By August of 2016, the Republican Presidential nominee will carry a lot of baggage. Romney enjoyed an insurmountable financial advantage and early front-runner status, but still felt compelled to tell undocumented immigrants to “self-deport.” This statement was no gaff, it was a calculated effort to sound tough on immigration without veering further right than necessary. In a truly competitive primary, the incentives to play to the nativist base would prove irresistible and even more intemperate language would abound. Any Republican candidate who is not a dominant front runner could maximize his odds of becoming President by embracing the base and hoping recession or scandal handed him the election. Even if the Republican presidential nominee somehow avoids nativist rhetoric, the House GOP is more concerned with propitiating conservatives than reaching out to swing voters in swing states.
As Fall approaches, the GOP candidate will likely repent these excesses and troll for Latino votes in Florida, deeming it too big a prize to write off. However, as I explained in my previous article, this strategy is unlikely to work. The GOP is simply too dependent upon Latino votes in Florida to sustain any significant erosion in its Latino vote share. This raises an intriguing question: can the GOP write off Florida and still win the presidency on the strength of white votes?
Without Florida, the Republican path to the Presidency is narrow. Under the most likely scenario, they would have to capture Virginia, and Ohio and Pennsylvania and win 12 additional electoral votes in Iowa (6 EV), New Hampshire (4), Wisconsin (10), Minnesota (10) and Colorado (9). If Florida falls, Colorado would be a difficult target, as it too contains a large and growing Latino population. If the GOP writes off Florida, it will have to campaign in the Upper Midwest.
Where the Racists Are
Between 2004 and 2008, Democrats increased their share of the national vote by 4.6%. This swing is not hard to explain. In 2004, Kerry faced an incumbent President who had recently won a war and presided over above-average economic growth. By 2008, the economy was lurching towards disaster, Iraq had turned into a bloody quagmire, and Bush's approval ratings were in the tank. Under these fortuitous circumstances, the 4.6% swing Obama achieved was unimpressive. In 1992, Clinton achieved a 7.3% swing in the two-party vote against an incumbent President who had won a nearly bloodless war only 18 months earlier.
Obama's muted swing was due to his race. Before Obama ran, respectable opinion doubted whether a black President could win the Presidency. Obama's election proved that enough voters had shed enough prejudice for a black candidate to win under favorable circumstances. It did not prove that all voters had abandoned all prejudice or that American politics had entered a post-racial era.
In 2008, many parts of the country trended Republican even as the national vote swung towards the Democrats:
The red areas on the map contain persuadable voters who shunned Obama because of his race. Almost all of these counties are poor, heavily white, and racially conservative. They are places where downscale whites were willing to back Kerry, but refused to back Obama. Four groups of these counties were in important states: southwestern Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio, southwestern Virginia, and north Florida.
Race conscious whites were not confined to the red counties on the map. Three countervailing effects occurred during the 2008 election: (1) some whites who voted for Kerry shunned Obama because of his race; (2) some minorities who had not voted or who voted for Bush chose Obama; and (3) some Bush voters chose Obama because of frustration with the economy or the Bush administration. All three of these effects occurred throughout the country. The red counties on the map represent the jurisdictions in which the first effect overrode the combined force of the second and third effects. In all likelihood, the pale blue counties contained both significant numbers of race conscious whites and significant numbers of moderates who were frustrated with Bush.
The Republican Dillema
It is unlikely that racial polarization will increase in 2016 because Obama's candidacy was the most racially polarizing political event since the Voting Rights Act. As I demonstrated in my second article, Obama achieved both unprecedented black turnout and an unprecedented share of the black vote. Similarly, Obama's candidacy moved many race conscious whites into the Republican column. These competing effects almost certainly cost Obama votes. Non-Hispanic whites were 74% of the 2008 electorate. Suppose that whites are only half as responsive to identity politics as minorities, that Obama's race won him 4 points among minority voters but cost him 2 points among whites. On this assumption, Obama's race would have cost him 0.4 percent of the overall vote. If whites are as responsive to identity politics as minorities, then Obama's race would have cost him 2 percent of the popular vote. For Obama's race to be a wash, minorities would have to be three times as responsive to identity politics as whites, an almost impossible scenario when Kerry captured 86% of the black vote and enjoyed record black turnout. Democrats can achieve a significant increase in the white vote simply by nominating a solid, white candidate.
"Missing White Voters" Lean Democrat
Trende claims that 2012 was a low turnout election and Republicans could compete if the roughly 6 million "missing" white voters bothered to cast ballots. Any argument which claims turnout will help Republicans is a strange one, and this argument is strange indeed. Downscale, Midwestern white voters lean Democrat and would happily pull the lever for Sherrod Brown or Hillary Clinton.
There are not many missing white voters in the Upper Midwest because there are not many missing voters of any race. This region enjoyed the highest turnout in the country.
State |
2012 Turnout |
Minnesota |
75.7% |
Wisconson |
72.5% |
Conventional wisdom holds that turnout is good for Democrats, and the numbers back this up. Republicans have won Senatorial elections in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but only in midterm elections with relatively low turnout. Republicans last won a quadrennial Senate election in Minnesota in 1984, and last won a quadrennial Senate election in Wisconsin in 1980. I performed a regression on the 31 Senate elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota since 1991, which modeled the Democrat's two party vote share as a function of turnout and incumbency. The Democrats' vote share increased by 0.30% for every 1% increase in turnout. The P-statistic for this regression was a middling 0.06, so it is somewhat possible that this result is statistical noise. Yet, this result is telling for two reasons. First, because it confirms the conventional wisdom and is consistent with the experience of other states, the middling P statistic is not terribly concerning. Second, even if the regression substantially overestimates the extent to which Democrats benefit from turnout, it precludes the possibility that Republicans in these states derive more than a minimal benefit from turnout.
Conclusion
Since the Civil Rights Act drove white Southerners from the national Democratic Party, Republican victory has depended upon a coalition of Southern Conservatives allied with fellow conservatives in the lower Midwest and Mountain West. This strategy is no longer viable. Republicans cannot capture South’s biggest prize, Florida, without a significant Latino vote, and victory in Ohio will not excuse failure in Florida unless Republicans also seize Democratic bastions further North. The Republicans' grip on the South is strong enough that they can hold on to Southern whites while wooing Florida's Latinos. The obvious path forward is to court Hispanics in Florida, but the Republican House and Republican primary voters are recalcitrant.
Prevented by circumstance from mollifying Hispanics, a Republican Presidential candidate might find that the nativist path is his best option. An agile Republican candidate could write off Florida and attempt to build a broad coalition between Southern whites, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the Upper Midwest. This is a hard road and would require abandoning many traditional Republican social positions, which have failed to win majority support in the upper Midwest. Yet both the South and Midwest have significant numbers of poor whites as well as manufacturing interests hurt by foreign competition. All of these states can be won on the strength of white votes with little regard to Hispanics. The nativist path will be open for one or two election cycles at most, it threatens long term harm to the Republican party, and yet it may be an ambitious conservative’s only path to power. The next three years will be fascinating