The Declining Significance of Reagan Voters
Reader J.C. emails in:
Your colleagues over at ThinkProgress have a post up talking about Limbaugh’s speech at CPAC. In his address, Limbaugh claims that Dems can’t “can’t accomplish what they want unless they appeal to Reagan voters,” and for years, I would have agreed with him; but it seems to me that younger voters – of whom I am one – are not nearly as enamoured with the cowboy president as our parents were. Public opinion of Reagan is gradually changing, and he seems to get more criticism for his mistakes now than he did during and directly following his presidency. All those calls for his head to be on Rushmore or the $100 bill have quieted as his domestic and economic policies appear more and more problematic.
So here is a question for you: How many of the Reagan voters have come out from under the spell of the Great Communicator? Perhaps more specifically, how many of the people who voted for Reagan are now dead, replaced by Obama voters? Some cold, hard numbers could help fight Limbaugh’s dictums, or at least our perception of the validity of those claims.
I think this nails the basic problem with nostalgia for the Reagan electoral coalition. When Reagan won in 1980, the younger people allowed to vote were born in 1962. In the last election, voters who are at least that old were somewhat more than half the electorate and John McCain did fine with this group:
Specifically, McCain won about 51 percent of the vote among the approximately 53 percent of the electorate that was at least 45 years old. But Obama won a decisive victory among Americans younger than 45—precisely none of whom were part of Ronald Reagan’s original coalition, and few of whom were part of his 1984 re-election campaign. Four years from now, Americans who were too young to vote in 1980 will be an even larger share of the electorate. Obviously, one could link this to other changes in the racial and ethnic makeup of the electorate and specific generational differences in point-of-view on environmental and gay rights issues.
28 Responses to “The Declining Significance of Reagan Voters”
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March 1st, 2009 at 2:09 pm
What’s so significant about “Reagan voters”? Independents decide every single election. Reagan Democrats could be called Clinton Republicans instead.
March 2nd, 2009 at 5:54 pm
I think the same point applies to minorities. They’re a much larger share of the electorate now. Over the weekend I heard someone make the point that Reagan couldn’t have won today with the demographics that got him elected in 1980.
March 2nd, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Going off of mark’s point, I remember reading shortly after the 2004 election that Kerry won almost identical shares of nearly all demographic groups as Dukakis in 1988. The shifts over the 16 year period alone made the difference between Dukakis getting just over 100 electoral votes and Kerry getting 252.
March 2nd, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Let me save MattY’s designated Kindergartener reviewers some typing: “Reagan voters” doesn’t necessarily mean “those who actually voted for Reagan”.
MattY’s designated First Grade reviewers will be along shortly to discuss the racial power aspects of MattY’s comments.
March 2nd, 2009 at 6:48 pm
As I remember the age-demographics of 2008 election, the results were considerably more frightening to Republicans than the under-45 group Matt describes. First-time voters and voters in the 18-28 demographic were approximately 3:1 Obama voters. If this cohort remains in democratic column (”Obama voters”), the long-term prospects republicans are very dim.
Also, as I remember, the youth vote was far more than a shift in distribution of minorities. The youth-vote swing crossed ethnic boundaries.
I don’t remember the numbers precisely and I can’t readily find the source. If someone has details, it will help.
March 2nd, 2009 at 6:50 pm
I heard the same thing.
24Ahead what’s eating you today?
March 2nd, 2009 at 6:55 pm
The decline of the Reagan coalition can’t just be tied to age and demographics. The FDR coalition managed to last over 40 years and make it through the Civil Rights movement to boot.
Mike
March 2nd, 2009 at 6:58 pm
I think it was Murphy on Meet the Press who made the point about Reagan having some problems with the demographics of today.
I made a similar point right after Election Day, that Obama would really have to screw up big-time to lose in 2012. The 60-to-70 bloc of 2008, which went for McCain, will be a 64-to-74 bloc, and the people in their twenties, who vote for Obama, will also be 4 years older, 4 years closer to the demographic mean, supplanted by even more enthusiastic Obama voters who find a guy like Romney (say) completely inscrutable.
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Mike, you just made the case yourself. If you posit that the Reagan Revolution had a fraction the importance of the New Deal, then everything else follows nicely. Reagan represented a fleeting moment of conservative backlash to the liberal agenda, and that’s all it was. I might even agree that I’m being too kind to liberals there, but the point stands. He got a generation to be skeptical about taxation. Whoop-de-do. FDR ushered the entire country into the 20th century, so to speak.
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:09 pm
This is one of the things that annoyed me about how Tom Brokaw before the first debate was talking about how swing voters were Reagan Democrats. He had no clue that swing voters today aren’t the same as almost thirty years ago. That’s just sad how the media completely failed to keep up with how the country had changed.
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:13 pm
I would venture to say that Obama’s youth won more votes than his ethnicity.
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:13 pm
The real question is if the Republicans can really appeal to 20 somethings without giving up the pretense of being the conservative party let alone actually trying to be the conservative party.
