Don’t get me wrong, I love Richard Florida. I’ve been reading Richard’s work for almost a decade. His article with Bill Bishop in 2003 was one that inspired the topic for my senior thesis.
But, I am going to disagree with his article from this week The Increasingly Republican States of America. I don’t dispute his data. I dispute the leap he takes in the title and in his summation.
Until and unless the Obama administration can make real inroads on jobs and economic recovery and give these voters some reason for optimism, America is likely to continue its rightward drift.
In short, he suffers from an affliction I identified in 2004: “The idea that a vast number of Americans changed the direction of their country pulls strongly at political analysts, and the desire to be the first to recognize such a [realignment] is strong.”
While I don’t doubt that increasing numbers of voters are calling themselves Republicans, I argue this is transient. It was transient in 2001-2003 when increasing numbers called themselves Republicans in solidarity with President Bush’s war on terror and it was transient in 2006-2008 when increasing numbers were called themselves Democrats in opposition to the war in Iraq.
One of the key components of realignment theory is that political identification is forged by a triggering event so strong that it remains an essential self-identifier for decades (David Mayhew, Sundquist).
As we look back at the last decade, the list of potentially triggering events is quite long: Bush v. Gore, September 11th attacks, Iraq, 2008 banking crisis, health care debate, and now the continuing unemployment crisis.
Yet, for 3 successive elections, the American people have simply booted the party in power. Rather than realign in large numbers, the bases of each party have entrenched further into themselves. They each exist in a closed loop, never thinking much about the other side, let along engaging with them in a discussion about which path forward is best for the country.
As I wrote in 2004, “self-selection of media allows constant reinforcement of political and social values. These selections are further reinforced by our neighbors as more and more voters move to neighborhoods and cities where the population holds similar values.”
This pattern has evolved even more rapidly with the emergence of Twitter and Facebook. Social media, and the narrowness of our “friends”, further entrenches our values and identity. Interaction between groups grows less civil leading to even further retrenchment.
As the party’s political bases have dug in, and political gerrymandering has increased the number of hard-left and hard-right members of the elected class, that has left a decreasing number of voters (mostly low-information voters, I’d argue) in the middle. It is these voters, in combination with the ability of each side to turn out its base, that decide elections.
These are the voters Florida is talking about. They’re small in number, but large in import. Focusing on their concerns is important, but I believe that his assertion that America is drifting rightward is wrong.
If you dig deeper than simply party identification, Americans aren’t drifting rightward. They’re pretty much standing pat.
But, they’re scared. And the President is a Democrat. A Democrat who members of the GOP have called a monkey, a communist, a socialist, and compared to Hitler. Rather than work with the President to improve the lot of all, they tell us their number one priority is to ensure he is a one-term President.
Add it all up, and a bunch of scared people are calling themselves Republicans. If Canada invades the United States, and the country rallies around the President, they’ll call themselves Democrats. If Mitt Romney is elected President and Mitch McConnell becomes majority leader, but the economy still sucks, they’ll call themselves Demcorats then, too.
In short, “the idea of a contemporary realignment… [is] virtually zero.” It was in 2004 when I wrote it. It is today. Parties and interest groups are too sophisticated in their use of data-mining and targeting and voters are too absorbed in their self-selected and reinforcing social graphs and news consumption for a drift to the right or the left to be anything more than transitory.