FiveThirtyEight: Over the Decades, How States Have Shifted
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Most of the code is open source, too:
Awesome that he's working at the NYT alongside people like Nate Silver.
http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1968...
The moral of the story (in my mind) is that while it's tempting to throw a big dataset into a cool visualization algorithm, if you're not careful about what each individual data point means, you might end up imparting more confusion and misconceptions than actual knowledge.
That's because it's correct, depending on what you mean by 'middle road Democrat'. Nixon created the EPA, created OSHA, signed Title IX into existence, ended the Vietnam war, and endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment, which nevertheless failed to pass.
He couldn't have done a lot of those things without Congress, granted, but there wasn't a Tea Party back then, either.
Now don't get me wrong: Nixon was a petty, vindictive ass who used the office of the President to pursue personal vendettas and ultimately authored his own downfall in a display of raw hubris worthy of a Greek tragic hero. The irony here was that with Watergate, he attempted to cheat his way to victory in the 1972 election, which was the biggest landslide anyone alive then will live to see. He threw away his entire future in politics trying to rig something that was a sure thing for him to win anyway.
But enough on Nixon. Ronald Reagan was too liberal for most of the people who currently lionize him.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/05/10/even-reagan...
http://www.quora.com/Politics/Would-Ronald-Reagan-not-be-con...
Cheating there too?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...
Since when can cheating cause a landslide?
At least two of the GOP's nominees since Reagan would have been happy to sign more immigration liberalization. Bush the Elder raised taxes. Bush the Younger failed to cut spending just like Reagan, and added a new prescription drug entitlement to Medicare. McCain was instrumental in passing campaign finance reform, and Romney passed an individual mandate and state run health exchanges.
Reagan "too liberal"? That's a fairy tale. Dead conservatives were always the moderate ones.
No, only by the illogic of false equivalence. Obama is for "free" trade, directly said multiple times that he was against gay marriage until recently, is running on a platform to cut Social Security, and has cut a massive number of government jobs during a time of high unemployment. In other words, Bill Clinton is conservative enough to be nominated by today's Democratic party. Reagan was far too liberal to be nominated by today's Republican party.
Citation needed.
and has cut a massive number of government jobs during a time of high unemployment.
As of Jan 2009, there were 2,790,000 federal employees. There are now 2,814,000.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/CES9091000001.txt
Maybe you mean he didn't increase the number of government jobs as fast as was projected?
Anwyays, you're smart enough to know that flatlining is effectively a cut, relative to population and inflation. Certainly relative to every other recent president, Reagan and Bush very much included. And relative to Romney's plan to increase military spending (guess how many of those 2.8M are military or homeland security employees).
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECIGVTWAG
The crappy part is that a huge % of the rollover cost is healthcare, so it's not even going to their employees.
Real wages need to go down in order for the recession to end, which is why inflation is promoted as the cure. Wages are sticky downwards, there is no reason to raise them, particularly for monopsony employers.
Basically, states and local governments aren't operating with a macro worldview of the whole economy, they're trying to balance their own budget. They're going to eat it on healthcare, pay as small a COL raise as they can get the public employee unions to accept (pretty small actually), and lay off employees on the stupid last-in-first-out basis that the unions insist on. Decision makers at the state level are just trying to get through the year.
The funny thing is that a liberal can look at those ballooning healthcare costs (biggest $ item in the deltas year-over-year) and see it as a private sector screwup, while a conservative can look at the total costs going up and see it as public bloat.
Obama's actually for all of those except for DoMa, and it took him until this year to finally come out in support of gay marriage. Obama has signed free trade agreements, cut the growth of discretionary spending, and hasn't attempted to touch Clinton's welfare reform (aside from granting states waivers that republican governors had been asking for).
It's silly to claim that a modern Reagan wouldn't fit well enough within the Republican and American mainstreams to be nominated, and those links don't provide real evidence otherwise. Shocking: Reagan wasn't a hard and fast ideologue. But a hard and fast ideologue isn't going to be nominated by the Republican party today, either.
Reagan's positions and what he did in office are completely incompatible with Republicans today. A budget deal with democrats that raises taxes? Tough love on Israel occasionally?
I'm not saying Reagan wouldn't have been able to be elected, but he'd have to be a different Reagan to get the nomination. A hard and fast ideologue or, in the worst case, someone who makes the appropriate noises and can beat Newt Gingrich.
From WW2 to the early 1970s, there was a two-party consensus on government intervention in the economy, and that consensus moved “right” even before Reagan. (One of Carter’s legislative accomplishments, for example, was deregulating airline fares.)
On the other hand, the country has moved “left” on social issues. Can you imagine any politician in 1975, outside of the most extremely liberal districts, saying that same-sex couples should have legal protections equivalent to those of a married couple? And now that seems to be the “safe” position for right-wing Democrats and left-wing Republicans to take. The ERA hasn’t passed, but the courts have been more critical of laws that have a disparate impact on men and women (the technical term is “intermediate scrutiny”).
Regarding protracted military interventions in foreign countries, the parties seem to have moved “left” in the aftermath of Vietnam and “right” again with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Trying to assign modern labels to the political parties of the 60's and 70's is a bit silly. Two of the biggest issues of the time (the Cold war and segregation) no longer exist today. Neither party has a stated position on the Soviet Union and both parties are radical integrationists.
We could call that a huge leftward shift, except that integration was mostly a right wing issue up until Nixon's "Southern Strategy".
Plus, much is made of the "radicalism" (ultra conservative / ultra liberal) in each party, as if it hadn't existed before. That's not very true.
My only quibble with the graph is it skips the times that 3rd parties probably cost someone the election (1992/2000 are probables) which means the states were actually leaning the other way.
Do you have a source for that?
