Anyone interested in political demographics should remember two things about age cohorts: (1) they age, and (2) they change. At Washington Monthly yesterday, I wrote about a particular important discernable trend involving seniors–currently the bedrock of the Republican coalition–and how they may age and change in the near future:

[Y]ou definitely need to take a look at David Frum’s interpretation of new research on how the changing composition of the senior population is likely to affect voting patterns over time.
Frum begins by noting the central importance of the pro-Republican swing among seniors in the very recent past:

The emergence of the older voters as a massively solid Republican bloc is a post-Obama phenomenon.
The Pew survey explained the trend in a 2011 report. The Silent Generation that voted for Bush in 1988 had retained its conservatism into its retirement years. No news there. The news was among the next cohort, the Baby Boomers: After the year 2000, the Woodstock generation veered abruptly to the right.
In their youth, the Boomers had expressed strongly liberal views about the role of government. In 1989, asked to choose between a bigger government that did more for people versus a smaller government that did less, they opted for bigger government by a margin of 52-40. By 2007, that preference had reversed itself, 52-35, and it has remained reversed through the Obama years. Even more striking was the collapse in trust in government among the Boomers: In 1997, 38 percent of them trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time; by 2009, only 16 percent did so, the same suspicious percentage as their formerly more conservative “silent” elders….

This changing attitude towards government was most intense among (white) men, notes Frum, who were close to parity with women among the Baby Boomers now just reaching retirement age. These men drove the Republican senior wave, but their relative power is due to drop:

In 2010, the old as a group voted Republican because the lopsided hostility toward Obama among older men could overwhelm the mild preference for the president among older women. As the population ages, however, the ratio of men to women within the over-65 population should drop. The share of over-80s in the population is rising faster than men’s likelihood of surviving to 80. The changing sex ratio will sway the political outlook of the whole group.

Aside from gender ratios, there’s a considerable change in perspectives as seniors move from their late 60s to their 80s:

Old age comes later now. But when it comes, it changes people in the same way it always did. Women begin radically to outnumber men. (In 2010, the older-than-80 population included 4 million males and 7.2 million females). Personal savings are exhausted. (Average net worth drops by 25 percent between age 65 and age 75.) Dependency rises. Attitudes to government change.
The older you get, the more you appreciate Social Security and Medicare…and the more you mistrust proposals for reform that might affect current recipients. In 2009, 43 percent of people in their twenties were open to reforms in entitlements that might touch those now receiving Social Security and Medicare; only 27 percent of people in the strongly conservative groups older than 65 would consider it.
As yet, few published surveys break out the differences between people in their sixties and eighties. Working politicians notice it, though. As one very successful political operative told me, “The No. 1 concern of every voter over 80 is, ‘Will my check arrive on time?'”
There will soon be a lot more people digging in against benefits changes. The elderly population is poised to grow hugely quickly; the oldest of the old to grow faster still. Between 2000 and 2010, the total population grew 9.7 percent; the population older than 65, by 15.1 percent; the population older than 80, by 23 percent. That last group now numbers more than 11.2 million–and demographers expect it to grow even faster over the decades ahead.

All in all, Frum believes that as the Baby Boom generation ages, its Republican voting tendencies will abate and likely be reversed.

A vote’s a vote, of course, and it’s a huge mistake to think that pro-Republican groups will change while pro-Democratic groups will stay where they are. But particularly for those Democrats who are frustrated by the senior-driven Republican advantage in midterm elections, which makes multi-cycle Democratic progress so difficult, a more balanced senior demographic will be a most welcome development.

As a month full of Republican primaries continues, the Year of the Republican Establishment narrative beloved of both GOP “insiders” and major precincts of the MSM (some eager to bury the Tea Party, others determined to show the GOP is “moving to the center”) continues to struggle. Here’s an excerpt from my take on the Nebraska and West Virginia primaries at TPMCafe.

