Planting Liberally

On Monday, Chris Bowers wrote about a fascinating Lear/Zogby study on entertainment choices and ideological orientation. The study is interesting because in addition to asking respondents to self-identify as liberal, conservative, or moderate, the study asks respondents a flurry of questions and then assigns ideological markers ("Blue", "Red", and "Purple") to respondents post-hoc. Bowers argues that the most significant way to produce political change is to support cultural institutions which produce progressive ideological change will make a much larger difference in electoral and legislative outcomes than anything that is done in the political world. I think it's a very wise point. Clever campaign ads and better voter targeting will only take a progressive candidate so far in a world where progressives are vastly outnumbered by conservatives. Contra-wise, even a very poorly run campaign for a progressive candidate can succeed in a world awash with progressives. That's why labor unions, progressive news and opinion media, and liberal religious organizations are so important: they are cultural institutions which make progressivism real for people who may not be tuned into politics actively, and thereby make people more progressive. The first-order political impacts of these organizations, like church voter registration drives and campaign donations from unions, are just gravy. For a long time, I've assumed that creating the kind of ideological change that will result in parity between progressives and conservatives is going to be a mammoth task. That's largely because ideological self-identification in exit polls has produced pretty steady results for a long time - about 33% of the electorate identifies as conservative, 20% as liberal, and the remaining 47% as moderate. However, the new Zogby/Lear survey paints quite a different picture. The survey puts about 39% of the country in the "Blue" team, 37% of the country in the "Red" team, and the remaining 24% in the "Purple" team. That's an astounding result! It means that a large chunk of the progressive base is going to the polls and thinking of themselves as "moderates", rather than as "liberals". Indeed, the survey data bear this out. When asked to self-identify ideologically, Blue team members spread out almost equally between "progressive" (31.1%), "liberal" (36.6%), and "moderate" (31.5%). In contrast, 87% of Red team members described themselves as "conservative" or "very conservative", with another 12% describing themselves as "moderate". (It's important to note that these ideological self-identifications didn't seem to matter for the presidential vote. Despite having many more self-described moderates, the Blue team voted 95.6% for Kerry, as opposed to the 98.6% of the Red team which voted for Bush; the comparable numbers among self-identified liberals and conservatives voting for Kerry and Bush respectively are in the mid-80s in exit polls. It's hard to say whether the Blue team slipped in voting progressively in down-ballot races. Finally, it's worth ) In light of these findings, I think the Center for American Progress's "Progressive and Proud of it" advertising campaign is both timely and wise. If you haven't seen the videos, click over there and check them out. I like them, a lot, although I do have some quibbles with the details. (For example, why put two white guys in the knock-off Mac commercials? Shouldn't progressives be represented by someone who's either not white, or not a guy?) On the whole, however, this advertising campaign, along with similar efforts like Commonweal Institute's "Promoting Progressive Values" project, are exactly the kind of thing we need. These efforts help people who might not be politically involved understand what progressivism is, and why they should identify with it. At the same time, these efforts lay the groundwork for candidates to self-identify as progressive, and to follow-through on that self-identification with progressive actions while in office. If there's a large group of voters willing to call themselves progressives, candidates and elected officials have an interest in identifying themselves with that group. In a way, the progressive ads are very similar to liberal cultural institutions. Institutions like unions, liberal churches, schools, and news media make ideology real by connecting the abstract concepts of an ideology with the tangible facts of everyday life. That is why we in the progressive movement should be working diligently to support labor organizing, establish and expand the reach of liberal religious organizations, and create progressive news and opinion media. These are the kinds of activities which are ultimately going to keep our movement growing.

Chris Bowers today points to a fascinating survey on ideology and entertainment choices by the Zogby/Lear center. Among other things, the poll assigned ideological preference to respondents, instead of relying on respondents' self-described preferences. The results? 39% of the country is grouped as a "blue" person, 37% as a "red" person, and 24% "purple". That's a far cry from exit poll self-identification numbers, where typically about 33% of the country self-identifies as conservative, 20% self-identifies as liberal, and the remainder are called moderates. This disparity is fascinating. If you look at the data (PDF), on page 3 you'll see that cultural liberals are almost exactly equally likely to identify as a Democrat, and to have voted for Kerry, as cultural conservatives are likely to identify as a Republican, and to have voted for Bush. In fact, "correct" partisan identification is slightly higher among liberals than conservatives! There is a slight fall-off in the presidential vote - 95.6% of liberals voted for Kerry, 98.6% of conservatives for Bush - but essentially, it looks like both Bush and Kerry maximized their respective cultural bases. And Kerry actually got slightly more votes from his base (37.3% of the overall vote was cultural liberals voting for Kerry) than Bush got from his (36.5% of the overall vote was cultural conservatives voting for Bush.) This result is astounding and a little unsettling for me - a large part of my reason for starting this site was to examine cultural changes that could produce more cultural liberals and a larger liberal base for future elections. Now it looks like that cause might be a bit like squeezing blood from a turnip. This data also calls into question Chris's theory that politics doesn't matter, which essentially supposes that the best politicians can do is try to shift cultural trends in a direction that is friendly to them, and then to get the hell out of the way. It looks like Bush's 2004 campaign did indeed overcome a slight 0.8% deficit in the cultural base vote, and thereby mattered a heck of a lot in that election.

The Wall Street Journal today discusses a trend that should be troubling for liberals:

Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children.

The piece rests on some rather shaky assumptions:

• Having children does nothing to affect a parent's ideology
• Children of parents with a particular ideology will adopt that ideology later in life

In fact, neither of these assumptions need be true, now or into the future. But the baby gap does charge liberals to think about the problem of parenting. For the liberal movement to grow, it's necessary to either reverse the baby gap; make liberalism a more readily inherited ideology than conservatism; make the parenting process itself a liberalizing life change; or some combination of these three changes. It's not hard to imagine solutions that will address some of these goals. For example, a liberal cultural movement to help parents with the day to day challenges of raising children would help attract new parents to the liberal movement. Such a movement might take the shape of a liberal alternative to Focus on the Family, a network of day care centers which espouse liberal values, or some other form. Arguably, the liberal movement has already succeeded in making liberalism a more readily inherited ideology: young people today are considerably more liberal than their parents. This ideological shift must be watched closely and expanded, however, through continuing investments and outreach in youth culture, as well as development and mentorship of young leaders. Of course, in order to maintain this shift in a way that will offset today's baby gap, such efforts must be extended for several decades into the future. Update: Via kos, Echidne questions the validity and impartiality of the professor who wrote the Wall Street Journal piece. Good eye, but at least some of the data is based on the 2004 General Social Survey, so I'm going to assume that a decent part of the data is valid. The baby gap appears to be 19%, not 41%, when we correct for factors like age, race, gender, etc. That's a huge difference, but 19% is nothing to sneeze at when you're talking about hundreds of millions of people. Echidne makes excellent points also about factors like the Latino migration, but even there we can't rest on our laurels. Latinos vote 2-to-1 for Democrats, which isn't half bad, but it's very much a demographic in play. Moreover, however much Latino immigration benefits liberals, there's no guarantee that it will continue for decades. Changes in our laws or in the economic conditions in Latin America could easily reverse that tide. Consequently, I still think that it's very important for our movement to take some of the steps I outline above - making parenting a liberalizing process and making liberalism more inheritable than conservatism.