Truthdig
GOP May Seem in Historic Disarray, but It Will Perpetuate Gridlock for Years
to Come
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_gop_may_seem_historic_disarray_perpe
tuate_gridlock_20161025/
AddThis Sharing Buttons
Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to MoreShare to Email
Posted on Oct 25, 2016
By Alec MacGillis /
ProPublica(https://www.propublica.org/article/the-democrats-bad-map)
The dome of the U.S. Capitol building. (O
Palsson(https://www.flickr.com/photos/opalsson/) /
CC-BY-2.0(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) )
Even as Hillary Clinton appears poised to win easily against a highly
erratic candidate with a campaign in meltdown, a sobering reality awaits
Democrats on Nov. 9. It seems likely that they will eke out at most a narrow
majority in the Senate, but will fail to pick up the 30 seats they need to
reclaim the House. If they do manage to win a Senate majority, it will be
exceedingly difficult to hold it past 2018, when 25 of the party's seats
must be defended, compared with eight Republican ones.
The Republican Party may seem in historic disarray, but it will most likely
be able to continue to stymie the Democrats' legislative agenda,
perpetuating Washington's gridlock for years to come.
Liberals have a simple explanation for this state of affairs: Republican-led
gerrymandering, which has put Democrats at a disadvantage in the House and
in many state legislatures. But this overlooks an even bigger problem for
their party. More than ever, Democrats are sorting themselves into
geographic clusters where many of their votes have been rendered all but
superfluous, especially in elections for the Senate, House and state
government.
This has long been a problem for the party, but it has grown worse in recent
years. The clustering has economic and demographic roots, but also a basic
cultural element: Democrats just don't want to live where they'd need to
live to turn more of the map blue.
Americans' tendency toward political self-segregation has been underway for
a while now - it's been eight years since Bill Bishop identified the dynamic
in "The Big Sort(http://www.thebigsort.com/home.php) ." This helps explain
why red-blue maps of so many states consist of dark-blue islands in the
cities surrounded by red exurbs and rural areas, a distribution that is also
driven by urban concentrations of racial minorities and by the decades-long
shift in allegiance from Democratic to Republican among working-class white
voters.
That hyper-concentration of Democratic votes has long hurt the party in the
House and state legislatures. In Ohio, for instance, Republicans won 75
percent of the United States House seats in 2012 despite winning only 51
percent of the total votes for the House. That imbalance can be explained
partly by Republican gerrymandering. But even if district lines were drawn
in rational, nonpartisan ways, a disproportionate share of Democratic votes
would still be clustered in urban
districts(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/why-democrats-cant-win.ht
ml) , giving Republicans a larger share of seats than their share of the
overall vote. Winning back control of state legislatures in Pennsylvania and
Michigan could help Democrats in redistricting in 2020. But it would help
more if their voters were not so concentrated in Philadelphia and
Pittsburgh, Detroit and Ann Arbor.
"It would be awfully difficult to construct a map that wasn't leaning
Republican," said the University of Michigan political scientist Jowei Chen.
"Geography is just very unfortunate from the perspective of the Democrats."
More recently, a confluence of several trends has conspired to make the
sorting disadvantageous for Democrats on an even broader scale - increasing
the party's difficulties in House races while also affecting Senate
elections and, potentially, future races for the presidency.
First, geographic mobility in the United States has become very
class-dependent. Once upon a time, lower-income people were willing to pull
up stakes and move to places with greater opportunity - think of the people
who fled the Dust Bowl for California in the 1930s, or those who took the
"Hillbilly Highway" out of Appalachia to work in Midwestern factories, or
Southern blacks on the Great Migration. In recent decades, though, internal
migration has slowed
sharply(http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201130/201130pap.pdf) ,
and the people who are most likely to move for better opportunities are the
highly
educated(https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/11/05/169-186He
rnandez.pdf) .
Second, higher levels of education are increasingly correlated with voting
Democratic. This has been most starkly on display in the 2016 election, as
polls suggest that Donald J. Trump may be the first Republican in 60 years
to not win a majority of white voters with college degrees, even as he holds
his own among white voters without degrees. But the trend of increasing
Democratic identification among college graduates, and increasing Republican
identification among non-graduates, was
underway(http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/15/educational-divide-
in-vote-preferences-on-track-to-be-wider-than-in-recent-elections/) before
Trump arrived on the scene. Today, Democrats hold a 12-point edge in party
identification among those with a college degree or more. In 2004, the
parties were even on that score.
Finally, in the United States the economic gap between the wealthiest cities
and the rest of the country has grown
considerably(http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bus
t/) . The internet was supposed to allow wealth to spread out, since we
could be connected anywhere - but the opposite has happened. Per capita
income in the District of Columbia has gone from 29 percent above the United
States average in 1980 to 68 percent in 2013; in the Bay Area, from 50
percent above to 88 percent; in New York City, from 80 percent above to 172
percent. Cities like New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Boston, exert a
strong pull on mobile, highly educated, Democratic-leaning voters, while at
the same time stirring resentment in the less prosperous areas those voters
leave behind. And these economically dominant cities tend to be in deep-blue
states.
How extreme is Democratic clustering? If you compare President Obama's 2012
performance with Al Gore's in 2000, you can see a huge increase in the
Democratic percentage of the vote in the 68 largest metro areas. But it
barely budged everywhere
else(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/why-democrats-cant-win.html) .
Some of that increase was caused by voters already in those cities flipping
from Republican to Democratic. But it was also the gravitational effect.
