Source: Map via Gallup.

Mississippi is the first state with more than 50% conservative identification, with Idaho, Alabama, Wyoming, and Utah approaching that level, and Arkansas, South Carolina, North Dakota, Louisiana, and South Dakota (the rest of the top ten conservative states) 45% or higher. Conservatives outnumber liberals in even the most liberal-leaning states (excluding the District of Columbia): Vermont, (30.7% conservative to 30.5% liberal), Rhode Island (29.9% to 29.3%), and Massachusetts (29.9% to 28.0%).

Political commentators have long pointed to underlying social and economic sorting that underpins this growing conservative/ liberal divide.  But what factors account for the growing conservatism of Americans and American states?

With the help of my colleague Charlotta Mellander I decided to take a look. We ran a simple correlation analysis on the Gallup poll numbers, comparing conservative identification to a variety of key economic, demographic and cultural factors by state. As always, our analysis only points to associations between variables; we do not make any claims about causation and note that other factors that we have not looked at might come into play. Still, a number of intriguing findings cropped up.

Not surprisingly, states with more conservatives are considerably more religious than liberal-leaning states.  The correlation between conservative political affiliation and religion (the share of state population for which religion is an important part of daily life) is .63.

Conservative states are also less well-educated than liberal ones.  The correlation between conservative affiliation and human capital (that is, the percent of adults who have graduated college) is -.53.

States with more conservatives are less diverse.  Conservative political affiliation is highly negatively correlated with the percent of the population that are immigrants (-.59) or gay and lesbian (-.66).

Conservative states are more blue-collar.  Conservative political affiliation is strongly positively correlated with the percentage of the workforce in blue-collar occupations (.73) and highly negatively correlated with the proportion of the workforce engaged in knowledge based, professional and creative work (-.61).

States with more conservatives are considerably poorer than those with more liberals.  Conservative political affiliation is highly negatively correlated with income ( -.65) and even more so with hourly earnings (-.79). Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman’s influential book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State sheds light on this phenomenon. While rich voters trend Republican, Gelman and his colleagues found, rich states trend Democratic.

Conservatism, at least at the state level, appears to be growing stronger. Ironically, this trend is most pronounced in America’s least well-off, least educated, most blue collar, most economically hard-hit states. Conservativism, more and more, is the ideology of the economically left behind.  The current economic crisis only appears to have deepened conservatism’s hold on America’s states. This trend stands in sharp contrast to the Great Depression, when America embraced FDR and the New Deal.

Liberalism, which is stronger in richer, better-educated, more-diverse, and, especially, more prosperous places, is shrinking across the board and has fallen behind conservatism even in its biggest strongholds. This obviously poses big challenges for liberals, the Obama admiration and the Democratic Party moving forward.

But, the much bigger long-term danger is economic rather than political. This ideological state of affairs advantages the policy preferences of poorer, less innovative states over wealthier, more innovative, open and productive ones. American politics is increasingly disconnected from its economic engine.  And this deepening political divide has become perhaps the biggest bottleneck on the road to long-run prosperity.

“The bitter political standoff in Wisconsin over Governor Scott Walker’s bid to sharply curtail collective bargaining for public-sector workers ended abruptly Wednesday night as Republican colleagues in the State Senate successfully maneuvered to adopt a bill doing just that,” The New York Times reports this morning. “Democrats….condemned the move as an attack on working families, a violation of open meetings requirements….and a virtual firebomb in state that already found itself politically polarized and consumed with recall efforts, large scale protests and fury from public workers.” Rallies and demonstrations continue in the state.

As heated as it’s been, the rhetoric over unions is fast-approaching the boiling point; Wisconsin is just the beginning. The right accuses unions, especially public sector unions, of stifling economic competitiveness and putting state economies in the red. “The bottom line is we are trying to balance our budget and there really is no room to negotiate on that because we’re broke,” Scott Walker told George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America. Or as Harvard economist Robert Barro wrote in the The Wall Street Journal: “Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion .…[but] collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty.”