Most rational observers would agree that there is little chance of the Republicans being appeal to appeal to 20 somethings without losing more older voters than they would gain.
So, the next question is what will politics in the U.S. be like with only one relevant political party.
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:25 pm
“could be called Clinton Republicans instead”
Yeah, the business-friendly Rockefeller Republicanish politician has always been pretty successful. But, that doesn’t erase the Republicans’ deep problems right now. A whole new generation is joining the Democratic Party in droves, and they are led by a guy who at least doesn’t sound scared by Republicans.
On top of that is the whole increasing-minorities problem. MY and other bloggers vastly overestimate the influence of CNBC and FoxNews — they are truly becoming as irrelevant as the party they heavily favor. As media disperses, influence does as well. I mean, what movie was number one the week after the Oscars? Tyler Perry’s hundredth addition to the Madea franchise for God sakes.
The sooner Republicans give up their race/immigration obsession, the better. Many upwardly-mobile Hispanics and Blacks would give up their Dem card in a second if not for Republicans’ crappy history regarding race. It was Reagan’s use of race which was one of the last nails in the Republican’s coffin, but the tactic was too successful in the short term to give up. In this light, the GOP’s current Reagan-worship seems sadly nostalgic — his largest political weapon now fails to be effective.
As the GOP continues to be geographically and racially isolated (not a coincidence), its focus on ideology rather than political realities will decimate their numbers. Even if events (as MY seems to argue sometimes) favor the small-but-ideologically-pure opposition, the opposition will be too ill-equipped and politically tone-deaf to offer an alternative that the public deems palatable.
March 2nd, 2009 at 8:18 pm
It’s not about demographics so much as changing times, but like the Reagan stuff, there’s a related factoid that I mention every chance I get: people born after the Berlin Wall fell were old enough to vote in 2008. A few million American voters had never lived in the same world as an expansionist, antagonistic, socialistic regime. And there are many millions more who are just a bit older than first time voters, who may have lived during part of the Cold War but were way too young for it to have much impact on them.
And the GOP wonders why the “socialism” smear didn’t have much traction?
March 2nd, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Cyrus is completely right. My entire generation grew up in the prosperous years of Clinton and then watched our country fall down around us under Bush. while that’s a simplistic view, its also true.
socialism, crime, all of the key issues of 80s simply don’t mean anything to us. Even fights over welfare are things I vaguely remember hearing about in elementary school.
Lets just say the republicans have a lot of work to do to connect to the majority of college-age voters these days.
March 2nd, 2009 at 9:37 pm
all this generational talk makes me want to put in a claim. obama is smart, practical, and progressive. just like many of us born in or around 1961. we were raised on the tail end of civil rights; we watched the war on t.v.; we cheered on the impeachment; we lived through the energy crises. we entered college before reagan, and then we were ambushed by our elders, who became reagan democrats and our younger siblings who did too. damn. glad you young folks came along and, by agreeing with us for the first time in our adult lives, gave us hope again. but obama is not of the younger generation, he’s of a group that lived in political exile for a long time
March 2nd, 2009 at 10:32 pm
DTM, i agree. being a 1961 child i have often noticed how the critical events of our formative years affected us. even those men born four years before, are, in my experience, quite a bit more sexist. and those born four years later were often deformed by the reagan years and its lies about social programs and the goodness of money. 1961 did not make obama, but neither is it an insubstantial factor. if, as i agree is true, the young see him as one of their own, it is because what we 1961 folks thought, when we were young, was the promise of america was long deferred.
March 3rd, 2009 at 12:45 am
As someone born in 1961, I find the last few comments fascinating. My brother wondered ten or fifteen years ago whether we were going to spend our entire adult lives wandering in an alien conservative wilderness, much as our dad (a WWII survivor and life-long Republican) had to deal with Roosevelt, Johnson, Carter, the civil rights movement and the hippies. I felt like a man out of time when I went to the University of Illinois in 1982, expecting alot of dope, music and sex, only to find budding investment bankers and corporate lawyers in pink Izods marching out of their fraternities and praising Ronald Reagan.
I’m still not fully convinced that we will see a longterm liberal renaissance, but I do have, what the word? Hope.
March 3rd, 2009 at 7:42 am
Political Armageddon: Ending Special Interest Influence in Washington DC
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There’s no question that this is the battle of a lifetime.
The end of the world is near — the Reagan world, that is. In one gigantic political battle, we can end the world of tax cuts for the rich, federal government-led attacks on organized labor, mindless deregulation, subsidies for wealthy corporations, war against science and preemptive war in Iraq.
The old political world will end on October 1, 2009 (the beginning of the next fiscal year) — if we just win the battle to enact President Obama’s budget.
Anyone who didn’t see or hear Obama’s Weekly Address on Saturday should go to the White House website and watch it. It is a declaration of war against the special interests:
I realize that passing this budget won’t be easy. Because it represents real and dramatic change, it also represents a threat to the status quo in Washington.
http://hiddenmysteries.net/geeklog/article.php?story=20090302172226488
March 3rd, 2009 at 8:23 am
It’s not so much the people who just turned 18 in 1980 who were Reagan Democrats.
