Electoral Realignment and Strategy

The map is not the territory.
         - Alfred Korzybski

Anybody who watches elections with a careful eye should print out a copy of Mike Barone's The Realignment of America (from yesterday's WSJ) and tape it to the wall. He tracks the growth and shrinkage of urban areas throughout the country and folds this into a larger picture America.

Among the conclusions he draws - and we're talking numbers here, not rhetoric - is that many of the blue cities in the east and west are becoming two-tiered societies, comprised of a working immigrant class and a wealthier elite. Meanwhile there's a boom in many cities in the middle of the country - from Charlotte to Dallas to Houston there's a great deal of growth. This appears to be where the middle class has headed - away from the tony neighborhoods of San Francisco to the "inland coast". And these are the Red State voters, to a large extent. The Rust Belt that extends from the upper Midwest to Pennsylvania continues to lose people. But other cities - Cincinnati included - are holding their own, domestic outflow is matched by folks moving to town.

Each political party should update their gameplan accordingly. One of the reasons the Democrats lost Ohio (arm-waving about "election fraud" aside) is that they had outdated model of the counties in and around Cincinnati. This lesson should be applied adroitly. And more importantly, political messages should be tailored to fit these shifting constituencies, and here's where it gets tricky, and we have to depart the land of numbers for some broad generalities.

The bifurcated cities that Barone describes present a problem for Democrats to the extent that issues split differently between two groups. I suspect lower taxes and a strong national defense would be valued more by the "lower tier" of the Blue cities, while the social issues that so animate the "upper" class simply do not resonate. John Edwards, tell me, if you know, how you write a speech that has equal appeal to "both" Americas? Although I suppose this is hardly a new problem for the Democrats, seeing as it's always been a party comprised of various ethnic and cultural sub-groups. But strictly from a targeting standpoint, the GOP has an advantage in having a large economically-similar population amassed in these key Central/Southern districts.

The name of the game is "where people live" - not only in terms of population growth, but also in terms of how they see their problems in relation to those of the nation as a whole.

Tags: Michael Barone, 2008, Demographics