Monday Open Thread [3.25.13]
Molly Ball asks “Has Obama Turned a Generation of Voters Into Lifelong Democrats?,” — and answers in the affirmative.
The under-30 vote went nearly as strongly for Obama as it had before: Obama got 66 percent of the under-30 vote in 2008 and 60 percent in 2012, the best youth-vote showings for any presidential candidate since 1971, when the voting age was lowered to 18. Against the by-now-familiar backdrop of massive Obama rallies on college campuses, liberal youth might just seem like the normal order of things. But there’s nothing natural about it. Ronald Reagan came within a point of capturing the under‑30 vote in his 1980 presidential election, then won it by 19 points in 1984, giving the lie to the idea that kids are inherently liberal.
Now some Democrats hope Obama’s repeat success with young voters signals the arrival of a cohort whose members will vote Democratic for the rest of their lives. “These are voters who are in their formative years, politically,” Joel Benenson, the lead pollster for the Obama campaign, told me excitedly in the days after the election. “People frequently maintain the partisan identity that shapes their entry point into politics. What’s happening now is something people will hang on to for decades to come.”
Could Benenson be right? Has Obama turned an entire generation of voters into lifelong Democrats? The answer, according to political scientists who study partisanship, may well be yes. Voting for a party is a habit, they say, and the habit tends to stick. The Americans who came of age under FDR leaned more Democratic than the electorate as a whole for the rest of their voting lives. Many of today’s oldest voters—who broke for Mitt Romney by a wider margin than any other age group—cast their first, formative ballots in the Eisenhower years. And the Reagan era (spanning his 1980 election, his 1984 reelection, and the 1988 election of his vice president, George H. W. Bush) had a particularly marked effect on the rising voters of the 1980s. The Americans who entered the electorate during that time have remained disproportionately loyal to the GOP compared with voters overall.
Reagan turned a whole bunch of middle class young people into Republicans during the 80’s, and they kept voting for Republicans in the 1990’s and 2000’s, which is why those years were fought on Republican frames and issues even though the Dems managed to win in 1992, 1996 and 2000*. 1980 is considered by political scientists to be a realigning year, just as 1932 was. The reason why Democrats were able to win after 1980 was because Bill Clinton adopted Republican policies as his own and spoke about issues in a Republican frame. It is beginning to look like 2008 was a realignment election back towards the Democrats, but the Republicans have not yet learned their lesson to adopt Democratic policies as their own and speak in Democratic frames. They are still stuck in their old talking points and language, which is understandable. The Dems did not reinvent themselves until after they lost a third straight election in 1988. And I don’t think the GOP will do so either until they lose in a landslide to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Ron Fournier: “House Speaker John Boehner has stubbornly insisted he will not bargain with Obama one-on-one. He also says the House, after increasing taxes by $600 billion last year, will not raise new revenue.”
“Don’t believe him. Don’t mistake a negotiating position for reality. House Republicans tell me they are open to exchanging entitlement reform for new taxes — $250 billion to $300 billion, or approximately the amount that Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania proposed raising over 10 years under the guise of ‘tax reform.'”
1. I don’t think it was Obama. Although I would give him some of the credit. Rather, it was the RWNJs who embarrassed and scared the moderates and center right. People did not run to the left. They ran away from the right. Whatever disease the RWNJs had could be contagious.
2. On an unrelated note, it might be time for those who have dissed Starbucks coffee (not me, I like their coffee) to have a cup: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/22/starbucks-gay-marriage-howard-schultz_n_2931734.html
1. I do think it was Obama. Probably the biggest similarity between Obama and Reagan is their skill in aspirational speaking. Obama does connect to young people in a way other Democratic Presidents did not — and I would argue that Howard Dean paved the way for Obama, too. And while plenty of us connect to aspirational styles of speech, I think that young people haven’t gotten enough cynicism to discount it.
2. New News and this is HYSTERICAL — The tejahdis no longer think Fox Noise is conservative enough.
“The tejahdis no longer think Fox Noise is conservative enough.”
Once the purge of RINOs is over, will the last conservative standing have to ostracize himself?
