Centerfield

In a party that includes substantial numbers of blacks and Hispanics, the Dean Democrats are overwhelmingly white -- 92 percent, according to the survey -- and constitute what could be described as part of the American elite. More than half (54 percent) hold post-graduate degrees and a quarter have graduated from college. Almost one in three (29 percent) have household incomes of more than $100,000 annually.

Just about the textbook definition of the "limousine liberal!" (One suspects that the college stats are inverted, as it's kinda tough to get that postgrad degree without first graduating from college.) These are indeed the cognitive elite that Herrnstein and Murray wrote about in their book, The Bell Curve. Among the things noted by Herrnstein and Murray was that the "cognitive elite" would trend towards isolationism and a loss of realism, developing an unrealistic and utopian view of public policy.

Hmmm.....

Posted by: Tully at April 7, 2005 02:35 PM

Tully,

The problem you've identified is one I see, which is that such post-graduate liberals make policy based on what might work in a community made up of themselves and people like them. Such policies often do work in places like Cambridge or Madison, where post-graduates outnumber high school dropouts. But when they "go national" the policies are rejected by the public.

Posted by: rickheller at April 7, 2005 02:52 PM

I don't want my party being dragged further left when it's clear that mainstream Americans are in the center.

Posted by: Daniel at April 7, 2005 02:58 PM

It's no surprise to me that Dean' hardcore supporters embraced him as the great white hope. I hope these true believers don't turn Dean into a demagogue, because his history and experience is really not as someone that is especially hard left. My sense is that he was embraced in large part as the most reasonable hope of the anti-war left. And he has populist appeal.

Contra the idea that Dean's supporters need to find ways to bring the center over to their way of thinking, I'd say that I hope Dean can bring his supporters over to a more centrist way of thinking.

Tully, bringing up H&M's bell curve? Why you GOP tool, you.

Posted by: bk at April 7, 2005 03:45 PM

People try to put us d-down
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we get around
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

Why don't you all f-fade away
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
And don't try to dig what we all s-s-say
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

Posted by: c3 at April 7, 2005 07:53 PM

What is the basis for this statement from Dan Balz?

"who now constitute the most liberal faction of the Democratic Party."

More liberal than Kuccinich supporters; more liberal than Jackson or Sharpton supporters.

Posted by: Bruce W. at April 7, 2005 08:53 PM

Only Balz knows for sure, but after reading the report I'd say that they couldn't find enough Sharpton and Kucinich supporters to measure that with any statistical validity. How big does a faction need to be before counts as a faction? A million? A thousand? One?

So, Brain, where's my check? I don't tool for free! Tell Karl I WANT MY MONEY! Cash works even better.

Posted by: Tully at April 7, 2005 09:24 PM

One finding of the Pew Survey that Mr. Balz might have mentioned if he had wanted to write a more interesting (and less conventional) article on the Pew Survey was that while Dean supporters were far more likely to oppose the Iraq War than Democrats generally, they are also less inclined to support a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq than other Democrats. Democrats favored withdrawing troops from Iraq by a 31% margin, while surveyed Dean supporters favored that action by only a 7% margin. Interesting.

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=240 (see second table down on right)

Posted by: Bruce W at April 7, 2005 10:44 PM

The best quote is about why they think Dean lost. It perfectly shows the problems with the Democratic party, and why I fear they might not return to a Congressional majority for a while:

Nine-in-ten Dean activists blame Dean's loss in the primaries on "negative news coverage." Many also pointed to perceptions that Dean was not electable (73%). While a third blamed Dean's campaign performance, just 19% pointed to Dean's policy stances as a reason he lost.

Let me paraphrase that: "Waaaaah!" It shows quite a lot of elitism to think that all the primary voters were somehow fooled into not voting for somebody who was close to perfect on policy.

I traced Dean's loss directly to his promise to repeal all of the Bush tax cuts, and I think the voters might have even gone away from Dean from a perception that he might actually raise taxes. Kerry, who promised to only repeal part of them got a little further, and Bush who promised to make them permanent won the whole thing.

Another curiosity I found was what they labeled themselves:

The activists overwhelmingly think of themselves as progressives (90%) and most describe themselves as patriots (80%). More than half (55%) call themselves fiscal conservatives.

