I stumbled on this topic when I was thinking of posting in the AL-05 diary that this was one of the districts that had swung the hardest to the right from 2000 to 2004, as measured by Gore % vs. Kerry %. That left me wondering if that was really the case, though, and I did some quick database manipulation. In fact, while Kerry did suffer an embarrassing drop in this district (4.3% lower than Gore, from 43.8% in 2000 to 39.5% in 2004), it was only the 35th worst drop for the Dems. Many of the ones that were worse really surprised me, and since this is a good place for discussing minutiae like this, I thought a diary on the topic might be a good conversation-starter. (PVI, as most of us here know, is the best shorthand for a district’s lean, but it averages out the results from 2000 and 2004 and one weakness it has it that it doesn’t indicate the direction the votes moved between 2000 and 2004.)
Biggest drops:
| Rank | District | % change | PVI |
| 1 | NY-09 | 11.2% | D+14 |
| 2 | TN-06 | 9.5% | R+4 |
| 3 | AL-04 | 9.4% | R+16 |
| 4 | NY-13 | 7.9% | D+1 |
| 5 | CA-47 | 7.7% | D+5 |
| 6 | TN-04 | 7.5% | R+3 |
| 7 | FL-19 | 6.5% | D+21 |
| 8 | TN-07 | 6.5% | R+12 |
| 9 | NJ-04 | 6.5% | R+1 |
| 10 | TN-01 | 6.1% | R+14 |
| 11 | OK-02 | 5.9% | R+5 |
| 12 | TX-15 | 5.7% | R+1 |
| 13 | CA-43 | 5.6% | D+13 |
| 14 | OK-03 | 5.5% | R+18 |
| 15 | AL-03 | 5.5% | R+4 |
| 16 | OK-04 | 5.2% | R+13 |
| 17 | TX-27 | 5.2% | R+1 |
| 18 | NY-03 | 5.1% | D+2 |
| 19 | FL-20 | 5.1% | D+18 |
| 20 | NJ-02 | 5.1% | D+4 |
I see four different trends at work here… none of which indicate a potentially damaging long-term trends in any of these areas.
1) 9-11 districts, for want of a better word. These are white ethnic districts in the New York metro area (and where retirees from these districts are found, i.e. the Jersey Shore and Broward County, Florida) where the impacts of 9-11 were felt the most, both actually and in terms of perception, and there was a rally-around-the-President effect (whether it was out of fear or jingoism is unclear, but it’s not likely to be as much of a factor next time).
2) Tennessee, where Gore benefited (somewhat) from favorite son status and Kerry necessarily fell off.
3) Predominantly white districts in Oklahoma and Alabama, two states that the Kerry campaign essentially wrote off and where highbrow Yankees are particularly unlikely to play well. Not so much of a problem if we have a presidential candidate running a 50-state strategy this time.
4) Certain heavily Latino districts in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and southern California suburbs, where apparently Bush’s Latino outreach efforts paid off some dividends. These districts already lean a bit more conservative than the more urban heavily Latino districts, and at any rate, with the 2006 election as an indicator, the GOP’s new tactics on immigration are likely to wipe out these gains and then some.
Biggest gains:
| Rank | District | % change | PVI |
| 1 | VT-AL | 8.3% | D+8 |
| 2 | CA-06 | 8.2% | D+21 |
| 3 | MN-05 | 8.2% | D+21 |
| 4 | CA-01 | 8.0% | D+10 |
| 5 | AK-AL | 7.9% | R+14 |
| 6 | CA-08 | 7.5% | D+36 |
| 7 | CO-01 | 7.5% | D+18 |
| 8 | WA-07 | 7.4% | D+30 |
| 9 | GA-13 | 7.4% | D+12 |
| 10 | CA-09 | 7.4% | D+38 |
I decided to stick with only 10 on this table because these aren’t as surprising: strongly Dem, mostly urban districts where there was a strong Nader effect in 2000 and most left-leaning voters returning to Kerry in 2004. The only exceptions are Alaska (again, explained by the lack of Nader) and GA-13, a suburban district where the African-American percentage of the population has shot up tremendously.
I decided that the presence of Nader’s thumb on the scales was making the biggest-gainer numbers too uninteresting, and I re-ran the numbers to see if anything changed based on using Kerry/Bush and Gore/Bush head-to-heads rather than total votes. Nothing really changed with the biggest drops (except ultra-liberal NY-08, Jerry Nadler’s district (and where the WTC actually was), wormed its way onto the list).
A lot changed with the biggest gainers, though. The biggest gainer is the aforementioned GA-13. Alaska and Vermont are still on the list, indicating that they really did like Kerry better than Gore (or at least started hating Bush a lot more). But most of the other gainers are southern districts where the racial demographics are changing rapidly, becoming much less white: TN-09, NC-12 (both of which are already solid D), TX-07, TX-10, and TX-32 (all of which are solid R… for now).
I really expected to see a big increase in NY, NJ, and CT for Bush but his results defined “normal.” Bush’s vote nationally increased by 22.95% (Kery’s was up by 15.73% over Gore). In NY (+23.27%), NJ (+30.05%) and CT (+23.66%) Bush did not experience a surge but Kerry (+5.02%, +6.85%, +5.08%) not only inderperformed Bush, he underperformed his national numbers.
Florida was another story. Both Bush and Kerry outperformed their national levels. Kerry added 670,000 votes (+23.05%) but Bush added more than a million (+36.11%).
I think what you don’t quite factor in is (a) that both sides generally found every voter leaning their way in swing states, and (b) Republicans pretty much found every persuadable social conservative who tended not to vote.
Kerry underperformed somewhat in seriously Blue States; he could have gotten hundreds of thousands or a million, possibly two, more votes there.
He’s been pilloried for losing, or not as efficiently turning out, Democrats in hardcore Red States. The talk is always of him being a Northeastern liberal and whatnot, but it’s probably fairer to say that Republicans simply completed their taking over/’realignment’ of the federal level voting of social conservative self-identifying Democrats.
I think we got simply a hard shaking out of the electorate in the ’04 elections. National Republicans completed their realignment of Old Democrats and mobilizing their leaners among Independents. Democrats finished bleeding off the white conservatives that had been leaving them in bursts since 1966 and 1977 and made room for the young, more liberal generation just starting to get involved in politics.
Since November 2004 it’s been a pretty linear upward trend from the results then for Democrats- Republicans lose more “base” as old voters die, and Democrats gain on a pretty large differential as young voters register. Boomers and Gen Xers are not switching parties much, or at least the Boomer trend to Republicans has ended and Gen Xers seem to be holding steady or even slipping slightly toward Democrats. Election splits are fairly predictable now- Democrats come in a few points above the ’04 split, increasing fairly linearly with time since then, and Republicans a correspondingly below.
is my district, let Bush run here now and see how much it swings back the other way, There were plenty of people who voted for Bush as a knee jerk reaction in 2004. It is, otherwise, solidly Democratic.
The problem I sense here now is that Obama isn’t too popular and McCain and Hillary are.