First, I don’t think anyone at the time envisioned Reagan Democrats to be 18 year olds – the common perception (or stereotype) was that Reagan Democrats were at least in their 30s – after all, the whole idea is that they’d been Democrats for some substantial period of time! Reagan Democrats were typically depicted as between 35-55. (I.E. born between 1925-1945).
Second, the reality probably is that the really important elections were when more mature voters who went from JFK in 1960 and LBJ in 1964 to voting for Nixon twice. Again, if that is correct, you’re talking about people born between 1920 and 1939.
For real Reagan Democrats, you’d be talking about people who are at least 64 years old, and more likely 5-10 years older. And plenty of the people in that age bracket don’t like Republicans any more because the Republicans keep trying to privatize their Social Security.
March 3rd, 2009 at 9:22 am
I was in high school in the 1980s and unfortunately, never got to cast a vote against Reagan. (In my first federal election, I got to vote against Bush I.) I do remember, however, my parents’ election party in 1980 – it was like a wake – people looked like they’d just been run over by trucks and turned into zombies of misery. My memory of the 1980s was that virtually everyone I knew (and I grew up in Arizona – not some coastal big city) was HORRIFIED by Reagan and everything that he did – from those mini invasions in tiny countries like Grenada to Iran-Contra gate. Bush was successfully mocked on SNL from their Christmas time trickle-down economics musical programs to their parodies of Ronald Reagan as someone who only acted like a fool in public but was secretly actually intelligent and Machiavellian.
It is not that Reagan did not win huge electoral victories in the 1980s – he did. But, there were also millions of Americans who could not stand him and could not believe that the clown was running our country.
So . . . the current public adoration as if EVERYONE loved Reagan in the 1980s and EVERYONE still loves the memory of him has been a shock in recent years. I think I first noticed it during his funeral and the rosy public memory has only grown. If it has been as if everything I remembered from the 1980s – the protest rallies and marches, the voter registration drives, and the embarrassment that millions of us felt whenever we went abroad – has completely disappeared.
Don’t get me wrong – I am thrilled that it is Obama and not Reagan (or anyone of his ilk) enjoying the electoral victories and that the country has shifted in a progressive direction, but to write off the voters of the 1980s as a 100% block of Reagan lovers who need to die off or be overtaken by voters who came of age in later years is not entirely accurate. Reagan never had all of us and the millions of Americans who voted against him and his successors are thrilled that (a) some voters have had a change of heart; and (b) new progressive voters are joining the ranks.
March 3rd, 2009 at 10:01 am
I was born in ‘56 and was a Reagan voter — twice! I admire Jimmy Carter now, but I didn’t (and still don’t) think he was a good president. I remember watching what is now mistakenly called the “malaise” speech and being so depressed. Looking back, I think the Carter presidency showed the exhaustion of the FDR coalition that Kennedy reinvigorated and then which cracked under LBJ. Certainly it was the end of the “solid South” for the Democrats. I think Reagan did some good in convincing Americans that they didn’t have to lay down to the Japanese economically or the Soviets militarily. But by he time he left office, and I was 32, I had grown and seen many of Reagan’s flaws — disgusted by his inaction on AIDS and Iran-Contra. I began to vote for Democrats, was an enthusiastic Clinton backer and can’t imagine voting Republican now. I wonder how many mid-Boomers like me went through the same transitions — and how many of the older McCain voters that Matt cites were actually from my parents’ generation?
March 3rd, 2009 at 10:02 am
I was under the impression that Reagan voters were the Reagan democrats; the blue dog democrats in the south and the blue collar workers in the rust belt. I don’t see how this coalition can work anymore. The blue dogs and the rust belt are at war over stimulus money. Getting them to be part of some grand coalition again is quixotic. Just look at the last two elections! The southern strategy is dead.
March 3rd, 2009 at 10:57 am
Why does the discussion of Reagan voters seem to focus almost exclusively on 1980 and not 1984? I’d bet that regardless of demographic shifts or aging population, if the GOP could get the ‘84 Reagan vote, John McCain would be in the White House right now.
And before anyone even tries to dismiss ‘84 by saying it was just a good economy, you can’t do that without also dismissing Obama’s win during an GOP-led financial collapse.
The question is “why was Reagan (and Nixon!) able to win voters that no Republican since has come even close to getting”?
Mike
Mike
March 3rd, 2009 at 8:05 pm
The 84 election was such a massive defeat that it scarred the psyche of a generation of Democrats. Clinton was just the Eisenhower of the Reagan era. It took W and a depression-lite economic meltdown before supply-side was finally discredited in the eyes of the masses. Even now there is a certain strain of Democrat who is fighting a rearguard action on behalf of a few of the pillars of Reaganomics.
March 21st, 2009 at 8:59 pm
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April 3rd, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Could this mean the rise of a new major party? We haven’t seen any new ones for 150 years. Maybe the Republican brand will become increasingly toxic, causing voters to flock to the Libertarians or Constitution Party. It’s worth checking out.
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