On the left, unions are seen as a bulwark against falling wages and the decline of the middle class. “Collective bargaining didn’t cause the economic meltdown, and crushing unions won’t solve it,” Paul Toner, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, protested in The Boston Globe. In a passionate defense of unions on the op ed page of The Washington Post, Yale’s Jacob S. Hacker and Berkeley’s Paul Pierson pointed out that unions “have resisted the rampant deregulation of financial markets and the soaring growth of executive pay. They have been one of the few organized voices that has consistently pressed back against the string of tax-cut bills for the rich that began in the late 1970s.”  

For all the sound and fury, neither side has adduced much hard data to support their positions. While there have been many studies of the effects of unions on corporate profits and productivity, surprisingly few assess their effects on state economies.  (One exception is a careful 1988 study by Harvard labor economist Richard Freeman, “Union Density and Economic Performance,” which finds that union density improves earnings and income, but exacerbates unemployment and hurts growth.) But that was over twenty years ago. And so, with my colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute, I decided to take a close look at current data and trends for unions across the 50 states.

For starters, there’s huge variation in unionization levels across the U.S. states (see map above).  Nationally, nearly 12 percent (11.9%) of workers are union members. New York touts the highest level of unionization in the nation, more than double the national rate at 24.2% percent. More than one in five workers are union members in Alaska (22.9%) and Hawaii (21.8%).  Unionization tops 15 percent in an additional ten states, and it’s above 10 percent in 14 more. Wisconsin ranks 17^th in union membership, less than 15 percent (14.2%) of its workforce are union members.

On the other side of the ledger, just 3.2 percent of North Carolina’s workforce is unionized.  Union members make up less than one in 20 workers in Georgia (4%), Arkansas (4%), Louisiana (4.3%), Mississippi (4.5%), Virginia and South Carolina (4.6%) and Tennessee (4.7%). While the conventional wisdom is that large numbers of workers are unionized in the Rustbelt states, that’s more of a myth than reality. Less than one in five workers in Michigan (16.75%) belong to unions. The rate is 15.5% in Illinois, 14.7% in Pennsylvania, and 13.7% in Ohio.

Unionization has fallen off massively in the past fifty years or so. Part of this is doubtless due to the transformation of the American economy from one that was primarily industrial to one that is more knowledge and service based.  Still the numbers are staggering (see the graph above).

Nationally, the percentage of union members declined by almost 20 percentage points (17.4) from 1964 to 2010. This drop has been much more pronounced in certain states, especially the older industrial states (see the map below).  Union membership fell by more than 30 percentage points in Indiana, from 40.8% to 10.9%; from 39.9% to 7.3% in New Jersey and from 36.5% to 4.6% in West Virginia. Ten additional states posted declines of 20 percent or more. Wisconsin saw its rate of union membership fall from 34 to 14 percent. And 25 others saw declines of more than ten percentage points.

All the posturing and sound byte-ready rhetoric aside, how do unions line up against key measures of state economic health?  Are more unionized states less competitive, as right wing critics would have us believe? Conversely, do unions provide a bulwark against unemployment and other adverse economic outcomes?

Relying on the steady statistical hand of my collaborator Charlotta Mellander, we examined the relationships between state unionization levels and key measures of state economies. As always, we remind our readers that correlation is not causation—we are simply looking at associations. Nonetheless, they tell a very different story than the ones you’re most likely to hear.

Unionized states are better-off economically than non-unionized states.  While it’s probably not surprising that unionization levels are correlated with higher hourly wages (.48), they are also correlated with higher incomes across the board—and the correlation between union membership and median income is substantial (.45). To put it baldly, unions are associated with the country’s economic winners, not its losers.   And it’s not that unionized states work more—unionization is negatively correlated with hours worked (-.36). States with higher levels of union membership work less hours per week but make more money—higher levels of union memberships are positively correlated with wage per hour (.48).

That said, unionization does not appear to mitigate the effects of inequality or to protect against unemployment, according to our analysis. There is no correlation whatsoever between union membership and income inequality. Union membership is not correlated with unemployment, either.

