Liberal/Conservative

Twenty-eight percent of Democrats are now college-educated women, an increase from 12 percent in 1998. Men without any college education have increasingly identified as Republican, but by a less substantial degree. Men consistently report greater interest in discussing and paying attention to politics, even if they are slightly less like to vote in elections than women are. Seven in 10 (70 percent) men say they follow news about national politics somewhat or very closely, compared to 57 percent of women. More than four in 10 (42 percent) women, including 60 percent of young women, report that they do not really follow news about national politics. conceptions of sex and sexuality have also undergone drastic changes in recent years. Young people express increasing fluidity in feelings of physical attraction, but these generational differences are much more prevalent among women. Women are more likely than men to report physical attraction to both genders. This is by far most evident among young women. Just over half (56 percent) of women ages 18 to 29 say they are attracted to only men, compared to 83 percent of women ages 65 and older. There are massive gender differences in the consumption of pornography. Men are four times more likely than women to report having watched pornography in the past month (44 percent vs. 11 percent). Men in their 30s and 40s report the most frequent use of pornography A majority (57 percent) of men age 30-49 report having watched pornography in the past month, and 42 percent say they have watched it in the past week. In contrast, 44 percent of young men and only 26 percent of senior men say they have watched pornography at some point during the past month

Daniel A. Cox,Dana Popky and Beatrice Lee, "Politics, Sex, and Sexuality: The Growing Gender Divide in American Life," American Enterprise Institute, May 4, 2022, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/politics-sex-and-sexuality-the-growing-gender-divide-in-american-life/

"... U.S. adults who fall on either end of the ideological spectrum are more active than other Americans across several measures of political engagement, from voting to posting about politics on social media to donating to campaigns. Americans who hold less consistently liberal or conservative views, by contrast, tend to be less engaged on these topics, as Pew Research Center studies have long found....About 85% of adults in the two groups at the ends of the political spectrum voted in 2020 (85% of Faith and Flag Conservatives and 86% of Progressive Left). Moving from either end of the typology toward more ideologically mixed groups shows a gradual decrease in turnout.Faith and Flag Conservatives and those categorized as Progressive Left were also the most likely to report having contributed money to candidates and political organizations in 2020, to have posted support for a candidate or campaign on social media, and to have attended political rallies in person or virtually....The typology groups at the ends of the spectrum register much higher levels of general interest in politics as well. More than half of Faith and Flag Conservatives (55%) say they follow what is going on in government most of the time, followed by Progressive Left (44%), Establishment Liberals (41%) and Committed Conservatives (42%). By comparison, only 19% of Stressed Sideliners say they keep such close tabs on politics and government. Those categorized as Progressive Left or Faith and Flag Conservatives are also generally more likely than other groups to say they talk about politics frequently...."

Carrie Blazina, "Americans at the ends of the ideological spectrum are the most active in national politics," Pew Research Center, January 5, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/01/05/americans-at-the-ends-of-the-ideological-spectrum-are-the-most-active-in-national-politics/

Americans at the ends of the ideological spectrum are the most active in national politics

U.S. adults who fall on either end of the ideological spectrum are more active than other Americans across several measures of political engagement, from voting to posting about politics on social media to donating to campaigns. Americans who hold less consistently liberal or conservative views, by contrast, tend to be less engaged on these topics, as Pew Research Center studies have long found. Here are some recent findings that illustrate this dynamic.

In a major 2021 study, the Center sorted Americans into nine political typology groups, based on an analysis of their political attitudes and values. The typology groups at either end of the political spectrum - Faith and Flag Conservatives on the right and Progressive Left on the left - are also the most politically engaged by several measures. The groups toward the middle of the ideological spectrum, those deemed Stressed Sideliners, Ambivalent Right or Outsider Left, have much lower levels of political engagement.

Among social media users, Republicans who identified as moderate or liberal were 15 percentage points more likely than conservative Republicans to say they never or rarely post or share about political or social issues (83% vs. 68%). Similarly, roughly eight-in-ten conservative or moderate Democrats who use social media (77%) said they never or rarely post this type of content, compared with a smaller share of liberal Democrats (56%).

In addition to being at the ends of the political spectrum, prolific political tweeters were especially likely to report engaging in political activities. In the year prior to the survey (a time period that included the 2018 midterm election), 34% of this group reported attending a political rally or event, while 57% said they contacted an elected official and 38% said they contributed money to a political campaign.

Vox write up of Catalist data (note report attached)“…Biden’s share of votes by Latinos decreased by 8 percentage points compared to Hillary Clinton’s, and his share of votes by Black people decreased by 3 percentage points. Biden’s share of white voters without a college degree improved about 1 percentage point as compared to Clinton. Biden’s share of white voters with a college degree improved by about 4 percentage points from Clinton’s….”

Andrew Prokop, "A new report complicates simplistic narratives about race and the 2020 election,"Vox, May 10, 2021, https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2021/5/10/22425178/catalist-report-2020-election-biden-trump-demographics

A new report complicates simplistic narratives about race and the 2020 election

In the days and weeks after presidential election results come in, commentators attempting to figure out what happened with voter demographics are often in a fog — forced to rely on unreliable exit polls. More rigorous analysis simply takes longer.