We’re STILL fighting on Republican frames. Look no further than labor issues: “Right to work” and “Paycheck protection”? We’re not fighting on friendly ground just yet.
Fox news earned the teabaggers boycott “…by whining loudly about Benghazi without the kind of hard-hitting investigative reporting that brought down Nixon over Watergate,”
So much craziness. It is like a black hole of craziness in wingnutville.
At least when Obama cuts taxes for the rich, he doesn’t do it while loudly proclaiming Republican frames like Reagan or Bush – he just does it quietly, with no real reason given.
It is amazing how Clinton’s 8 years peace and prosperity didn’t create waves of Democrats. Instead, we dumped the program for GWB’s reign of error as soon as we got the chance, in some kind of mass hypnosis.
Democrats are having great success attracting younger members with the gay rights issue, though. Maybe one day taxophobes will be as scorned as homophobes.
But all that might mean is that the Democrats would become less populist and more comfortably corporatist. Meanwhile: “The DHS Federal Law Enforcement Training Center requires the following items, Brand Name or Equal, to the following:
LI 001: Ammunition, Commercial leaded training ammo (CLTA) Pistol .40 caliber 165 grain, jacketed hollow point (JHP) p/n P40HSTS3G or equal – Brass casing. Quantity of 360,000 rounds” FBO.gov
That’s on top of the 1.5 billion hollow points and the 17,00 tanks already on order. So if the bankster’s debtopaclypse proceeds on schedule, all the election results may mean is that it will be Democrats Inc. running the police $tate, prosecuting the next war, reinstating the draft and putting down any anti-war or populist movements like Occupy in the end. One would think that they would have slowed down the banksters, yet it seems that they’ve sped the process up by entertaining the people most likely to resist it with the idea that they “represent” them.
We’re STILL fighting on Republican frames.
Ultimately you’re still in the bankster’s paradigm, thus Jamie Dimon’s new cuff links from Obama Inc. and JP Morgan’s booming food stamps business. Duh.
“It is amazing how Clinton’s 8 years peace and prosperity didn’t create waves of Democrats…”
Thanks Al Gore, Donna Brazile and Ralph Nader – you d%cks.
Is there someone on an oversight committee to make sure that the food stamps don’t lose their purchasing power? Of course, Jamie Dimon could just flash them his cuff links with the Presidential Seal of Approval on them. It’s as if we’re back to lords and vassals again, except that Obama Inc. is full of vassals.
And so the debt serfs plod on… with that carrot of wealth out in front of them while trying to pull a cart of the bankster’s paper ponzi and debt/money behind them that’s rapidly growing too heavy. Real. Dumb.
But as long as this is the paradigm, the banking cartel should at least put an image of a dead president on the food stamps too. Preferably one of those that they didn’t try to have assassinated for trying to issue debt and interest free forms of currency to “WE the people…”
I don’t really like to mix coffee and politics, but Starbucks also has pro-gun policies. What to do, what to do?
DuPont announces support for marriage equality. Now if we can get them to commit to a living wage for employees and discontinue the extensive use of “contractors” instead of hiring employees with benefits, we can certainly say that we have accomplished something!
There is a big difference between the Reagan years and now. In the mid to late 70, s I was making just above minimum wage working for my dads business, and a little more than that working at the race track on weekends snd I was able to pay for my own college without borrowing any money. Now kids borrow these huge sums of money, not fully realizing that eventually they will have to pay it back. About the third or fourth year after college, when they are still paying back huge loans, they will start to question the socialist platform of the democrats. But until then, its just like one big party on momy and dady and he governments expense
Im not sure what accounts for the huge increases in the cost of higher education,( insurance, President’s compensation, legalization of usery?) but I’m sure it isn’t socialism.
And by the way. Reagan was president in the 80’s not the 70’s.
If there was a real socialist agenda, these kids wouldn’t be getting loans to pay for their education — the government would just pay the bill.
Rusty, your Dad only gave you just above minimum wage when you worked for him back then? Was it cause your Dad was a cheap republican or was it cause you were such a lousy worker? Were you still living at “mom and dad’s place” at the time?