Unions are usually thought to go along with blue-collar working class jobs.  But that’s not the case either, at least for state economies.  Union membership is negatively correlated with the proportion of blue-collar, working class jobs in a state (-.48). This too is a likely consequence of the ongoing transformation of the U.S. economy. As manufacturing unions have declined, service and public workers unions have grown.

To that point, unionization levels are higher in states with more highly educated workforces and knowledge based economies. Union membership is moderately correlated (.3) with both human capital levels (the percent of adults with a college degree) and the share of the workforce in knowledge, professional, and creative jobs (.35). More surprising, unionization is even more highly correlated with the percentage of the workforce in artistic and culturally creative jobs (.53). This is not to say that artistic and culturally creative workers are more likely to belong to  unions (though some, like actors and musicians, do) but rather that states with more dynamic creative economies are also more likely to be highly unionized.  It’s also worth pointing out that unionization is more likely in states with higher levels of immigrants. Union membership is closely correlated with the share of adults that are foreign born (.42).

Unions continue to be a hot button issue in American politics despite the fact that the level of unionization has fallen precipitously over the past half century.  While many continue to think of unions as the province of blue-collar working class economies, less than one in five workers in Rustbelt states – Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio—belongs to a union. Union states have more knowledge-intensive economies, boast more highly educated workforces, and have higher incomes as well.

The basic fact that unions are positively associated with so many key measures of prosperity suggests that their existence has little to do with state budget problems. Unions are not the cause of the serious economic and fiscal problems that are challenging so many American states, which are result of the economic crisis, collapsed housing market and massively reduced revenues. In fact, the economic influence of unions has been dramatically curtailed as a result of the ongoing transformation of the U.S. economy. At the same time, the existence of unions does not appear to be enough to forestall growing income inequality within the U.S. states.

It’s time to get beyond the angry, ideologically motivated rhetoric about unions. We need to put our fiscal house in order and buckle down to the serious business of generating good jobs; more than that, we need to reinvent the U.S. economy for this new age.

Here’s the longer, unedited version of my column published in today’s The Daily Beast – It Wasn’t About the Economy, Stupid.

The conventional wisdom among pundits, pollsters, and political analysts is that the Republican victory in the midterms represents a referendum on – and a stunning of repudiation of – the Obama administration’s stewardship of the economy. “U.S. registered voters choose economic conditions by nearly a 2-to-1 margin over any of four other key election issues as the most important to their vote for Congress,” according to a Gallup organization analysis, a result that held “across all partisan groups.”

But the geographic patterns of Tuesday’s historic election results reveal a curious paradox. While the economy was clearly the voters’ number one concern, economic conditions alone cannot explain why they cast their ballots as they did. A Wall Street Journal analysis of House races found that Democrats held onto their seats in congressional districts that were feeling the recession the worst. “Of the 25 congressional districts hit hardest by the recession—measured by joblessness, poverty rates, and housing prices—16 are currently represented by Democrats. Fourteen of them won re-election despite the Republican tide.”

Economic factors did not drive state-wide races for Senate or governor either. Democrats, for instance, held onto governorships in the blue states of New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland, and they won a victory in California even though it has taken a tremendous economic hit. Despite the massive Republican pickup in the House and smaller gains in the Senate and governors races, the American electoral map continues to reflect its long-held red versus blue shading.

Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman’s influential book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State sheds light on this conundrum. Rich voters trend Republican, Gelman and his colleagues found, while rich states trend Democratic. My own earlier analysis of polling data suggested that short-term economic factors like the unemployment rate or changes in housing values provided little explanation of state favorites for Senate or governor, while more deep-seated structural factors like income, social class, attitudes toward religion, and openness toward immigrants as well as gays and lesbians were more likely to hold sway.