Now, Catalist, a Democratic data firm, has put out a report on “What Happened in 2020,” authored by Yair Ghitza and Jonathan Robinson, which makes a serious attempt to answer that question. The report is superior to the exit polls because it’s based in their research for what’s known as a “voter file.” Basically, they’ve put together a large database of turnout information about actual voters, assembled from state or local records about who actually showed up.

That information has its limits — it’s a secret ballot, so we don’t know who specific people voted for. But this information can be supplemented with precinct-level vote results, census information, and survey findings. The Catalist authors put all this together to estimate how different demographics voted. Some of their general findings about what changed since 2016:

Biden’s share of votes by Latinos decreased by 8 percentage points compared to Hillary Clinton’s, and his share of votes by Black people decreased by 3 percentage points.
Biden’s share of white voters without a college degree improved about 1 percentage point as compared to Clinton.
Biden’s share of white voters with a college degree improved by about 4 percentage points from Clinton’s.

But the report doesn’t just look at the narrow question of what changed in each group; it helps us understand the two parties’ coalitions as a whole. For instance, it drives home the fact that the non-college white population, while declining as a share of the electorate, remains quite large (they were about 44 percent of all voters in 2020), and Trump won 63 percent of them. And though Biden performed worse among Black voters than Clinton or Obama, he still won about 90 percent of that group.

One note here is that, for the sake of allowing easy year-to-year comparisons, these percentages are calculated by looking only at votes cast for either the Democratic or Republican nominees, rather than for third-party candidates. This is called the two-way vote share — Catalist’s report focused on this metric, so all of this article’s references to demographic vote percentage will use it as well.

The non-college white vote: Joe Biden’s underrecognized electoral achievement

Much attention has been paid to the shift of white college-educated voters toward Biden and Latino voters toward Trump in 2020, which makes sense — as a table from Catalist shows, those were particularly dramatic shifts.

This was crucial to Biden’s success for two main reasons. First, white non-college voters continue to make up a very large chunk of the electorate. Catalist estimates that their share of the electorate has been shrinking, but they still were 44 percent of all voters in 2020. And second, they make up an even larger share of the electorate in some key swing states.

Furthermore, the shorthand of punditry often says Democrats win because of a coalition of nonwhite and college-educated white voters. But the below chart makes the point that non-college whites actually still make up an estimated 32 percent of overall votes cast for Biden. In comparison, Black and Latino voters together also comprised 32 percent of the overall votes for Biden. More than half the Trump coalition, in contrast, is comprised of non-college-educated white voters (and Trump’s coalition is 85 percent white overall).

Latino voters: Biden’s better-recognized problem

Biden’s worsened performance among Latino voters as compared to past Democratic nominees has been much discussed since the election, and Catalist puts some numbers on just what happened there — the group estimates that Hillary Clinton won 71 percent of Latino voters in 2016, but Biden won 63 percent in 2020. This 8-point drop is the most dramatic shift in a four-year period among the major racial or ethnic groups seen in Catalist’s data.

This comes in the context of a massive increase in Latino turnout overall — while turnout was up across the board, it was particularly up among Latino (and Asian) voters, in what’s just an incredible increase in a four-year period.

The turnout surge also raises a question — did Trump improve because previously voting Latinos switched from backing Democrats to backing Republicans, or were his gains mainly among new voters? Catalist doesn’t provide a definitive answer, but the authors say, “we see suggestive evidence that both of these factors played some role.”

In contrast to claims that Democrats’ worsening performance with Latinos was mainly concentrated among Cuban Americans in Florida, the report finds that the decline was broader — but that the drops were smaller in key states that Biden barely won, like Arizona and Georgia.

Black voters’ support is crucial for Democrats — is it dropping?

Biden won an estimated 90 percent of the two-way vote among Black voters in 2020 — which is both an overwhelming win, and the worst performance for a Democrat among Black voters in over a decade. Clinton won 93 percent of the two-way vote among Black voters in 2016, and Obama won 97 percent in 2012.

The authors make that point that despite this drop, “Black voters are key to Democratic success” — without the large majorities of Black voters Biden won, he couldn’t have been competitive nationally or in key Electoral College states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Michigan.

Furthermore, the report estimates that turnout among Black voters increased from 2016 by 14 percent, a higher rate of increase than among white college voters (13 percent) or white non-college voters (11 percent). So it can be true both that Biden did worse than Clinton among Black voters and that Black voters remain a core pillar of the Democratic coalition.

White college-educated voters have moved toward Democrats (but many still vote for Trump)

So how does Joe Biden win if he barely improves on Clinton’s performance among non-college-educated white voters and does worse than she did among Black, Latino, and Asian voters?

