Kids, Parents, and Political Realignment

Danger, GOP: our economic crisis may be a family crisis.

By Joseph Knippenberg,  November 14, 2008

As is my wont, I spent some time with my students after the election worrying over the exit polls (ignoring the wisecracks from all the happy Apple customers about how my laptop was made by a company that is now defunct). Especially when you compare polls from different years, you can make all sorts of interesting observations.
 
Consider, for example, this one: In 2004, young people (ages 18 – 29) were 17% of the electorate and went 54 – 45 for John Kerry. In 2008, they were 18% of the electorate and went 66 – 32 for Barack Obama. That means that roughly 9.2% of all the 2004 voters were young people voting for Kerry, while in 2008 11.9% of all voters were young Obama supporters. In a closely divided country (remember that George W. Bush beat John Kerry 51 – 48), that kind of change is huge — enough, indeed, to be a game-changer.
 
Obama makes similar gains over Kerry among African-American voters, going from 88% of 11% of the electorate to 95% of 13%. Thus in 2004, 9.7% of all voters were African-American Kerry supporters, while in 2008, 12.4% were African-American Obama supporters. Another game-changer, in other words.
 
But if you look more closely at these constituencies, something even more interesting emerges. While they still went for Obama 54 – 44, young whites were significantly less supportive of him than were young African-Americans (95 – 4) and young Latinos (76 – 19). More than 40% of Obama’s young supporters were African-American or Latino, half again as large as their share of the electorate as a whole. While the 2004 exit poll crosstabs don’t provide similar data, I think that it’s fair to argue that a significant portion of the surge in youth to the Democratic side comes from this source.
 
As we were looking at the data, a student almost started out of her seat and asked the following question: “What happens when you turn 30?” Her puzzlement was prompted by the stark contrast between the preferences of white 18 – 29 year olds and those 30 – 44. As I just noted, the former went for Obama 55 – 44; the latter preferred McCain even more pronouncedly (57 – 41). Although the data isn’t sorted by race, the same phenomenon was evident in 2004: those 30 – 44 were 8% more likely than their younger brethren to prefer Bush to Kerry (53 – 44, as opposed to 45 – 54).
 
There are a number of explanations for this. I’ll begin with the one that’s least comforting for geezers like me: there’s a generational difference between twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings. Someone in his or her late thirties could, for all intents and purposes, be a political product of the Reagan era. Anyone over thirty could well have come of age during a time of Republican Congressional dominance. To the degree that we persist in voting how we started voting, the over-thirty support for McCain could be the result of what happened in the 80s and early 90s.
 
By contrast, the Big Political Facts of the last few years are Iraq and Obama. If they persist in following their current predilections, today’s politikids may be the harbingers of an era of increased Democratic dominance, as, over time, older Republican-leaning voters are replaced by their younger Democratic-leaning counterparts.
 
I’d be crying in my beer, if only I still drank the stuff. (Red wine's better for the heart.)
 
At least at first glance, a somewhat more comforting explanation is the so-called parent or, more properly, marriage gap. Folks over thirty are more likely to be married, to have children, and to own a home than are their younger compatriots. With roots in the community and parental concerns, they have something to conserve. They’re also more likely to find their way to church. Finally, since there’s a connection between marital stability and general familial prosperity, they’re less likely to be dependent upon government for support. All of these factors make these groups currently more likely to favor the Republican candidates.
 

The 2004 exit poll data offer substantial evidence of these tendencies: George W. Bush won the married vote 57 – 42 and the married with children vote 59 – 40. In 2008, McCain won the married vote (66% of the electorate) 52 – 47 and the married with children vote (31% of the electorate) 51 – 48, but lost the “have children under 18” vote, 40% of the electorate, 53 – 45. The latter result looks like an anomaly, but it isn’t: the 9% of the electorate that is unmarried with dependent children seems to have gone strongly in Obama’s favor. Indeed, unmarried women with children favored Obama 74 – 25, while their married counterparts pulled that lever (does anyone still do that?) only 51% of the time.
 