The dominant primary narrative for 2014, that the sensible, pragmatic Republican establishment was putting the “constitutional conservative”/Tea Party extremists back in their place, has somehow survived less than impressive establishment wins in Texas and North Carolina. At some point, the narrative may need to change, beginning with Tuesday’s results from West Virginia and Nebraska, where the establishment is again struggling.
In the one major contested primary in West Virginia, for the House seat currently held by Senate candidate Shelley Moore Capito, a carpetbagger from Maryland (he was once state GOP chairman in Maryland, but says he needed to move from that sinful secular socialist Blue State to secure “freedom”), Alex Mooney, won a comfortable victory over a field of six other GOP candidates. He was endorsed by the Senate Conservatives Fund, the Tea Party Express, the Madison Project, and Citizens United — all the ideological heavies. He’ll face Democrat Don Casey — another state party chair, but from West Virginia — in November.
Across the country in Nebraska, the marquee Senate race featured Republican establishment candidate and former state Treasurer Shane Osborn against college president Ben Sasse, with self-funding banker (and alleged “moderate,” as the other candidates hastened to accuse him of being) Sid Dinsdale. Sasse was endorsed by nearly every Tea Party and ideologically right-wing group in sight, including the Senate Conservatives Fund, FreedomWorks, and the Tea Party Express, plus Sarah Palin and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT). Osborn was backed avidly by Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Sasse romped past Osborn by better than a two-to-one margin, as the establishment candidate finished third, narrowly behind Dinsdale. Sasse will face Democrat Dave Domina in November.
As Osborn’s sinking fortunes became obvious in the run-up to the primary, some elements of the Republican establishment tried to disclaim him or dismiss the contest as no big deal (just yesterday, Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin noted the two main candidates had similar positions — which you could have also said about the North Carolina Senate contenders a week ago, in a primary trumpeted across the land as a huge establishment victory — and dismissed the race as “irrelevant”). But it’s hard to avoid the impression that the spin would have been very different if Mitch’s boy had, as was originally expected in this race, beaten the Tea Party insurgents…
All in all, last night definitely represented a hiccup for the “Year of the Republican Establishment” narrative. I’m guessing the Powers That Be in the GOP and the mainstream media will emulate Rubin by dismissing the results and focusing their attention on next week’s primaries, when the establishment is expected to do better in Idaho (Rep. Mike Simpson appears likely to hold off a right-wing challenger), Kentucky (Mitch McConnell has bludgeoned Matt Bevin into submission), and perhaps Georgia (“outsider” businessman David Perdue and career appropriator Rep. Jack Kingston are leading most polls and could be headed to a runoff).

Yeah, Big Media Narratives die slowly, living on until they find the data to support them.

This week North Carolina kicked off the series of Republican primaries that have been so heavily billed as a death struggle between the Republican Establishment and the Tea Party. Predictably, Thom Tillis’ plurality win got heavy billing as a huge Establishment triumph that augered well for GOP prospects this November. I dissented from this lazy CW in a column at TPMCafe:

For “Establishment” Republicans, the good news is that their Senate candidate in North Carolina, House Speaker Thom Tillis, won yesterday’s GOP primary without a runoff, easing comfortably past the 40% victory threshold. Fiery “constitutional conservative” Greg Brannon was second with 29% of the vote, and Christian Right candidate Rev. Mark Harris trailing with 16%.
The bad news is that the victor emerges from the contest hard to distinguish from the extremists he defeated.
It’s not as though there was ever a great ideological distance between the candidates. Yes, Brannon is one of those conservatives who thinks the federal government should be confined to its original minimalist role; he was supported by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY), both of whom campaigned for him in North Carolina. But Tillis boasted of his support for Jim DeMint’s “Cut, Cap, Balance” constitutional amendment that would permanently pare back federal spending and tie it to a fixed percentage of GDP.
Tillis was also able to parry Harris’ social conservative street cred (the Southern Baptist preacher was a leader in the successful drive to ban same-sex marriage in the state, and was endorsed by Mike Huckabee) with incessant statements of his own opposition to same-sex marriage, and boasted of achieving a restriction in abortion rights in North Carolina. He also came out for a “Personhood” Amendment (the linchpin for efforts to outlaw Plan B contraception and IUD devices as “abortifacients”) and was endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee.
All this positioning seemed prudent; even with his large financial advantage and high name ID, he won about the same percentage of the primary vote as did Texas “Establishment” icon David Dewhurst in his first Senate primary in 2012, before Ted Cruz dispatched him in a runoff. Tillis can thank his lucky stars his state’s primary victory threshold is 10 points lower. Looking forward to November, it’s worth emphasizing that at a time when the behavior of the Republican-controlled state government remains controversial, Tillis has branded himself as the leader of a “conservative revolution” aimed at turning back the clock on many years of moderate leadership and policies in the state. This messaging may have ruled out any “move to the center” maneuvering by the new Republican nominee.
The punctuation mark for the Speaker’s radicalized image may have come the day before the primary, when Kay Hagan’s campaign drew renewed attention to a 2011 video in which Tillis cooly lectured a Republican group on how to pit people with disabilities against people receiving other forms of public assistance, in what he called a “divide and conquer” strategy.
The video, which is sort of a nastier version of the Mitt Romney “47 percent” video, has the air of an instant classic, thanks to its unmistakable class and racial undertones. Unless some other conservative politician outdoes Tillis, the video will remain nationally and locally notorious for a long time to come, thanks to the especially devilish, manipulative nature of Tillis’ analysis of how to demonize public assistance recipients, a strategy he said he would pursue even if it killed him politically.
The New Republic‘s Brian Beutler, calling it a “Bond-villainesque soliloquy,” explains:

Class warfare? Check. Racist dog whistle? Check. A belabored explication of the political utility of racist dog whistling? Check. An acknowledgment that this strategy must be deployed at strategic moments, because it can backfire? Check. A further acknowledgment that admitting to the strategy can be career ending? Check.

All in all, the assumption that Tillis won’t have the general election handicaps to overcome that Brannon or Harris might have suffered from is not as strong as it was when the primary contest began, particularly now that Tillis has attracted so much national attention for his own hammerheaded ideological stances.