This clustering of Democrats helps explain why Trump has been keeping it
close in Ohio and Iowa, both states where some 72 percent of white residents
over 24 lack college degrees, the highest
share(http://www.wsj.com/articles/voters-education-level-a-driving-force-thi
s-election-1476401440?tesla=y) among the 13 most competitive states.
It works the other way in presidential elections, too. Democrats have gained
in some other swing states with high levels of college-educated voters, like
Virginia and Colorado, and they do at least reap a benefit in the Electoral
College for having a lock on big states such as New York and California.
But it's another story in the Senate, where this dynamic helps explain why
the Democrats are perpetually struggling to hold a majority. The Democrats
have long been at a disadvantage in the
Senate(https://newrepublic.com/article/112925/small-states-sway-gun-control-
debate-senate) , where the populous, urbanized states where Democrats
prevail get the same two seats as the rural states where Republicans are
stronger. The 20 states where Republicans hold both Senate seats have, on
average, 5.2 million people each; the 16 states where the Democrats hold
both seats average 7.9 million people. Put another way, winning Senate
elections in states with a total of 126 million people has netted the
Democrats eight fewer seats than the Republicans get from winning states
with 104 million people.
Clustering is part of the problem. All those Democrats gravitating to blue
strongholds like New York and California get the party no more Senate seats
than Republicans get from Idaho and from Wyoming, a state with a population
of about 580,000, slightly more than Fresno, Calif. If the Democrats are
going to gain a lasting hold on the Senate, they have to win seats in swing
states. But that gets harder the more that Democratic-leaning voters flock
to big, blue states, abandoning swing states like Ohio, where the Republican
Rob Portman is gliding to re-election, or smaller red states where Democrats
might still have a shot at holding Senate seats, like Montana, Indiana or
North Dakota.
Jenn Topper has thought about this dynamic a lot, because she's a clear
example of it. Topper, 31, grew up in Beavercreek, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton,
a city that has lost nearly half its population since 1960. She left for
college at Florida State, then for a public relations job in New York, then
for a political communications job in Washington.
"When you grow up in Ohio, there's a bigger world out there, and if you know
about it, you just want to go to it," she said.
A couple years ago, Topper and some colleagues who were also from Ohio were
excited to meet "their" Democratic senator, Sherrod Brown, at an event. He
asked them where they lived in Ohio. But they don't live in Ohio - and won't
be able to vote for him in what is sure to be a tough race in 2018.
Topper's high school classmate Brett Stelter, 31, left Dayton after
attending Ohio University. His father was a district parts manager for
Honda, which has a plant near Dayton, and Stelter himself did part-time work
at the plant. But his dream was to be an actor, and so he ended up in Los
Angeles.
"There's just nothing to do in Ohio," he said. "The jobs are limited, but
it's not just the jobs and the industries that are in Ohio, it's the
mind-set that I didn't gravitate to."
Stelter, who voted twice for Obama, is disappointed that his vote is
superfluous in California, and tries to make up for it by engaging on social
media with people back home - people like his father, who is leaning toward
Trump. "Part of me wishes I could be there to personally talk to people
instead of trolling them on the internet," he said. But his political
irrelevance is not enough to make him consider moving back. "Going back to
Ohio to be able to vote every four years is not enough for me."
This clustering is happening even as many smaller cities and outlying
regions are experiencing mini-cultural renaissances. For one thing, a foodie
or beer snob now has much less to complain about when contemplating dining
outside a big coastal city. And most of these places are much more
affordable than Brooklyn or Los Angeles. But they can't seem to compare with
the profusion of cool elsewhere.
Even cities making comebacks, with restored downtown buildings and plenty of
locally brewed I.P.A., have the memory problem. If a city was on the ropes
when young people left it, it's frozen in that form in their image of it.
"You're competing with memory," Topper said. "People look back and remember
what it was like when they were there. You don't often hear about how things
are moving or growing or new things are happening. That picture of when you
have left is all you have."
Of course, some people do go back. Brittney Vosters, 30, who went to high
school and college in Dayton, left for several years, living in Chicago and
enrolling in graduate school in public administration at Rutgers in New
Jersey. She recently moved back to Cincinnati so her husband could go to
graduate school in northern Kentucky. It has struck her how much her former
Dayton classmates have sorted out politically. "It's noticeable that the
people who left are more liberal-minded and the people who stayed are more
Republican," she said.
And this sorting out is self-perpetuating, too. The fewer people you
encounter of the opposite political persuasion, the more they become an
unfathomable other, easily caricatured and impossible to find even
occasional common ground with. By segregating themselves in narrow slices of
the country, Democrats have also made it harder to make their own case. They
are forever preaching to the converted, while their social distance also
leaves them unprepared for what's coming from the other end of the spectrum.
Changing that would mean adopting a broader notion of what it means to live
in a happening place, and also exposing themselves to discomforts that most
people naturally avoid, given the human tendency to seek out our own kind.
Vosters, for one, appreciates that her vote counts a lot more now in Ohio
than it did when she was in New Jersey and Illinois. But she has no doubt
where she'd like to end up for good. For her next move, she said, "I'd look
at the political map and go toward the blue, because it's more comfortable
to be around people who are like you."
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
All-American Slaughter: The Youthful Carnage of America's Gun Culture
Big Pharma Prepares to Spend Hundreds of Millions to Keep Drug Prices High
Americans Will Face Megadroughts and Superstorms
How the Catholic Church Has Snuck Between American Women and Their
Reproductive Rights (Video)
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
C 2016 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
Signup for Truthdig's newsletter
