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Out West

I’m not likely to take Ryan “Social Conservatives Have a Death-Grip on Republican Politics” Sager’s analysis seriously in any case, but as someone who hails from the “interior West” I am going to cry foul on any attempt to explain the political changes of the Southwest that does not so much as mention two obvious long-term demographic reasons for shifts […]

I’m not likely to take Ryan “Social Conservatives Have a Death-Grip on Republican Politics” Sager’s analysis seriously in any case, but as someone who hails from the “interior West” I am going to cry foul on any attempt to explain the political changes of the Southwest that does not so much as mention two obvious long-term demographic reasons for shifts in voting patterns: mass immigration from the south and, perhaps more immediately significant, considerable migration from California and other parts of the country to the interior West.  Our states are the places where the Californians frequently go when their cost of living became too expensive, and they then proceed to turn around and start trying to Californianise their new homes by reproducing the politics that had created the mess in California.  This may be exacerbated by new arrivals from the Northeast, but mitigated to some extent by people coming from the Rust Belt.  But that would require actual work, rather than recycling (yet again) the story about how the big, bad social conservatives lost the West.  To repeat this story of the GOP losing the “libertarian” West, you would have to ignore the rather large evangelical population in Colorado.  One might want to check changes in Colorado evangelical voting patterns against changes on the national level to see if the GOP is losing as many of these voters there as they are elsewhere.  As the cost of living goes up in the “interior West,” voting patterns probably have begun to follow the parts of the country where it is most expensive to live, and this means voting for Democrats who begin winning elections based on arguments for making this or that “more affordable.”  Tackling the question of how the population has changed over the last ten or twenty years in specific states would be a lot more useful and much more interesting than listening to a New Yorker raise vague alarms.  These are some of the structural changes that are driving the West towards the Democrats. 

More broadly, the “interior West” has experienced significant urban and suburban growth (mainly suburban), and to the extent that the GOP is losing the suburbs everywhere they are probably also losing some of them in the vicinities of some of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas, such as Phoenix and Las Vegas.  Albuquerque has been growing quickly, attracting a new wave of transplants who are reshaping the First District and making it increasingly likely that my home district will elect a Democrat for the first time.  Profound incompetence, corruption and bad policy at the national level, including but not limited to the war, have been contributing factors in driving suburbanites away from the GOP.   The GOP needs a policy agenda and a message that shows them to be the party of suburban America in what was already being called the “suburban century” 16 years ago.  As Schneider wrote back in 1992:

The prevailing imperative of suburban life is security–both economic and physical.  

For obvious reasons, it is this question of economic security that is especially important in this cycle.  As much as I like a message of limited government, I know, just as anyone who knows the first thing about the level of involvement of state and federal governments in the “interior West” understands, that this message is increasingly ineffective in winning electoral campaigns.  But it is also worth considering what kind of Democrats are winning in these states.  They tend to be centrist, tax-cutting and pro-business.  Even in New Mexico, Richardson has won both his elections by running and governing more or less as a centrist.  So it is not necessarily the case that the GOP needs to engage in a bidding war to preserve itself in the West. 

Keeping the Californians out, while desirable, is not really practicable, but immigration enforcement and control of the borders are possible–they are also exactly one of the things Sager thinks Republicans should give up.  Also, despite what Sager is saying, most of the “red” states of the interior West are not going to vote for a Democrat for President this year.  Sager misleadingly includes New Mexico in this group, as if the land of Tom Udall and Marty Chavez is a natural bastion for his brand of “libertarian” Republicanism, when it was something of a fluke of broader national trends that New Mexico had a Republican governor in 2000.  We have since reverted to the norm of electing Democratic governors, and we have not had a Republican majority in the Roundhouse since Hoover was in the White House.  So of course New Mexico is leaning towards the Democratic side right now–on every level except the federal, New Mexico is essentially a Democratic state.  However, in presidential elections New Mexico frequently aligns with national popular trends, which is why I would still insist that the presidential race is going to be much more difficult for the Democrats than most realise, since they are not polling all that well in a state where they ought to have every advantage. 

Update: McCain is already running general election ads in New Mexico (via Ambinder).  Like everything else McCain, it is awesomely devoid of policy content and focuses entirely on the use of patrotic sentiment and McCain’s military service.  In a state with a large military population, this sort of ad will probably work pretty well.  It also seems to be an indirect way of saying that Obama doesn’t believe all of the things about American goodness and honour that McCain does, and we can expect more of this for the next seven months.

P.S.  It’s also slightly worrisome that the actor (Powers Boothe) doing the voiceover played the crazy Vice President from season 6 of 24.  Does this mean that McCain is going to pick a Noah Daniels-like figure for his veep?

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