There’s always a lot of ongoing talk about the South as a political region, whether it’s as the dreaded source of Republican extremism or the land of hope for a future Democratic comeback. But definitions of “the South” vary, as I discussed at Washington Monthly in the context of a FiveThirtyEight survey on the geographical contours of the region:

“[T]he South” is a politically potent concept in which precision and context are often rather important. The general hazy historical perception is that “the South” during the Civil Rights Era transitioned from being solidly Democratic to being solidly Republican. Actually, as Sean Trende likes to point out, the Republican share of the regional presidential vote was 48% in 1952, 50% in 1956, 46% in 1960 and 49% in 1964–remarkably stable and competitive, though masking some pretty large subregional swings–even before the enactment of the Voting Rights Act. But after that Act, as late as 1976, Jimmy Carter (a southern Democrat, of course) was carrying the region by ten points. In 2000 and 2004, Republicans did indeed carry (if you credit the 2000 Florida results) every state in the former Confederacy. But then in 2008 Barack Obama muddied the waters again by winning Virginia, Florida and North Carolina and won the first two again in 2012.
I’ve gone through this brief history because an awful lot of rhetorical weight has been placed on the impact of the “Republican South” on the GOP, on the conservative movement, on non-southern voters, and on the general tone and character of U.S. politics–and quite rightly so.
Still, subregional variations in the South should by no means be ignored. Last week the New York Times‘ Nate Cohn created a bit of a sensation with a column suggesting (a bit more indiscriminately in the headline that he would have liked) that “southern whites” had now become nearly as overwhelmingly Republican as African-Americans were Democratic. Careful readers noted that Cohn was actually only describing white voters in a band of counties “from the high plains of West Texas to the Atlantic Coast of Georgia.” 2012 exit polls showed Obama winning 37% of the white vote in VA and 31% in NC. Upon my own inquiry, Nate noted on Twitter that the statewide Democratic share of the southern white vote in 2012 varied as follows: Kentucky 33%, Arkansas 26%, Tennessee 25%, South Carolina 22%, Texas 22%, Georgia 19%, Alabama 17%, Louisiana 12% and Mississippi 11%.
So in 2012, a white voter in Kentucky was three times as likely to vote for Obama as a white voter in Mississippi. I’d say that’s a variation worth noting when making generalizations about “the South”–not by Nate Cohn, who was careful, but by the very many people who are going to mis-characterize his work.

We are at a point in the 2014 election cycle when reliable predictive data is sparse and changeable, while spin is ever-abundant. Sometimes it’s not that easy to separate the two. I wrote about this problem today at the Washington Monthly.

As we have all observed, Nate Silver and other purveyors of “data journalism” have gotten a lot of flak early in this election cycle, some of it warranted, but much of it the kind of taunting schoolyard kingpins typically inflict on tyros they instinctively understand will be rich and powerful someday.
Close to the line between rational objection and special pleading is a column from National Journal‘s house conservative, Josh Kraushaar, who begins with this hackish complaint about 538’s early Senate projections:

[C]ount me underwhelmed by the new wave of Senate prediction models assessing the probability of Republicans winning the upper chamber by one-tenth of a percentage point. It’s not that the models aren’t effective at what they’re designed to do. It’s that the methodology behind them is flawed. Unlike baseball, where the sample size runs in the thousands of at-bats or innings pitched, these models overemphasize a handful of early polls at the expense of on-the-ground intelligence on candidate quality. As Silver might put it, there’s a lot of noise to the signal.

So? Has Nate somehow failed to observe that the projections will become more reliable the closer we get to November? Or is there something else he’s missing? Yeah, that’s it:

The models also undervalue the big-picture indicators suggesting that 2014 is shaping up to be a wave election for Republicans, the type of environment where even seemingly safe incumbents can become endangered. Nearly every national poll, including Tuesday’s ABC News/Washington Post survey, contains ominous news for Senate Democrats. President Obama’s job approval is at an all-time low of 41 percent, and public opinion on his health care law hasn’t budged and remains a driving force in turning out disaffected voters to the polls to register their anger. Public opinion on the economy isn’t any better than it was before the 2010 midterms when the unemployment rate hit double-digits. Democrats hold only a 1-point lead on the generic ballot in the ABC/WaPo survey–worse positioning than before the GOP’s 2010 landslide.

Now if cherry-picking the most bleak of national indicators and then comparing them to indicators that largely proved wrong in 2010 proves another Republican “wave” is on the way, then it will always, always seem apparent just on the horizon to those who want to see it. National indicators, BTW, are just as subject to change as state polls, and Silver, BTW, does factor in Obama’s approval ratings and economic conditions.
But then having done the journalistic equivalent of “trash-talking,” Kraushaar eschews said practice and offers his own, quasi-empirically based projections, which (with the exception of a strange, wonder-if-they-are-related paean to Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst) follow pretty much the same sorts of micro-indicators Silver uses.
So it’s tough to figure out when a guy like Kaushaar is spinning or telling us what he really thinks. That’s generally not a problem for Nate Silver.

Which is why I find nit-picking about data-based political journalism to be so often misguided. Criticize the data where it’s warranted. But when you do so, lay off the spin.