Battleground America
Bowman, Karlyn
Battleground America Suddenly the Midwest is up for grabs in the next election. by Karlyn Bowman Earl and Merle Black, the brothers who have added immeasurably to our understanding of the politics...
...This transformation is the book's subject, and the authors view it through discussions of five regions and the groups that predominate in them...
...This book was written before the 2006 elections...
...By the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency, 63 percent of white conservatives called themselves Republicans and just 15 percent Democrats...
...White liberals have moved in the Democratic direction, but as the Blacks' chart shows us, they are a much smaller group than the white conservatives...
...Three charts on the same page then show the partisan identification of these groups over the same time span...
...But political junkies can learn a great deal from Merle and Earl Black's expert dissection of the data...
...The largest group —white moderates—now splits evenly...
...The Democrats' problem here is that strongly Democratic groups such as minorities are still a fairly small slice of the Midwestern electorate: Whites made up 85 percent of the Midwestern electorate in 2004...
...They believe that the Democratic and Republican parties have "less in common in their composition, values, and objectives than was the case after World War II," and that neither party can win by appealing solely to its core supporters...
...by Karlyn Bowman Earl and Merle Black, the brothers who have added immeasurably to our understanding of the politics of the South, have turned their attention to the rest of the country, and their latest book, Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggle in American Politics, is a numbers junkie's look at what makes our political map red and blue...
...After discussing national trends, the Blacks take us on a tour of the changing electorates in Republican strongholds (the South and the Plains/Mountain states), the Democratic ones (the Northeast and Pacific Coast), and, finally, the competitive Midwest...
...In the Pacific region and Northeast, where Democrats have made gains, the size of the white voter group has declined...
...It would be interesting to hear what the Blacks think about the strength the Democrats demonstrated in the Mountain West last year, a region the authors put in the Republican camp...
...Today, the parties are evenly balanced...
...In 2004, Republicans held a seven-point edge...
...Today, conservative Democrats are an endangered species...
...The first chart shows the size of the moderate, conservative, and liberal white groups in the nation, and then three other charts show us how these groups have voted over the span...
...The region is second only to the South in population (64 to 84 million...
...or what they have to say about the argument advanced by Thomas Schaller that Democrats should simply write off the South and concentrate on other regions...
...The realignment of white Christians has fueled Republican growth in the South, for example, and growing numbers of ethnic and racial minorities and non-Christian whites have added to the Democrats' strength in their strongholds of the Northeast and Pacific Coast...
...The Blacks begin by reminding us that from 1932 to 1950 the Democrats held the White House and both houses of Congress in nine of 10 elections...
...In 2004, 39 percent of voters in the Midwest were Republicans and 39 percent Democrats...
...Both parties appear to agree that the key to the next election will be the Midwest, what the authors describe as the "most volatile, evenly balanced, and reliably competitive geographical area in the United States...
...Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where she studies public opinion...
...But this edge is much lower than the one Republicans have in their strongholds...
...Another set of figures looks at the realignment of white voters that began in the late 1970s...
...Divided America The Ferocious Power Struggle in American Politics by Earl Black and Merle Black Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $26 Using data from the American National Election Study and national exit polls, the authors tell their story in clear language and clean charts...
...At a glance, it is possible to see one of the keys to GOP success—the realignment of white conservatives toward the Republican party...
...In the region, neither party has been able to capitalize on the developments that have moved it ahead in other regions...
...But in the Midwest, union strength has "partially blunted" the GOP's advance...
...In an age of PowerPoint presentations that frequently obscure more than they reveal, the Blacks' simple charts tell complex stories very well: One chapter, for example, includes a chart on the share of whites, African Americans, and what the authors call the "new minorities" in the electorate from 1952 to 2004...
...Between 1952 and 2004, however, one party controlled two of these institutions and the other party the third nearly two-thirds of the time...
...In 1976, about 40 percent of white conservatives called themselves Republicans and the Democratic party included as many white conservatives as white liberals (19 and 22 percent, respectively...
...Fifty years ago, Democrats enjoyed a slight advantage among white voters in the Midwest...
Vol. 12 • May 2007 • No. 32
