So last night I brought up the question what happened to the Republican dominance in California for Presidential elections. Brad theorized that it was a demographic change that lead to Claifornia becoming a safe state for the Democratic Party in presidential elections. I expressed some doubt, but he may be right. Be low the cut is a graph I made of the popular vote totals in California for both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. For comparison I also graphed the popular vote totals for both parties nationally.
The Democratic part has been gaining steadily in the Golden State since about 1980, this did not translate into victories until 1992, but the trend is plain. What I found even more surprising was that the trend was mirrored, though delayed in the national vote totals. From 1952 through 2008 in general the Democratic Party has been gaining popular votes and the Republican Party has been bleeding them.
If this is demographics, then it could spell massive trouble for the Republican Party. The Tea Party revolution will be carrying the party into the wrong direction for electoral victory. Note that the Republicans did not lose votes totals, slipping behind the Democrats when the total losses became too great, but rather votes moved from the Republican ledger to the Democratic ledger. It is hardly likely that those migrating votes are of a Tea Party mentality. As such moving towards the Tea Party is unlikely to bring those votes back to the Republican party and is therefore unlikely to help in the long term electoral prospects of that party. (there may be short term swings such as 1964 or 1994 but the trend lines continue.)
Becoming a lite version of the Democratic pArty is no answer, rather the Republicans are faced with a generational challenge of finding a philosophical stance that agrees with their principles, and is flexible enough to sweep in votes from the growing Democratic wave.
Okay, so you think a one time act that only created an estimated 4 million _LEGAL_ immigrants (who can’t vote) in the whole country has significantly changed California’s voter demographics? You realize that does not make sense? As for the children, if they are born here, doesn’t it make sense that they would be citizens? Is there a requirement other than being born here that I don’t know about? (Technically, they have dual citizenship until they choose an actual country and some can maintain dual citizenship throughout their life, depending upon the laws involved.)
I think you want to say that illegal immigration can effect voting demographics not that illgeal can vote. In both your examples the voting is being done legally. (Either through the amensty from Regan or by virtue of being native born citizens.)
Amnesty of 1986. So yes illegal aliens can vote. In addition the children born in California, whose parents were illegal aliens, can vote once they are 18.
Brad, I’m sorry, but you can’t use illegal immigration in reference to any issue related to voting. Immigrants can’t vote and illegal immigrants REALLY can’t vote – unless you are asserting that there is a massive ammount of forgery of documents going on and that the illegal immigrants are voting.
A case can be made for legal immigration changing demographics in that extensive legal immigration in a state could/should lead to a higher than national average number of naturalized citizens in said state.
I wouldn’t omit any elections results, that would defeat the point of looking for a trend now wouldn’t it? After all I could declare any Lose on either side I didn’t like an aberration and throw it out. (1964 for the Rs and 19884 for the Ds), adding in 1948 hardly budges anything. (D +.19 and R -.45) Throwing out 2008 results because you did not like them makes a change but only in D gains (D=+.02, but Rs =-.44)
I am aware that the victory turns on the electoral college, but the trend looks real the Republicans are losing votes from the general population, and have been for some time. Frankly these were not the results I expected.
Carter did not campaign as a liberal in 1976 and Carter was also a Southerner. And Humphrey only won a plurality of the vote in 1968, the other 59% was split between Nixon and Wallace.
As for national vote trends any graph that can be radically altered by the omission or addition of a single data point is too course of a data set to support the notion of a declining Republican vote. What happens to your graph if you include the 1948 election and omit the 2008 election?
Plus presidential elections are too circumstantial of an event to read too much into one party or the others percentage of the vote. If Kennedy had lived, I doubt the Democrats would have racked up the margin they did in 1964, for example. And how would the election of 2008 have turned out if the economic crash was delayed by sixth months? And it is important to keep in mind that neither party competes for the greatest vote percentage, they compete for the greatest number of electoral votes. If they did compete for the greatest popular vote that would alter the results.
Every time one party or the other takes a beating such as 1964 or 1984, some try to read too much into the results and predict unending doom for the losing party. Very foolish.
At this time I am only speaking of presidental contests. Texas, Went for Humphery and Carter neither by any stretch could be conservative, so liberals did compete in Texas for President and now it is a write off for them.
So you look at the chart I have above and you do not see a Republican Decline and a Democratic rise in the Presidential vote percentages? If we cannot agree to basic facts it’s going to be impossible to have a discussion.
I guess you’re getting the 40 years time frame from something you read, because its not anything I am familiar with. If you look at the line for California you can see the Democrats started gaining after 1980 and by 1992 they were winning and the Republicans were losing. The trends in California has only gotten worse since then.
[Updated]
using the data from the popular votes totals, which is how I graphed the trends, I had excel compute the slope of the line for the two parties in the presidential elections.
CA ONLY: Democratic: slope = .60 Republican: slope = -1.11
NATIONALS: Democratic: Slope = .16 Republican: slope = -.45
A negative slope indicates a decreasing X axis value, in this case vote percentage totals, while a positive slope indicates an increasing X axis value.
The units work out to percentage points/election cycle, and are based on all presidential elections from 1952 through 2008. The republican Party is losing votes, more than twice as fast in California as Nationally, but in both data sets the total are trending down.
1)Yes
2)?
Texas has always been a conservative state and has always had a rather large hispanic minority. Republicans now dominate Texas at all levels of government, because conservatives are not welcome in the Democratic Party.
This is a pattern that repeated all over the once Democratic solid-South. I believe that after the 1994 elections over 200 office holders in the South switched party affiliation from Democratic to Republican.
3)?
I don’t agree that the Republican presidential vote nationwide has been on a long term downward decline. For one thing there are too few data points to track anything as subtle as decline.
If anything it is the Democratic Party which has been in trouble since WWII, because they only received more than 50% of the popular vote for president on three occasions, while the Republicans did so on seven.
Many factors have influenced California and it’s demography. Factors which do not function the same on the national scale, for example illegal immigration. So I don’t buy the prediction that the nations demography is bound to resemble California, only with a forty year delay.
But even if the demographic prediction is accurate, I don’t buy that the nations politics of 2051 must also resemble those of 2011 California. Forty years is a long time to change peoples minds on issues.
Even the whole world changes over a period of something like 40 years. Who would have predicted in 1950 at the height of the Korean War, that the Evil Empire would be dust by 1990?
Do I understand your points correctly?
1) Republican no longer compete in California because the state’s demographics has place the state out of their reach.
2) Texas voted for Humpher and Carter because there used to be conservative Democrats but these people have now become Republicans and so the Democrats can’t compete in Texas anymore.
3) For 40 years the trends lines in presidental elections has been slopin downward for the Republicand and upwards for Democrats, more so in California than Nationally, but this is not a long term concern because demographic doesn’t drive ideology and in the end the Republicans will win the battle of ideas.
Seriously this is not an attmept to distort your argument but this is how they look and I wanted to see if I misunderstood and if so exatcly where.
The Teixeira theory of destiny by demography assumes that ideology tracks with demography, hence his confidence of an emerging dominance of “progressive” politics. Even if that is true, and demographic trends continue without change, the nation as a whole is forty years behind the California ratios (I think).
But I don’t believe ideology is the same as demography. Ideology can change. The contest of ideas matters.
Just look how the ideological contest over guns has worked out over the last fifty years. In spite of the changes of demography.
Likewise I think the progressive ideals of big-government high-tax welfare-statism is a dying ideology. In partial support of which I present this graph…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/liberalisms-problem-in-one-graph/2011/08/25/gIQAVuVTqO_blog.html