With the help of my colleague Charlotta Mellander, I took a close look at factors associated with the recession’s impact – like the change in unemployment and in housing prices since the onset of the crisis — that might have influenced voters. We also looked at income and several other structural variables. In The Emerging Democratic Majority, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued that Democrats have gained an advantage by adding the wealthier knowledge workers who cluster in urban centers to their historic base among poorer populations and minority groups. On the red side of the divide, blue-collar working class voters have been shifting into the Republican column. Taking this into account, we examined the relations of work and class and partisan choice. Following Ronald Inglehart’s lead, we also looked at the relations between religious values, tolerance, and political preferences. Confining our analysis to state-wide Senate and gubernatorial races, we conducted a basic correlation analysis and compared the results for the current midterm. We also compared the midterm pattern to the state-by-state vote for Obama and McCain in the 2008 presidential race.  As always, we caution readers not to make too much of these findings. The size of the sample is small, and our analysis can only identify relationships among variables, and in no way implies causation. Still, a number of very interesting patterns emerge.

Despite all the hubbub about the economy, we found no evidence at all that short-term economic factors – unemployment and housing prices – significantly shaped state-wide voting patterns for either party. This is not to say that short-term economic factors did not matter at the margin: Clearly, election returns and exit polls showed that many individuals shifted their 2008 Democratic vote to a Republican one in the midterms. But, at the state level, deeper-seated factors remained by far the dominant factor.

Income and class remain important, but less so than in the ‘08 presidential race. Higher-income states went for Obama, while lower-income states went for McCain. This trend continued to hold for Senate races, with higher-income states voting Democrat and lower-incomes states trending Republican, but not for gubernatorial races.

Class also continues to play a role, though its relation was less evident than it was in ‘08.  Obama took states where knowledge workers and the creative class – which makes up roughly  a third of the workforce and includes workers in science and technology; business and management; law; arts, culture, media, and entertainment; health care and education – comprise a larger share of the workforce, while McCain took blue-collar working class states. The creative class was more split in the midterms, and significant segments of it shifted from Obama and the Democrats to the Republicans. While a considerable change from ‘08, it is not surprising, as many creative class voters tend to be independent and more candidate-centered. While the correlation between creative class states and Democrats remained positive, it was not statistically significant. Blue-collar working class states were positively associated with Republican Senate votes and negatively associated with votes for Senate Democrats.

Religious orientation remains a key pivot point in America’s cultural and political divide.  In 2008, more religious states went for McCain and less religious states went for Obama. This pattern continues to hold for the Senate, though not for governors’ races. Religion is positively associated with both Republican votes for Senate and negatively associated with Democrat votes for Senate. (Our religion variable is from Gallup polls that ask individuals if religion is an important part of their everyday life.)

From Tom Tancredo in Colorado to Carl Paladino in New York, we’re constantly reminded that immigration and gay rights remain significant wedge issues in American politics. (We used the percentage of immigrants and gays and lesbians in states as proxy measures for openness). Salient in 2008, openness toward gays and lesbians and toward immigrants were again among the most important factors in state partisan patterns. States with higher percentages of gays and lesbians and higher percentages of immigrants went for Obama in 2008 while those with lower percentages went for McCain, and these trends also continue to hold. Immigrants appear to have a more substantial relation with votes in Democratic states, while gay and lesbians have a more noticeable association with Republican states. States with larger percentages of immigrants were more likely to vote Democratic in both Senate and governor races. The percentage of immigrants was negatively associated with Republican votes for Senate but not significantly associated with Republican votes for governor.  The percentage of gay and lesbian residents in a state was negatively associated with Republican votes for both Senate and governor, and it was positively associated with the Democratic votes for Senate but not significantly associated with Democratic votes for governor

But, the strongest factor of all in our analysis was the red-blue pattern itself. States that voted for Obama in ‘08 tended to elect Democrats to Senate and governor, while those that went for McCain again went for Republicans. The correlations were significant for both Senate and governor races across both parties, though they were about twice as powerful for Senate races.

The upshot of this could not be clearer. We witnessed no massive realigning of the electoral map; instead, America remains divided along the same political, cultural, and economic axes. Richer states are still more likely to be Democratic and poorer ones Republican. But it’s about more than just money. The creative class might have split its vote to some degree, but working class states continue to trend red, while states with higher percentages of immigrants and especially gays and lesbians continue to tack Democratic.

