It's the Demographics Stupid

In my last post I looked at two theories of the general election:

1. Populism

2.Demographics

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2016/05/two-theories-of-election.html

The title might betray which side I come down on.

Not everyone likes the theory of demographics: they see it as two reductionist. Matt Yglesias has often voiced displeasure with it. One reason he had hailed the rise of Bernie Sanders was he thought this complicated the Dems' demographic determinism.

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/20/11466376/bernie-sanders-future-democrats

Really? Does it?

The results of this primary seem to me to affirm it. I expect that they will again hold in the general.

Now I grant that demographic determinism seems reductionist. But what we learn from economics is that to say anything interesting you have to keep it simple.

Keep it simple, stupid. Like Scott Sumner has a very reductionist theory: it all goes back to NGDP. I'm not saying he's right, but he sure never runs out of interesting posts to write anyway.

Generally theories need to be simple to have much mileage. The more qualifications you insist on, the less illuminating it becomes.

You can explain a lot with a purely demographic model of the last 48 years of American politics. The other day I talked about this great book of Jeff Greenberg I'm reading where he imagines what would have happened if Kennedy hadn't been killed.

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2016/05/counterfactuals-gore-and-911-and-jfk.html

Note I didn't say if Kennedy wasn't shot. Just a hint...

One interesting aspect was that in 1964, as Kennedy wasn't dead, he obviously ran again. Greenfield projects that he does win by a healthy margin-but nowhere near as big as LBJ in fact would end up winning by.

What does come through in his counterfactual Kennedy Administration is that race will soon be a big problem for Democrats. Whites across the country were certainly in a state of social panic. Kennedy actually had moved slower than he would have liked on civil rights as he knew that this would cost the Dems the white vote for as LBJ would come to put it: for a generation.

And not just the white vote down South either. In the counterfactual, Kennedy is able to overcome the increasing white fear of black civil rights with an even bigger fear: the fear that Goldwater would use nuclear weapons.

So not an 'aspirations' election but fear vs. fear. And in the actual history this is something like what LBJ did. LBJ, as a Southerner with a history of resisting integration, was better able to push for civil rights as it turned out.

This is what those who worry about Hillary's 'greater hawkishness'' miss: the structural side of political history. Bill Clinton was less a more conservative Democrat than a Democrat from a more conservative era

As for Goldwater's talk of using nuclear weapons, does this sound familiar? There are certainly ways in which Trump and Goldwater differed-Goldwater did have a history of being in the Senate at least. But there are a lot of similarities as well as should be obvious.

Actually Goldwater's landslide defeat actually was the beginning of a conservative Republican era while Trump's rise is the end of it.

But the demographics model works very well if you look at what has happened starting with Nixon's 1968 win. During the 24 years between 1968 and 1992, the demographics favored the GOP.

The Republican party was the white man's party and the demographics made this a winner. But by the Bush years this had clearly begun to hit the point of diminishing returns.

Bush did win twice-though 2000 was quite likely stolen-but with very paltry margins. Yet his percentage of the white vote, and McCain and then Romney's were comparable to what Reagan and the first Bush got.

Again, no theory explains everything. But the demographics theory of politics explains an awful lot.