The Enlightened Despot

There’s been a lot of talk about whether the increase in voter turnout met expectations. (The obvious answer is that it depends on whose expectations we’re talking about.) More interesting than the overall increase in turnout from 2004, which was 1.5%, is the state-by-state breakdown, showing where that increase came from. Here’s a list of states that saw the largest jump in turnout (as calculated by subtracting the percentage of eligible voters that voted in 2004 from the percentage that voted in 2008):

1.) North Carolina: 8.0%
2.) Virginia: 6.8%
3.) DC: 6.6%
4.) Mississippi: 5.6%
South Carolina: 5.6%
6.) Georgia: 4.9%
Maryland: 4.9%
8.) Alabama: 4.6%
9.) Indiana: 4.5%

This is a pretty remarkable list, so I’m going to go ahead and remark on a few aspects of it:

- The first eight states on the list form a contiguous region. This, to me, was the most amazing result of this exercise. Presumably this is, for the most part, not a simple causal relationship; bordering states often have a lot in common demographically. Nevertheless, it seems quite plausible that there is a certain amount of spillover here, where states which weren’t in play were hit by a lot of advertising because they were in the same media markets as states that were.

- Perhaps the least surprising result is that the turnout went up a lot in states with a large black population. Compare the list above to this one, which ranks states by the (relative) size of their black citizenry:

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Over at the Corner, in response to Andrew Sullivan’s beef with socialized medicine, Jim Manzi utters treason:

I know a lot of readers here have a big problem with Andrew, but ask yourself a practical question: Shouldn’t you, at a minimum, want a tactical alliance with somebody who believes this?

I’m not trying to personalize this, but am just trying to use this as an illustration of a broader point. Politics should not define our lives, and consequently, it’s not healthy to look to politics for your soulmates. Think of it as finding a team of people at work who can accomplish practical goals together. Somebody hurt your feelings? You don’t agree with the guy about gay marriage? Whatever. Unless it’s an extreme case, just get over it, and get on with the job at hand.

If you think of it this way, why wouldn’t you go out of your way to try to find areas of commonality and pursue them in the public square, rather than emphasize differences? There’s a simple term for a coalition built in this way - a majority.

Unfortunately, Manzi did not put the sentence about Andrew merely being an example of a broader point in all capitals and italics; as a result, some folks over there are losing their cool. I’m not in the least bit interested in the resulting debate over Andrew’s moral worth, the ups and downs of his relationship with Jonah Goldberg, etc. If you are, you can read this, this, and, no doubt, about 60 more posts to come - they really, really hate that guy.

But the broader issue Manzi is trying to talk about is interesting. As I’ve said before, I find all talk of where conservativism is heading, what conservativism really is, etc. to be a waste of time. But political parties, unlike conservativism, exist, and they need to have platforms for which a good percentage of the population will vote. Leaving aside Andrew’s personality, the NRO crowd has been pretty dismissive of his ideology as one their party needs to appeal to, airing rhetorical questions like: “Does anyone seriously still think this guy is a conservative?”

And the answer to that is yes people still think that, and yes those people are correct. The man doesn’t believe in progressive fucking taxation! Wars in Iraq come and go, but taxes are forever. The GOP simply can’t afford to throw away votes from people far to the right of them on tax policy.

I don’t think this is a deal-breaker for their short-term viability. Obama won big, but he didn’t win that big. Had the economy been better, the war been less disastrous, and Bush less detested, the Republicans would have been in this thing. Assuming they get the crazies in line, the economy, now safely in Democratic hands, could make them viable again four years from now. They can’t win as the Party of Palin, but they might have a shot as the Party That Includes Palin but Doesn’t Like to Talk About Her.

In the longer term, though, they really need the Sullivans of the world. Well, the kind that can actually vote, anyway. The demographics of the Proposition 8 vote showed what should already be obvious: hating gay people is slowly going the way of the buffalo. Old people are very into it; young people don’t see the point. As much as has been made of black homophobia, age is really the salient metric here. The percentage of black people in this country will hold fairly steady, while old people keep dying and young people keep turning 18. There’s no stopping this - that’s just what old and young people do, respectively.

What that means is that you’re going to have more and more Andrew Sullivans running around, and fewer and fewer Jess Helmses, and today’s Republican platform just won’t be electable. Talk about jettisoning social conservatives altogether is wishful thinking; it would be nice if that were the smart play, since social conservatives are a real downer, but it’s just not the case. But they do need to be shoved back into the shadows to some extent. There’s no reason this shouldn’t be possible. In the Reagan/Bush v1.0 years, they were humored whenever possible, but they didn’t run the show. And honestly, who else are they going to vote for?