Understanding the Decline in GOP Self-Identification
It’s easy to make striking claims about the decline in Republican Party self-identification over the past eight years. Their problem, maybe, is that they’ve lost the support of married people—down five points. Or maybe the problem is that they’re down six points in the west. But the real problem is that the decline is so across-the-board that it’s easy to pull facts out of context. What I think is interesting to do is understand that the overall Republican decline in self-identification has been five percentage points, so then we can try to set that as the baseline and see where their declines have been concentrated. Here, for example, are the normalized declines by age cohort:
The sinking tide brought the GOP down among all groups. But relative to the average, the Republicans are declining a lot among young voters whereas senior citizens are (relatively!) non-disillusioned. Similarly, the Republicans declined by a less-than-average amount from their already low standing among non-whites. The decline among the (substantially larger) group of whites was, by contrast, a bit sharper than average.
26 Responses to “Understanding the Decline in GOP Self-Identification”
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May 19th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
I think the black/nonwhite issue points out the baseline approach doesn’t really help illuminate the dynamic either. What we really need is some solid regression analysis.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
More and more I think there’s only two possibilities: Either the GOP is in fact in a death spiral and will actually disappear as a national party within the next decade, or the GOP has realized that in a two-party system you don’t actually need to say you’re sorry; you can just sit back and wait for your opponents to have bad luck, then go crazy once you’re back in office.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
See fivethirtyeight.com for more on this. He’s recently had breakdowns and graphs on age, gender, race, geography, and so forth.
By the way, normalizing the graph is needless in this case, since it’s just shift of the Y-axis origin. In fact, it’s arguably a negative, since it can be easily mis-read as showing an increase. Plotting the absolute numbers, from negative 9% in the youngest group to negative 1% in the oldest, allows the same cross-group comparison without obscuration.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
That 30-49 demographic is just weird.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
OK so I am a bit confused as to why this is supposed to be a good way to look at this. If I am not mistaken this makes it look like a 5% reduction in support from young people is the same as a 5% reduction in support from old people. But I think old people vote more so that isn’t right. The real question is what is the demographic of the groups most likely to swing in the Republican direction. I think Republicans will have to lose some policy fights before they can start winning elections again. A Republican party that supports universal health care and doesn’t scare suburban woman and promises a humble foreign policy will be very strong indeed.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
That 30-49 demographic is just weird.
Speaking as someone from that group, it consists of people that came of political age in the time of Reagan. And who actually believed Reagan was competent. I never did; I consider myself a fiscal conservative and Reagan was the beginning of the end for fiscal conservatives in the Republican party.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
http://www.gallup.com/poll/15370/Party-Affiliation.aspx
The trend does certainly not look good for the ruling party. Tied?
May 19th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
I wonder how much the effects are exaggerated by shame. There could be a non-negligible number of Republicans who don’t self-identify.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
The trend does certainly not look good for the ruling party. Tied?
That is an outlier. See here:
Charles Franklin on PID tie
May 19th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
@ 8:
The Republicans I know in my age group (18-29) certainly feel quite a bit of shame lately, FWIW. Even those in investment banking keep their party on the DL.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
I’d like to see Nate or someone talk about the chances of the GOP actually having a for-real collapse. As in “ending.” I keep thinking, “no, next month, they’ll get their shit together.” But then, no, they don’t.
I genuinely think there’s a decent chance that the GOP will go the way of the Whigs. Some would retire, some would be primaried out, the leftovers will slap on a new name.
I mean, if we millennials are going to be as prominent in the electorate as ze policy peeps tell us, what chance does the GOP have with us? I would argue: “No chance.”
May 19th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Similarly, the Republicans declined by a less-than-average amount from their already low standing among non-whites.
Yes, because they’ve already hit bottom. You can get 10 to 20 percent of the population to believe any damn fool thing, 27 percent if it’s a political issue with any institutional support. Alien abductions, Elvis, 9/11 trutherism, voting for Alan Keyes, anything. People are irrational, and holding minority opinions on impersonal issues is liberating in that you’re free of depressing stuff like “reality”. In a general opinion poll with only two or three options, 90 percent might as well be unanimity.
