Swinging Liberals and Reagan Resentment
Lee on Jan 21 2008 at 9:36 am | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Election 2008, Lee's Page
(photo: Marc Nozell)
Matt Stoller at OpenLeft has a pretty interesting observation about the swing of the self-described “very liberal” constituency from Obama to Hillary over the course of the primaries:
In Iowa, Obama beat Clinton by 16 points among those who consider themselves as ‘very liberal’. In New Hampshire, they were even. And now in Nevada, Clinton simply destroyed Obama within that block by 16 points. In other words, while it’s not entirely clear who ‘won’ Nevada, whatever that means, had Obama run even with Clinton among those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal’, he would have soundly defeated her at the caucuses outright instead of having to play delegate games.
(OpenLeft via Corrente)
Matt goes on to make the argument that Obama’s recent praise of the Reagan legacy was the catalyst for Obama’s defeat. Overall Matt’s grinding old ideological axes a bit too hard here, given that this would clearly fail to answer how the trend he identified managed to precede Obama’s remarks on Reagan. But he is onto something at the margins. It would be interesting if Obama was losing the “very liberals” as Matt notes, among the aging and still resentful leftists who were adults during the Reagan era.
While Hillary has always appealed to an older demographic on the Left, it merely got worse in Nevada. In New Hampshire Hillary won the 50s and 60s age brackets with 39% and 48%. But in Nevada she dominated this group, by 46% and 60%. People in their 50s in the 2000s were in their thirties in the 1980s, and thus in the midst of the most common life stage for reaching solidified political maturity. In your teens in 20s you flirted with the opposition, even had a fling or two with other partners, but in your 30s the odds are high you’re married to a party and an ideology. Matt might have a marginal case that the Reagan praise couldn’t have helped with this old, bitter, liberal group. A group that has essentially led entire adult lives of political failure at the hands of Reaganauts and the Reagan-influenced Democratic reformers.
Amusingly though, after making this persuasive point, Matt gets swept up in his own argument and launches into a deranged rant against Ronald Reagan and his “psychologically diseased followers and predecessors” because they “started the Confederacy and fought for slavery.”
While his understanding of history and the history political philosophy in the United States might be comically ridiculous and fantastically misinformed, the furious strength of this hostility to Reagan and Republicans of any kind is not uncommon for the demographic we have in mind here, despite post-1990s, pro-market makeover of the DNC (or perhaps because of it).
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