eirias | (no subject) (Reply)

I have heard some say recently that what the Democratic party needs to do in the next four years is to reassert a coherent stance on progressive principles. Move back to the basics, these people say. We need to find our voice again, they say, so that candidates will have something to stand for other than "Anybody But Candidate Z."

The difficulty with this is that it is unsupported by data. Here is a long list of breakdowns of exit polling data along just about all conceivable lines. Each row lists a sector of people; the columns to the right indicate what percentage of that sector voted for each candidate. If you scroll down to "Vote by Ideology," you'll note that Kerry won the liberals over pretty well - and that he also took the majority of moderates. Bush, on the other hand, did predictably poorly with liberals, didn't do so hot with moderates - but swept the conservatives. The reason this gave him the election is that conservatives comprise an ever-increasing segment of the populace.

I have done a simplistic analysis of what would happen if Kerry had won over different percentages of liberals and conservatives, extrapolating the CNN data to a hypothetical population of 200,000,000 voters. It is posted here. There are some assumptions that go into this - like the already-discredited assumption that exit polls are an accurate way of gauging the voting trends of the population, and the dubious assumption that changes to party platform necessarily are met with predictable changes in voting habits of individuals. But as a thought exercise, I think it suggests that in the short term, becoming more progressive is not how the Democrats will succeed. Criticism welcome, if you think my math is wrong.

On the other hand, thinking about long-term goals, it may be the case that the Democrats will need to pursue a more progressive stance just to give their party some reason to exist beyond "we're not the Republicans" - and to decrease the market share of conservative ideology. The difficulty is that my gut says this will take a decade or two, maybe an entire generation, to have a real effect on the culture. That's a long time for people to feel powerless. Will the party even hold together that long?

EDIT: Fixed the formatting on the second link.