What? They are fiscally conservative progressives?!? That's almost a flat out contradiction. The whole language of "fiscally conservative" has become corrupt. It used to mean those stingy with spending and wanted low taxes. Think of the libertarian Cato Institute. Now it means those who want to raises taxes.

Posted by: jjayson at April 8, 2005 12:24 AM

Let me paraphrase that: "Waaaaah!"

Yeah, the Dean crew is a bunch of whiners, after all I've never heard the right complain about biased media coverage. At least they haven't complained in the last hour or so.

Posted by: fledermaus at April 8, 2005 01:22 AM

Yep, there are many Deanites who think he must've lost because us Democrats won't allow people with reasonable views to run. But at the same time, many of these same people thought one reason Dean could win was that he had moderate issues. Heh.

Of course, he was having it both ways, and you can't get away with that these days. Sometimes I wonder if William Jennings Bryan got away with that very thing.

Posted by: Jon Kay at April 8, 2005 04:20 AM

Boy, I strongly disagree with the notion that Dean lost in the primaries because of his stated policies. That is not directly true, in my opinion.

I think he lost due to the timidity or pragmatism of moderate democrats, depending on how you wanna color it. Moderate democrats that simply wanted ANY democrat in the White House (to replace evil Bush) chose the guy they perceived as the most electable. So I think many democrats who agreed with the substance of Dean's views went with Kerry anyway because they felt Dean would have gotten crushed in the general election.

Now such views are in fact related to Dean's policies, because mod dems must have felt Deans policies wouldn't fly in the gen elec, and that it was more important to elect ANY democrat to replace Bush.

My point is that this notion fits in much better with the "liberal elite" hypothesis than the notion that he lost because his policies didn't match the views of primary voters. Because many, especially in the Dean wing, this so-called cognitive elite, think they are right and the rest of America is wrong on policy. But the cognitive elite still want to win.

Posted by: bk at April 8, 2005 08:51 AM

I think/hope Dean lost because he basically had a bunch of crazy ideas and started telling people all of them, even when they contradicted each other. I suppose that could count as his policies.

Publicly losing his composure, to put it politely, surely didn't help either.

Posted by: Justin at April 8, 2005 11:29 AM

jjayson --

I traced Dean's loss directly to his promise to repeal all of the Bush tax cuts, and I think the voters might have even gone away from Dean from a perception that he might actually raise taxes.

Nonsense. For one thing, Dean lost the primary, not the general election. I seriously doubt even a tiny minority of Democratic primary voters voted against Dean because they were afraid he would raise taxes.

Calling Dean's policy positions outrageous is just silly. His domestic policy proposals were just a shade more progressive than Kerry's -- which are, last and every time I've checked, far more popular than Bush's.

Dean lost the primary for the same reason he was vaulted into the spotlight in the first place: his position on Iraq and the war on terror. It's security and military issues, not domestic issues, where the Republicans enjoy an electoral advantage.

Posted by: Tom Strong at April 8, 2005 03:02 PM

Tom, one of the hardest things to do is have self-introspection. This is true for all of us. If you asked people why they voted the way they did, I promise you the answer you received wouldn't be correct. I used to see this every day when I was a software engineer. You never asked the prospective users what they wanted, because they never knew themselves.

Individuals may not be able to tell you why they voted -- just like my users -- but the electorate as a whole is a very efficient policy weighing machine, the best ever devised. And the electorate will not vote against its best interests.

Calling Dean's policy positions outrageous is just silly. His domestic policy proposals were just a shade more progressive than Kerry's -- which are, last and every time I've checked, far more popular than Bush's.

No, they aren't. Polls are terrible for guaging the electorate because of how suspectible they are to a variety of problems such as signaling and how they lack thought behind them. People tend not to think for a poll, just giving a quick answer, but an election is an entirely different thing where policies get hashed out in everywhere from the media to the gym for months before hand.

A great example of this was universal health insurance in Oregon. Polls consistenly showed large public support for universal coverage, but when it came up to a public vote -- where coverage is no longer in a vacuum but attached to reality and all the negatives associated with it such as cost -- the referendum went down by a 2-to-1 margin. Even afer the vote, polls still showed support for universal health insurance, but if you had another referendum, I guarantee it would go down again.