Here's a visualization of this; mostly bluer cities and mostly redder non-city:
But DC voted 93% Democrat in 2008. 93! That's not a majority. That's a consensus.
Democrats are pro-government, so DC votes for Democrats.
- Many in the DC metro area are also employed by the military or employed by proxy (i.e. working for a contractor like Boing/Lockheed/Caci/etc.).
- The military is a part of the government.
- The republican party is firmly behind the military.
Unsurprisingly the outlying suburbs of the DC metro area are lean republican[1].
Looks like everyone is voting for their own interests here.
[1] http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/elections/Multiyear3.gif
Here are the next-most-Democratic cities I came across in some spot-checking, with NYC boroughs broken out b/c they're separate counties: 89% Bronx (NYC), 86% Manhattan (NYC), 84% San Francisco, 80% Brooklyn (NYC), 79% Boston, 79% Alameda County (East Bay), 77% Portland.
Silicon Valley is closer to the 70-ish you're thinking of, but it includes a number of quite suburban areas. Obama won 74% in San Mateo County, and 70% in San Jose County. LA County is about the same (70%), as is Fulton County (Atlanta).
Santa Clara County? :-)
> LA County
Sorry, I guess we're a bit overly fussy out here. That one would be Los Angeles County. (Not that you couldn't call it LA County, just doesn't sound quite right. It's not uncommon to abbreviate the city to LA, but not so much the county.)
(And for the Nixon era, that time's Republican party is a very different one than the one today. See also Texas being blue for Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, and Carter.)
Meanwhile, you have the big influx of Latinos, that vote strongly Democrat.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that difference is quite narrow (10%). Although it's hard to quantify this stuff.
Yes, we can mouse-over. But you can't easily mouse-over, scroll, and keep the mouse-over going.
Also, this is another darn fine visualisation from the NYT.
http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html
New York County (Manhattan), Chicago and SF look a lot like DC. LA a bit less so, but that's probably because a lot of LA is suburban.
It's interesting to note that the entire South did not ratify the amendment, except Tennessee. Also, DC still does not have separate representation in the Congress.
More info: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-third_Amendment_to_the_...)
I understand wanting more options or not liking either available option but they're not the same. They don't have the same values, beliefs, principles, policies or experiences. They have many things in common, but they're not the same and it's not useless to talk about them and their perception in the polls.
If I instead compare and contrast them with each other, obviously I can too can see that they are not "the same"
That they are both bought and paid for by the same corporate money. Where do the hundreds of millions to fund the campaigns come from? You don't think that those interests might, you know, want something in return?
All mainstream political "discussion" is simply a distraction from the true issues. To think anything else is just naive.
Quite frankly, that's bullshit. Romney/Ryan advocate a rollback of my rights and continued (or furthered) discrimination against me. That's only one small social issue that they differ on and they differ on policies that involve much more substantive issues.
Maybe you're privileged or fortunate enough to not be affected by tax rates, women's rights legislation, gay rights issues, and more, but many of us aren't. Those issues matter and that's why some support Romney and some support Obama.
As for national health-care, education, science, etc, they very noticeably and very starkly differ as well.
... I feel like you just supported what I was saying. My second post was simply an example of how they differ in meaningful ways.
Oh I certainly agree.
How clueless are people about social issues exactly?
Plurality voting ensures that there are two major parties, and that they are as similar as possible without ceding ground to third parties.
1) Not vote 2) Start something like the Tea Party 3) Toss the incumbents out because they weren't extreme enough
This is happening on the left as well; we're becoming way more partisan as a country, and slowly but surely removing all the moderates from Congress.
There are just over 600 people in my ward of my township. 67 people voted in 2011 for the Council seat that was up. It's disgusting.
I would posit that the cause is somewhat different, though: the partisan zealots are the ones that vote in every single primary and general election. For those of you who vote for POTUS and that's all, there are actually two elections every year. The country as a whole I think is more moderate than 99% of our elected officials, but the country as a whole isn't voting. It's largely straight-ticket people voting, especially in off years. This results in Members of Congress becoming more extreme because those are the people voting for them.
The reason the country is becoming more partisan is more likely due to the benefits of incumbency, and the insane level of gerrymandering we allow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#United_States
On the contrary, it's not necessarily pessimism, the people who feel that way are probably just rather focused on the issues where the candidates are depressingly similar. For example if you want to see military spending massively reduced, the financial system reformed in fundamental ways to reduce systemic risk, or massively increased gasoline taxes to cover infrastructure improvements or green energy development, you probably feel badly served by both parties and their candidates right now.
On the other hand, if you're a gay man who wants to get married and start a family, or a redneck who wants to be able to carry your .357 magnum wherever you want whenever you want, or a rich guy who wants to keep your taxes as close to zero as can be achieved under the current two party system, the party differences are rather more obvious to you.
It's not really a question of pessimism, just the way people prioritize things. A person who has a lot of strong interests in the first category of issues (where the parties are rather similar, or just similarly useless) might be a lot more likely to say the parties are the same than a person whose strong interests are in the other set of issues.
The importance of those similar areas to other people is unaddressed in this concern. Key is that the opinion holder see this as a larger issue in their, or everyone's lives, even if others (you, me, anyone) may disagree.
Americans would never accept a system that did not allow them to select their chief executives (presidents, governors, mayors).
In fact, the UK, one of the oldest parliamentary democracies in the world and the originator of the "Westminster System" used in most Anglophone countries, moved towards presidentialism with the Local Government Act 2003 that allowed directly-elected mayors, such as London's colorful Boris Johnson.
Haha...I love this.
The only way to do government is full-blown communism, with a little genocide mixed in for good measure. This isn't a political statement, but someone should figure out how to make this happen.
Of course it's a political statement!