A tribal election (and a stand-off) in 2012
The next half-year, Republicans and Democrats will churn out a lot of words, wrangling over everything from deficits to global warming. And in theory, elections should be about issues.
But one fascinating element of this year’s campaign is how distinctly tribal it appears to be. We are, despite our collective myths and ideals, a society of distinct and very different ethnic and cultural groups.
And we see the world very differently.
One of the latest polls, from the Christian Science Monitor gets at this reality starkly.
It reveals that while Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are essentially tied, the two men are incredibly polarizing figures when looked at from the perspective of our various “identity enclaves.”
Obama is winning just 37% of the white vote, compared with 86% of the black and Hispanic vote. That’s a see-saw pattern with profound implications.
Romney, meanwhile, is losing badly among women (40% to Obama’s 49%) but he absolutely dominates among white women (51% to 39%).
Another dynamic that shapes the race pits our urban tribe (61% for Obama) against our rural tribe (51% for Romney).
And the nation’s regions are also dramatically different, with the Northeast and the West solidly in Obama’s camp and the Midwest and the South tilting toward Romney.
Obviously, a lot of these cultural dynamics overlap.
The South and the Midwest are more rural than the rest of the US, and many small towns tend to be whiter than urban and suburban areas.
One other remarkable thing is that with all of these patchwork-quilt differences, we still add up to a roughly 50-50 divided nation.
It may be that in the future the rise of the Hispanic population and increasing urbanization will move us significantly in the Democrats’ direction, as some pundits have suggested.
But for this election cycle, and the near-future, our various tribes have formed up into something like a stand-off.
Whoever wins in November, it appears that roughly half of the population will leave the polls dissatisfied.
Indeed, some of the factions that make up our society will be deeply grieved by the outcome, contributing to the sense that America is a democracy struggling to find its center.
Tags: analysis, election12, politics
Maybe the divide is between people raised to believe clap-trap notions of American identity (George Washington could not tell a lie; he chopped down the cherry tree) and others with different experience.
I’m not sure I would characterize these numbers as being “tribal”. The black vote is solidly behind Obama regardless of his performance. It’s the white vote that has changed. Many voters who voted for him in the last election are ready for “hope and change” in the form of Romney. One only has to listen to how he is campaigning to see that he can’t focus on his accomplishments. He is starting out with a negative campaign against the GOP. The more he travels down that road the more white voters he will push away.
Unfortunitly you are correct in saying the nation is divided. People have carried these feeling way beyond politics.
Maybe the GOP should have helped him accomplish more.
But Knuckle I think that is part of the problem, your comments. Its not crazy to be conservative, its not clap trap ideas. There is a reason that socialism utterly failed as a concept, there is a reason that even with all of the talk; the defining fixture of economic success in the world in this century has been the embrace of free markets and private property.
However, I think the other side does the same thing acting as if to believe that government has a decent ad important role to play makes you some sort of a crazy socialist who is unamerican.
I don’t know we seem to have moved beyond just talking about ideas and get into this idea that the left has NO points and the right have NO points.
That simply is not true.
Also the freaking internet and talk radio and talking heads on t.v. has made us all think we need to argue over things that people didn’t use to argue about, we all think our opinions really need to be argued about. Growing up in South Dakota in a conservative family we all really liked George McGovern a decent human being, who we disagreed with but in the end not enough to get all riled up about him. That thinking is gone now everyone is more isolated and more riled up all of the time about politics. Its kind of a load of crap, nothing much changes frankly, its more important that we vote in decent people who are not totally corrupt than we get some ideologically pure person.
Your analysis is probably correct. People who base their votes on emotion and fear and simplistic slogans (“Change”, “class warfare”, etc) will vote for Obama or Romney. Those who do so based on a rational analysis of the issues will vote for a smaller party/independent candidate.