It’s because of those gains among white voters with a college degree — where he built on and expanded the improvement Clinton had made. In 2012, Obama won an estimated 46 percent of these voters, in 2016 Clinton won 50 percent of them, and in 2020, Biden won 54 percent of them.

Further, according to the report, about 58 percent of white women with a college degree voted for Biden (compared to 55 percent voting for Clinton in 2016 and 50 percent voting for Obama in 2012).

This is true as far as the trend goes, and it’s one of the most important factors explaining why Biden won and Clinton didn’t. However, it’s also important to stress that 46 percent of college-educated whites still did vote for Trump. Democrats don’t exactly dominate among this group just yet, and it remains to be seen whether their gains here will prove durable.

One overall takeaway from the report, though, is that an electoral majority is often a fragile thing these days. Lose a few points among a few groups and it could slip from your grasp. And some apparent trends continue from one election to the next — while others can surprisingly reverse

“…So what do we learn from the California comeback? Mainly, that you should take anti-government propaganda with large helpings of salt. Tax increases aren’t economic suicide; sometimes they’re a useful way to pay for things we need. Government programs, like Obamacare, can work if the people running them want them to work, and if they aren’t sabotaged from the right. In other words, California’s success is a demonstration that the extremist ideology still dominating much of American politics is nonsense….”

The states, Justice Brandeis famously pointed out, are the laboratories of democracy. And it’s still true. For example, one reason we knew or should have known that Obamacare was workable was the post-2006 success of Romneycare in Massachusetts. More recently, Kansas went all-in on supply-side economics, slashing taxes on the affluent in the belief that this would spark a huge boom; the boom didn’t happen, but the budget deficit exploded, offering an object lesson to those willing to learn from experience.

And there’s an even bigger if less drastic experiment under way in the opposite direction. California has long suffered from political paralysis, with budget rules that allowed an increasingly extreme Republican minority to hamstring a Democratic majority; when the state’s housing bubble burst, it plunged into fiscal crisis. In 2012, however, Democratic dominance finally became strong enough to overcome the paralysis, and Gov. Jerry Brown was able to push through a modestly liberal agenda of higher taxes, spending increases and a rise in the minimum wage. California also moved enthusiastically to implement Obamacare.

I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore. (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)

Needless to say, conservatives predicted doom. A representative reaction: Daniel J. Mitchell of the Cato Institute declared that by voting for Proposition 30, which authorized those tax increases, “the looters and moochers of the Golden State” (yes, they really do think they’re living in an Ayn Rand novel) were committing “economic suicide.” Meanwhile, Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute and Forbes claimed that California residents were about to face a “rate shock” that would more than double health insurance premiums.

What has actually happened? There is, I’m sorry to say, no sign of the promised catastrophe.

If tax increases are causing a major flight of jobs from California, you can’t see it in the job numbers. Employment is up 3.6 percent in the past 18 months, compared with a national average of 2.8 percent; at this point, California’s share of national employment, which was hit hard by the bursting of the state’s enormous housing bubble, is back to pre-recession levels.

On health care, some people — basically healthy young men who were getting inexpensive insurance on the individual market and were too affluent to receive subsidies — did face premium increases, which we always knew would happen. Over all, however, the costs of health reform came in below expectations, while enrollment came in well above — more than triple initial predictions in the San Francisco area. A survey by the Commonwealth Fund suggests that California has already cut the percentage of its residents without health insurance in half. What’s more, all indications are that further progress is in the pipeline, with more insurance companies entering the marketplace for next year.

And, yes, the budget is back in surplus.

Has there been any soul-searching among the prophets of California doom, asking why they were so wrong? Not that I’m aware of. Instead, I’ve been seeing many attempts to devalue the good news from California by pointing out that the state’s job growth still lags that of Texas, which is true, and claiming that this difference is driven by differential tax rates, which isn’t.

For the big difference between the two states, aside from the size of the oil and gas sector, isn’t tax rates. it’s housing prices. Despite the bursting of the bubble, home values in California are still double the national average, while in Texas they’re 30 percent below that average. So a lot more people are moving to Texas even though wages and productivity are lower than they are in California.

And while some of this difference in housing prices reflects geography and population density — Houston is still spreading out, while Los Angeles, hemmed in by mountains, has reached its natural limits — it also reflects California’s highly restrictive land-use policies, mostly imposed by local governments rather than the state. As Harvard’s Edward Glaeser has pointed out, there is some truth to the claim that states like Texas are growing fast thanks to their anti-regulation attitude, “but the usual argument focuses on the wrong regulations.” And taxes aren’t important at all.

So what do we learn from the California comeback? Mainly, that you should take anti-government propaganda with large helpings of salt. Tax increases aren’t economic suicide; sometimes they’re a useful way to pay for things we need. Government programs, like Obamacare, can work if the people running them want them to work, and if they aren’t sabotaged from the right. In other words, California’s success is a demonstration that the extremist ideology still dominating much of American politics is nonsense.

Left Coast Rising

Paul Krugman, “Left Coast Rising,”New York Times, July 24, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/opinion/paul-krugman-california-tax-left-coast-rising.html