Of course economic conditions do play a role in elections and this one is no exception. Obama benefited strongly from the support of the creative class in 2008; economic conditions have considerably tempered their enthusiasm this time around. And “throw the bums out” inevitably takes a greater toll on the party in power.

But a discernible political pattern remains, one that is etched in a deep class divide that is rooted in the very structure of our economy. It’s not just that more educated, higher income, knowledge workers prefer to live in denser cities and metro areas on the coasts. The logic of an idea-driven economy generates innovation and productivity by concentrating them there. But just as the economy benefits from the concentration of human capital and the creative class in tighter, spikier geographic locations, our political system penalizes it, as evidenced by the big swaths of red in the less densely populated states and the smaller specks of blue on America’s new electoral map.

And this political reality handicaps the nation’s ability to address the very serious economic problems it faces. In previous periods of economic crisis and transformation, like the Long Depression of the late 19th century and the Great Depression of the 1930s, America benefited from the “critical realignments” that were long ago identified by Walter Dean Burnham, which recast the electorate to create more stable governing and policy coalitions. These political realignments shift the power balance between the parties and, in doing so, provide the political underpinnings for the major changes in public policy that are needed to help the nation adjust to structural economic change.

Though our economy is currently in the midst of a similar great reset today, our politics reflect what Burnham called an “unstable equilibrium.” In fact, the overlay of class and geographic divides, combined with Washington’s inability to get much done, creates an especially volatile backlash-gridlock-backlash partisan cycle. Democratic anger at Bush motivated massive voter enthusiasm in the ‘06 and ‘08 cycles among Democrat-leaning groups. The same kind of mobilization was apparent not just in the Tea Party but in Republican-leaning groups this cycle.  According to a November 2 Gallup poll, 63 percent of Republicans surveyed reported that they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting — an all-time high. Americans are most enthusiastic about voting when they feel the least empowered – it is hardly an inspiring picture.  This backlash cycle is chronically unstable. No sooner is a new administration or a new congressional majority in place than anger begins to mount on the other side and the cycle begins again. To match our unstable economy, we have an unstable political system.

The consequences of this backlash-gridlock cycle extend far beyond politics, paralyzing America’s ability to deal with the deep and fundamental economic issues it faces. Just when the United States needs bold, forward-looking leadership which can develop broad efforts to renew the economy, upgrade jobs, spur innovations, and address mounting inequality, it is stymied by a volatile political system propelled by anger and backlash, leaving it with gridlock and inertia.

They keep rolling in (h/t Chris Hardwicke). And they continue to reinforce the depth of the class divide.

Here’s a map of the final vote count for Toronto’s mayoral election this past Monday (via Torontoist). It shows the share of votes by ward. Note the strong inverted T pattern radiating out from the center.

Check out more maps being posted at Torontoist. Even more maps here.

With the midterm elections only two weeks away and the Democrats in jeopardy, the prevailing wisdom is that the election will be a referendum on the Obama administration’s stewardship of the economy. A large fraction of 2008 Obama voters now cite the economy and jobs as the key reason they will vote Republican this year, according to an October 17 AP poll. “The president must zero in on the economy if he wants to help himself and his party,” writes Eleanor Clift. The basic notion here, promulgated by pundits and political analysts, is that the current political environment turns on the vagaries of the economy. This amounts to a cyclical theory of American politics. And, in fact, several decades ago, the political scientist Douglas Hibbs advanced his seminal theory of the “political business cycle” which argues that economic movements have a sizable effect on American elections.