As long as the Dems try to write their platforms by looking at polls and not truly understanding the electorate, wins will be few.

Some of the best leaders have beed excellent at discerning the will of the people without having to look at the morning's polling report.

Dean lost the primary for the same reason he was vaulted into the spotlight in the first place: his position on Iraq and the war on terror. It's security and military issues, not domestic issues, where the Republicans enjoy an electoral advantage.

Quite the contradtion. First you look to the polls to say that Kerry's domestic platform was more liked than Bush's. Now you don't look at the polls that show how people had a negative opinion of the war. (Of course to be consistent, I think those war support polls aren't very accurate either, being higly likely to show people's desire to show positive public support for our troops while they have a private opinion much more negative.) Posted by: jjayson at April 9, 2005 01:33 AM

jjayson --

You raise a good point about polls, which I (and the Democratic Party) should probably be more careful in invoking (Curiously, Matt Yglesias makes a similar point about them on his weblog this morning). However, on the issue of why Dean lost, you're still wrong.

In case you missed it the first time, let me remind you again: the people who vote in the Democratic Presidential Primaries are, by and large, Democratic voters. And Democratic voters, by and large, are more likely to vote for a candidate who will increase their taxes (although they're even more likely to vote for a candidate who will increase other people's taxes). Moreover, the voters who turn out for a primary tend to be the most politically active and partisan voters. Finally, the idea that tax cuts are as popular as you seem to think they are remains very doubtful to me -- and thanks to your input here, I'm not going to accept polling data as evidence.

Individuals may not be able to tell you why they voted -- just like my users -- but the electorate as a whole is a very efficient policy weighing machine, the best ever devised. And the electorate will not vote against its best interests.

You also misunderstand my point here:

Quite the contradtion. First you look to the polls to say that Kerry's domestic platform was more liked than Bush's. Now you don't look at the polls that show how people had a negative opinion of the war.

I'm not saying that Dean lost because people had a negative opinion about the war. I am saying that Dean rose to prominence because he enunciated a strong anti-Iraq-war view that resonated with a bunch of activist voters (the Deaniacs in this study). They were not enough to carry him through the primary, however -- in part because the majority of Democrats had more conflicted views of the war, and in part because Democrats worried about Dean's -- yes -- electability.

He was a yuppie draft-dodger with a strong anti-war stance, going up an incumbent wartime president with a fervent base. The vast majority of primary voters -- including myself -- ended up voting against him and for Kerry for this simple reason. I don't think you can underestimate how much this was on people's minds at the time.

Generally speaking, you are right that Dean's policy positions hurt him, as long as you include foreign policy in that. But unless you have some other evidence that you're not sharing, tracing it back to the tax cuts seems indefensible to me. The fact that Dean would have raised everyone's taxes was not in the forefront of the news; it was not the subject of hundreds or thousands of opinion columns; it was not talked about, to any great extent, by rank-and-file Democrats. And no, people weren't polled on it either. But his position on Iraq was examined and dissected, in great depth, as far as the eye could see.

Finally, departing from politics to philosophy, I'm not sure what to say about your warning that people never know what they want, or why they vote the way they do. I think you're probably right in part, but I seriously doubt that you're completely right. I work in retail, and I have a suspicion that when it comes to retail, customers are much more likely to be able to articulate what they want. Maybe that's because retail is more transparent than software engineering to most people; maybe it's because retail shoppers have a greater tendency to shut up and shop. In any case, my business experience has been almost the precise opposite of yours. Our sales growth is almost always tied to developing a clearer picture of what our customers want, and suggestion boxes, membership meetings, and surveys all play a part in developing that picture.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments.

Posted by: Tom Strong at April 9, 2005 05:17 PM

In case I wasn't clear on why I chose the lyrics to my generation. I did so because the survey clearly pointed out that the core of the Deaniacs were white, anti-war baby-boomers. The 60's live!!! (And yes sir, that is my generation.)

Posted by: c3 at April 10, 2005 09:54 AM