Are We All Identicrats Now?

Exit polls, now more extensive and detailed than ever, make it easy for post-election analysts to focus on – whatever the exit polls happen to have asked about. That means, primarily, age, sex, race, ethnicity and income. There were a few questions about issues, too, but the average data digger thinks that Obama’s margin among Asian-Americans is far, far more important than the voters’ opinions on the size of government or the relative merits of tax increases and spending cuts.

As the data are sliced and diced mostly by “identity” categories, it’s not surprising that the explanations of the results and prescriptions for future strategy tend to emphasize questions like, How can Republicans get a bigger share of the Hispanic vote? What’s the best way to appeal to young, unmarried women? And so forth.

Yet, if one truly believes that the United States is a balkan-like patchwork of “identities”, more like the Hapsburg Empire than the melting pot, isn’t the most striking fact the inability of the Democratic Party to hold its own among non-Hispanic whites, who make up three-quarters of the electorate? White male voters, a group with whom President Obama fared particularly poorly, by themselves outnumber blacks, Hispanics and Asians combined. So do white Evangelical Christians, another non-Obama-voting bloc.

From the identicratic point of view, the Republican Party’s path to victory lies in carving off small segments of the pro-Democratic identities. Incongruously, most of those who follow this line wind up proposing to impel these minor changes in electoral preference through major changes to the GOP’s traditional positions: Support same-sex marriage, downplay the youth vote, raise taxes on the “rich”, back immigration reform, and so on.

Does that make any sense? Let’s look at immigration reform, an idea that I support. Done right, it’s good policy, on economic, humanitarian and national security grounds. But how many Hispanic voters are sticking with the Democratic Party solely because of the Republican stance on immigration (which is, let’s remember, the stance of only slightly over half the party; there are plenty of pro-immigration GOP’ers)? Hispanics who care strongly about immigration also overwhelmingly believe that big government will make their lives better. The DREAM Act or amnesty or a “path to citizenship” won’t win them over to the party that espouses the opposite opinion.

Might it not be more profitable to pursue the cadre of voters who agreed with Mitt Romney’s positions on the key issues but voted for Barack Obama nevertheless, without fixating on their race, sex, age or parents’ native tongue? If everyone who thinks that the federal government should do less or that spending cuts are a better cure for deficits than tax increases had chosen Romney, the election wouldn’t have been close. As to what kept those potential supporters away, the cross-tabs on the polls aren’t fine-grained enough to tell us. I suspect, though, that it had more to do with doubts about whether a President Romney would be vastly different from the incumbent than with concern over the legal status of same-sex unions.