Pseudo-Psephology

Since I have a Ph.D. in political science (albeit from a Canadian university), some people expect me to know something about voting behavior. At this time of year, I try not to embarrass myself too badly. With that in mind, I promise to make some not too poorly informed comments on this site in the next few days.

I’ll start today with a query posed to me by a colleague (and I’ll welcome all your responses) and then go on to a few things I’ve told my students in the past couple of days.

First, the query: what impact will the World Series victory of the San Francisco Gianta have on today’s election? Will the victory of a team representing the bluest of blue cities over a team representing one of the reddest of red cities (and formerly owned by the [you supply the adjective] George W. Bush) portend something unusual about today’s election returns? Will hungover, ebullient, and distracted Giants fans forget to vote? Will despondent Rangers fans stay in bed all day? Will the first Giants World Series victory since 1954 give new life to the “yes, we can” slogan? I don’t know the answers to any of these somewhat frivolous questions, nor can I guess whether the political orientation of Giants/Rangers/basseball fans differs from the communities in which they’re located. (Michael Barone would surely know, would he not? (So, presumably, would Jim Geraghty and Jay Cost.) Bot none of these non-pseudo psephologists has addressed these somewhat frivolous questions, which gain at least a litle bit of significance, given the closeness of the Calafironia Senate race between Barbara Boxer and Carly Fiorina. Commentary is welcome here.

In a slightly more serious vein, I recently made the following observations to my students.

First, using Jim Geraghty’s 2010 House picks and making some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I’d be willing to guess that Republicans will regain roughly 75% of the House seats they lost in the last two election cycles. This will “devastate” the so-called Blue Dog Democrats, diminishing (such as it was) the moderate voice in the House Democratic caucus. The Democratic remnant in the House will be more monolithically and devotedly liberal after an election that likely marks a repudiation of liberal overreach than it was before. Whatever may be Barack Obama’s inclinations and abilities to pivot or triangulate, it’s not obvious that’s he’s going to have a lot of help and/or encouragement from his fellow partisans on the Hill. What’s more, it’s worth asking whether the remaining Blue Dog Democrats might consider whether they’re more at home with Republicans or have brighter political futures on the other side of the aisle. In my home state (Georgia), there was a spate of party-switching after the Republican breakthrough. It’s not inconceivable that something similar might happen in the case of some moderate to conservative southern Democrats. (I hasten to add one caveat: in Georgia, it was pretty clear that Democrats stood little or no chance of regaining significant power in the foreseeable future; that certainly isn’t true on the national level.)

Second, I observed that even if there weren’t significant headwinds blowing against Democrats in this cycle, the 2010 electorate was likely to be less favorable to them than was the electorate in 2008. According to the 2008 exit polls , the electorate then was 74% white, 13% African-American, 9% Latino, 2% Asian, and 3% other. Without Barack Obama atop the ticket, I doubt that the proportion of African-American voters will be that high this time around. Similarly, I doubt that voters under 30 will be 18% of the electorate. Even if nothing else had changed, an older, whiter elctorate would behave differently. And, it goes without saying, much has changed.

My third observation has less to do with the likely outcome than with one of the ways we tend analytically to slice the elctorate. There’s lots of talk about a “gender gap,” with women voting in ways that are decidedly more Democratic than men (in 2008, 56-43 for Obama, while men went more narrowly for him 49-48). But consider these figures. Married people went 52-47 for McCain in 2008, while unmarried people went 65-33 for Obama. The marriage gap, in other words, is much more pronounced than the gender gap. What’s more, married mothers (51-47 for Obama) resembled all men (49-48 or 50-48, take your pick) than they did all other women (58-40 for Obama). Married women and married men don’t vote all that differently from one another. In other words, the “gender gap” is largely an artifact of the voting behavior of unmarried women, who are much more economically vulnerable and much more likely to require government assistance than their married counterparts.

Finally, I like to unpack the religious vote, despite the fact that we’ve been told that there really is no such thing as the Catholic vote. If you slice the 2008 exit poll electorate into religious segments, it’s true that Catholics went for Obama in roughly the same proportion as the elctorate as a whole, while Protestants are their mirror image (54-45 vs. 45-54). It’s worth noting, first, that white Protestants and Catholics both went for McCain over Obama, the former pronouncedly (65-34), the latter narrowly (52-47).  Also, frequent church attenders (usually a sign of theological and moral conservatism and orthodoxy) went for McCain (55-43), while less frequent attenders (57-42) and non-attenders (67-30) went for Obama. This split holds for both Protestants and Catholics, with regular attenders trending Republican either decisively (67-33 for Protestants) or narrowly (50-49 for Catholics).

I think that there remains a culture war- style political divide between traditionalists and modernists across denominations, and I expect that the 2010 exit polls will show divisions that are closer to those manifest in 2004 than those reported in 2008. (In 2004, Catholic frequent attenders went for Bush over Kerry 56-43, while less frequent attenders went for Kerry over Bush 50-49.) That’s the good news. The bad news is that the proportion of weekly attenders in the elctorate is likely to continue to shrink over time (41% in 2004, 39%in 2008). To be sure, the 2010 polls might reflect a higher proportion of weekly attenders (I’m betting, without knowing for certain, that they’re more likely to vote.). But that’s a number that bears watching (and lamenting, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with politics) over time.