Battleground America

The Blacks begin by reminding us that from 1932 to 1950 the Democrats held the White House and both houses of Congress in nine of 10 elections. Between 1952 and 2004, however, one party controlled two of these institutions and the other party the third nearly two-thirds of the time. Today, the parties are evenly balanced. This transformation is the book’s subject, and the authors view it through discussions of five regions and the groups that predominate in them.

After discussing national trends, the Blacks take us on a tour of the changing electorates in Republican strongholds (the South and the Plains/Mountain states), the Democratic ones (the Northeast and Pacific Coast), and, finally, the competitive Midwest. They believe that the Democratic and Republican parties have “less in common in their composition, values, and objectives than was the case after World War II,” and that neither party can win by appealing solely to its core supporters.

Using data from the American National Election Study and national exit polls, the authors tell their story in clear language and clean charts. In an age of PowerPoint presentations that frequently obscure more than they reveal, the Blacks’ simple charts tell complex stories very well: One chapter, for example, includes a chart on the share of whites, African Americans, and what the authors call the “new minorities” in the electorate from 1952 to 2004. Three charts on the same page then show the partisan identification of these groups over the same time span.

Another set of figures looks at the realignment of white voters that began in the late 1970s. The first chart shows the size of the moderate, conservative, and liberal white groups in the nation, and then three other charts show us how these groups have voted over the span. At a glance, it is possible to see one of the keys to GOP success–the realignment of white conservatives toward the Republican party. In 1976, about 40 percent of white conservatives called themselves Republicans and the Democratic party included as many white conservatives as white liberals (19 and 22 percent, respectively). By the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, 63 percent of white conservatives called themselves Republicans and just 15 percent Democrats.

Today, conservative Democrats are an endangered species. White liberals have moved in the Democratic direction, but as the Blacks’ chart shows us, they are a much smaller group than the white conservatives. The largest group –white moderates–now splits evenly.

Both parties appear to agree that the key to the next election will be the Midwest, what the authors describe as the “most volatile, evenly balanced, and reliably competitive geographical area in the United States.” The region is second only to the South in population (64 to 84 million). In 2004, 39 percent of voters in the Midwest were Republicans and 39 percent Democrats. In the region, neither party has been able to capitalize on the developments that have moved it ahead in other regions.

The realignment of white Christians has fueled Republican growth in the South, for example, and growing numbers of ethnic and racial minorities and non-Christian whites have added to the Democrats’ strength in their strongholds of the Northeast and Pacific Coast. But in the Midwest, union strength has “partially blunted” the GOP’s advance. The Democrats’ problem here is that strongly Democratic groups such as minorities are still a fairly small slice of the Midwestern electorate: Whites made up 85 percent of the Midwestern electorate in 2004. In the Pacific region and Northeast, where Democrats have made gains, the size of the white voter group has declined. Fifty years ago, Democrats enjoyed a slight advantage among white voters in the Midwest. In 2004, Republicans held a seven-point edge. But this edge is much lower than the one Republicans have in their strongholds.

This book was written before the 2006 elections. It would be interesting to hear what the Blacks think about the strength the Democrats demonstrated in the Mountain West last year, a region the authors put in the Republican camp; or what they have to say about the argument advanced by Thomas Schaller that Democrats should simply write off the South and concentrate on other regions. But political junkies can learn a great deal from Merle and Earl Black’s expert dissection of the data.

Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where she studies public opinion.