According to the link in the original post, Republicans had 12 percent support from black people in 2001. They’re now down to 10 percent. Hit bottom, digging.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Judd,
Gallup polls are very volatile.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I can’t believe young people aren’t gravitating to Steele. His street smarts and jazzy lingo should have been enough to bring in the youth damnit. What happened? I mean, he even beat Colbert in the hip-hop battle. I just don’t understand it.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
The trend does certainly not look good for the ruling party. Tied?
One data point isn’t a “trend”, choad.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
I genuinely think there’s a decent chance that the GOP will go the way of the Whigs.
I’ve been thinking the same thing, for a while. At a certain point in a power dive, it gets to be too late to pull back on the stick. (Though in the Republicans’ case, I don’t know that they will get around to even trying to pull back before the altimeter hits zero.)
The basic issue is that the GOP has convinced itself that some utterly wrong propositions are unshakable truth (all economics boils down to tax policy, all government except for the military is bad, all foreign policy is a military confrontation), and they can only recover by jettisoning these ideas. They can’t do that, and they won’t do that, so eventually the party will die.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/congressional_ballot/generic_congressional_ballot
Taken in concert with the generic congressional ballot, that the dems usually lead in, don’t count the republicans out.
May 19th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Meh, it takes a lot to make a major party collapse. It took slavery for the Whigs. As crappy as our economy and government are right now, they aren’t that bad. If the next two elections go as badly for the Republicans as the last two did, then I’ll start predicting a new party to emerge or a minor party to become major. Until then, though, even if Obama winds up being another FDR, FDR was followed by Eisenhower just a few years later.
May 19th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
There is more Republican self-identification in the Eisenhower and Reagan cohorts (those who were children or teenagers during those years). Nothing new there. As the Eisenhower kids generation dies off, in particular, change WILL happen.
May 19th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Cyrus is right. After the 1936 election, there were exactly 88 Republican House members and 17 Senators. 17. They recovered from that. This is nothing.
May 19th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Eisenhower was a war hero – and after him, there wasn’t another Republican until Nixon. The kinds of wars we have these days aren’t very conducive to heroism, and anyway, the Republicans have a seriously off-kilter definition of heroism right now. (Watch them run an “enhanced interrogator” in 2012, someone who resigns from the Obama administration angrily denouncing its refusal to “do what it takes” along the lines already being laid down by Cheney… he could win the Republican primaries, even over the opposition of the money men who would realize that he would go down in flames in November.) On top of that, heroism won’t solve our current problems and I think people realize that.
Eisenhower also notably backed away from any attempt to dismantle the New Deal. He considered it political suicide. This suggests that any *electable* post-Obama Republican will probably be one who will not make any large moves against Obama’s accomplishments (at least the ones the public approves of).
May 19th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
At which point they cease to be a Republican Party.
May 19th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
“Until then, though, even if Obama winds up being another FDR, FDR was followed by Eisenhower just a few years later.”
Eisenhower actually argues against your thesis – Eisenhower actually ran against the leadership of the Republican party. The “Draft Eisenhower” movement was begun by Democrats, and Eisenhower had to defeat the long-time leadership (Taft) of the Republicans to win the nomination. In fact, during the aftermath of WWII (which Taft consistently opposed throughout), Taft called Eisenhower a covert communist based on the way Eisenhower was running Germany (Eisenhower was Military Governor of the American Occupation Zone from 1945 to 1948).
May 19th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Re Eisenhower
There is another general in the mix that may have republican leanings and even Obama listens to him. Petraeus.
May 19th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
The U.S. needs to start making changes to allow for the coming one party state. When one realizes that the real election for governor in Virginia will occur June 9, 2009 during the Democratic pirmary. Even though there will be a general election, everyone will know that the Democratic nominee will be a sure winner. Thus, why have the real election six months before assuming office. Why have such long transition periods?
By 2020, there will be so few competitive elections in the primary and none in the general election that the media will be at a loss on how to report on politics.
May 19th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
[...] Matt Y. But relative to the average, the Republicans are declining a lot among young voters whereas senior citizens are (relatively!) non-disillusioned. [...]