While the exit polling data isn’t sorted in all the ways that I’d like, I’m fairly confident in supposing that since white women favored McCain over Obama 53 – 46, white married women were also comfortably in the McCain column, most likely by an even larger margin. Stated another way, the gender gap about which we’ve heard for some time is largely attributable to the political predilections of single women, with or without children, and of non-white women (who comprise a larger portion of the electorate than do non-white men).
 
This leads to me to two other suggestions. First, it’s likely the case that children by themselves don’t make their parents “conservative.” Economic marginality or insecurity tends to push those who feel it into the welcoming arms of government. Stated another way, “conserving” one’s ability to care for one’s children might actually make a parent vote for a liberal, if there seemed no other way to gain or secure access to the necessary resources. Such parents might still care about the culture in which their children are reared and about the schools in which they are educated, but they often vote their pocketbooks. This has typically been the case with African-American voters, who share the social and moral views of their white evangelical brethren while voting for pro-welfare state Democratic candidates whose social views are anathema. I note that, given the opportunity to reflect their different views in different votes, African-American voters in California did so, supporting Barack Obama and Proposition 8.
 
For the GOP, there are two takeaways here. First, while cultural and moral appeals can from time to time trump economic concerns, they don’t do so with sufficient frequency and reliability to be the sole basis of an electoral strategy. If Republicans don’t have a persuasive answer to the economic worries of downmarket socially conservative voters — the family men and women who, yes, shop at Sam’s Club — they may not be able to appeal to them. Second, implicit in the data to which I referred above is the issue of race, which also (and quite reliably) trumps social and moral concerns, not to mention all the other circumstances that make the adult members of intact families somewhat more likely to vote Republican.
 
My second larger observation is also connected to pocketbook issues. In comparing the 2008 to the 2004 exit polls, I noticed that in many categories in which McCain did well, he still did less well than Bush, often to the tune of about five points. There are a number of plausible explanations for this relatively slight shift — Bush fatigue, for example — but surely our current economic straits also have something to do with it.
 
This is obviously a threat for the GOP and a political opportunity for Democrats. If the latter come to be identified as the party of peace, prosperity, and security, it will be a long march in the wilderness for Republicans. I began these reflections by suggesting that marriage, childrearing, and homeownership gave “grown-ups” something to conserve. All three are, I think, intimately connected, with the house as the physical embodiment of the household. Threaten the house, and you weaken the household that inhabits it. Those who feel called to provide that shelter — traditionally, the husband and father, now perhaps both parents — can lose the confidence of their family, not to mention confidence in themselves, if they can’t keep the home they worked so hard to provide.
 
In other words, what we’re facing now isn’t just an economic crisis; it may also become a crisis of the family, a crisis that could have significant political and moral consequences. I don’t have to explain what could happen to parental authority when parents can’t provide for their children. And I don’t think that it’s adequate to say, for example, that people who can’t keep their homes in the face of this downturn probably shouldn’t have been in them in the first place. It’s perhaps true enough: many of them were bad credit risks. But more than their credit score is now at stake. If Democrats ride to their rescue with a statist rescue package, they will have accomplished a morally and politically significant result. If they come to be seen as conservators of the family, it will be Republicans who will be writing books about what’s the matter with Kansas. And the Kansans, God bless ‘em, might be right to look to the Democrats to protect the family from the vagaries of an undisciplined and threatening marketplace.
 
So while I might take some comfort from the prospect that today’s Obamaniacal politikids might grow up to be Palindrones or Jindalists or to have a Huckabee in their bonnets, I’m also worried that our current credit crisis might recast the political scene altogether. Both parties have a large stake in addressing the current economic insecurity of our middle class and working class families. Republicans should remember that the market ought to be a servant of the family, rather than its master, and that the moral fabric of the republic depends upon its continuing integrity.