It shows how tribal our politics are. In a political landscape that includes true iconoclasts like Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul and Ralph Nader, the two candidates drawing so much rage from one side or the other are two of the most elite, milquetoast, pro-establishment figures you can possibly find. The only way you could’ve gotten a more pro-establishment race would be if Jeb Bush had run against Patrick Kennedy.
You may be correct, Mervel, that private property/free markets are a powerful economic engine and that socialism has less power to drive that engine. The problem is that the Right is attempting to make this election an battle between the two. That’s absolutely bogus. A classic strawman strategy.
The facts: A significant portion of President Obama’s stimulus was in tax cuts for private business and individuals. His health care reform plan elevated the private market, not a government single-payer system. He focused his economic recovery toward preserving the private manufacturing base of the nation. He has employed private sector incentives to stimulate employment, advocated tax reform to benefit small business, and urged development of infrastructure by private contractors.
Even the much-maligned delay in approving the Keystone pipeline was respectful of the rights of private property owners and the sovereign rights of the State of Nebraska. He resisted massive pressure from the Republican Party to ram this thing through with federal power. Hardly socialism.
This President has, most assuredly, used government levers to pull us back from a depression. But he has used those powers to stabilize and then re-start the private engine — not to replace it with a “socialist” structure.
You can debate whether or not socialism has “utterly failed” before the power of capitalism — but that debate has absolutely nothing to do with this election or reality. Nothing whatsoever.
Mervel, the problem is that people don’t listen to what is being said. I didn’t say anything about being conservative being a claptrap notion. My example was of a false idea of the history of who and what we are.
I have a great deal of respect for many of the ideas that have been considered conservative in the past, but I have no tolerance for the fantasy John Wayne and Walt Disney made up history that many conservative seem drawn to. I find lies about our common history to be offensive. We are not a nation of rugged individuals, certainly there were some rugged individuals but they had little influence on the development of our nation. They were the trappers who had little interaction with society, etc.
We are a nation of people banding together to accomplish things, sometimes good and sometimes bad, but they were done together.
I believe in the powerful conservative notion that we should have both free and fair markets and strict oversight to prevent greed from skewing those markets.
But I also believe in the conservative notion that I am my brother’s keeper and the conservative notion that we are a people together, that we move forward together and that we don’t allow the weakest to fall by the wayside in our travels.
Tribal fits but it is a sad fit if Americans want to believe they are individuals, which most do.
Think of tribe, any tribe, (race, sex, political, religious, economic, education, etc.) as being inherently opposed to individualism. It’s not that you couldn’t technically “belong” to any of these groups but if you let yourself be defined by any of these groups, you relinquish your individuality.
While there is strength in numbers, the strength of the individual is sucked away to provide the group.
If you look around the World today, you see every trouble spot is a spot where individuals are drowning in tribe/group think. Terrorists are but creatures unable to think or act outside of what they are told to think and do by their “tribal leaders.”
is this election any more tribal than any of the ones going back to (at least) 2000?
gary writes:
did you miss the whole “osama is dead and gm is alive” business? did you miss things like this?
funny but i seem to have heard an awful lot of mitt romney hammering away at the president. surely that’s going to push people away just as much, right?
goodness what a good comment from mayflower!
This election has nothing to do with anything either Mayflower. This idea that these elections are very important is simply false. The big events and changes driving this world and our futures are not being decided if Obama or Romney wins.
Since when did polls become news?
Now the move toward tribalism IS a movement that is dangerous for our country. Political parties and talking heads want to keep us upset and divided because it is good for business for them. The last thing they want is for us to turn of the internet or the t.v. and have a cup of coffee with someone from a different “tribe”.
I have to edit what I said earlier. The president has one power that is unique and important and that is the guy can go kill people, without congressional approval, without much oversight if any, the guy can use a massive military to take lives. So what do we want from that perspective? That is important and it does not have really to do with our fake tribes. All in favor of re-invading Iraq raise your hand! We have one of these candidates who might do that.