoring the Palm Beach mansion of Estée Lauder. “But with so many of them, you can’t tell where they are. They’re totally anonymous.”…

The candidates all seem to be striving for an American colonial look — there is not a fixer-upper or modernist glass oasis in the mix. And many aspire to the formality of the White House — there are lots of wood-paneled studies and use of a pale gold that Benjamin Moore would surely name Oval Room Yellow.

And read further for more specific critiques of each candidate’s home.

Several quick thoughts:

1. I wonder how much the quip about McMansions is prompted by the houses themselves or political leanings of the commentators. Many of the comments about these houses are similar to those generally made about McMansions: the homes are big, boxy, poorly proportioned, full of flashy luxuries, look traditional but aren’t really, and inhabited by social strivers. Perhaps more liberal candidates or officeholders do actually have more “authentic” homes but I wonder…McDonald’s is better than these homes?

2. Despite my thoughts in thought #1, scholars have noted how important the shift was from seeing the home as a necessity to seeing the home as an expression of oneself. While there are varying opinions about how this should be carried out, homes are like many consumer objects: we want them to help express our individuality.

3. While it is noted that the candidates generally have traditional-looking homes, is this really any different than most Americans? How many people really live in or desire more unique designs? (It might also be interesting to think about what is a “traditional” look – does stucco count? Mediterranean?)

4. Perhaps this is too obvious to note: this doesn’t contribute much to our knowledge about the candidates except to remind us that most (all?) big-name politicians have big homes.

(Side note: others, like The Atlantic, have picked up on the McMansion aspect of this story.)