But another line of thinking suggests that American politics turns on deeper structural changes in economy and society. In the influential Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman and his colleagues uncovered a paradox that both confirms and defies the conventional wisdom about American elections. While rich voters trend Republican, rich states trend Democratic, he found. The opposite holds as well. Though poor and minority voters overwhelmingly pull the lever for Democrats, poor states consistently end up in the Republican column. A second version of the structural approach comes from John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, who argue in The Emerging Democratic Majority that the rise of the post-industrial economy has tilted the playing field toward Democrats who gain advantage in wealthier urban “ideopolises” while holding onto the votes of the poor and minorities. A third perspective comes from Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan, whose detailed World Values Surveys identify a shift in political culture from the more traditional, religious, and materialist orientations of the industrial age to post-materialist values of self-expression, openness to diversity, secularism, and broad public goods like concern for the environment.

~ ~ ~

This juxtaposition thus mirrors the debate over the economy: Will shorter-term cyclical factors determine the outcomes of the mid-terms or are deeper structural factors at play?

With the help of my colleague Charlotta Mellander, I decided to take an empirical look at this question. On the one hand, we considered a series of key cyclical variables such as the unemployment rate and its change since the economic crisis began, and also housing prices and their change since the bubble burst. And, on the other hand, we considered key structural factors, such as income a la Gelman, post-industrialism a la Judis and Teixeira (measuring the prevalence of creative class jobs versus working class jobs), and post-materialist political values a la Inglehart, including the prevalence of religion and openness to both immigrants and gays and lesbians. We confined our analysis to the state level, using pooled polling data for both Senate and governor races across the country, which we drew from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight election forecasts at The New York Times. We conducted a basic correlation analysis and compare the results for the current midterm to those for Obama and McCain in the 2008 presidential race. (The graph below summarizes the key findings). This kind of analysis can only point to associations between factors and does not identify any causal pattern, and of course other factors may come into play. Polling data covers a much smaller number of observations than election returns and suffers from other problems. For these reasons, we caution against drawing overly broad conclusions from this exercise. Still, the patterns it points to are quite interesting.

Despite all the “it’s the economy, stupid” hub-bub among the chattering classes, our analysis finds little empirical support for the cyclical view. There was no statistical association at all between the share of voters leaning Democrat or Republican for either Senate and governor races and our key cyclical factors – the unemployment rate, the change in the unemployment rate, housing values, or change in housing values. This is not to say that these factors do not matter at the margin, as polling data clearly tell us that  many individuals are shifting their 2008 Democratic vote to a Republican vote in these midterms.

But it’s structural factors on which this election is much more likely to turn. We find significant statistical associations between most of the structural variables in our analysis and the share of voters leaning Democrat or Republican in both Senate and governor races, as detailed below.

Income: Higher income states went for Obama in 2008 while lower income states went for McCain. The trend continues, even in light of the ongoing economic malaise. Income is positively associated with Democratic share for Senate (.4) and governor (.36) races. And it is negatively associated with Republican share for Senate (-.54) and governor races (-.38). These associations have weakened more on the Democratic side (.52 for Obama) than for the Republicans (.-51 for McCain).

Class: Class played a role in the 2008 presidential election and it continues to do so in the midterms. Creative class states went for Obama in 2008 and working class states went for McCain, and this holds up for the midterms as well. The creative class is positively associated with Democratic share in both Senate (.34) and governor (.36) races, and negatively associated with Republican share in each (-.38 for Senate and -.52 for governor). These associations have again weakened more for the Democrats (.52 for Obama) than for the GOP (-.46 for McCain) in 2008.

Working class states voted overwhelmingly for McCain in 2008 and this remains the pattern today. The working class is positively associated with both Republican share for governor (.46) and Senate (.48) and negatively associated with Democrat share for both (-.34 for governor and -.38 for Senate). The results are slightly weaker than for the 2008 contest (.64 for McCain, -.64 for Obama). While many creative class members vote Republican and many working class members vote for Democrats, the state-level patterns show the continuing salience of class for American politics.

Post-materialism: The shift from traditional, religious to more secular values is a hallmark of post-materialist political culture. In 2008, more religious states went for McCain (.63) and less religious states went for Obama (-.59), and this patterns continues to hold. (Our religion variable is from Gallup polls which ask individuals if religion is an important part of their everyday life.) Religion is positively associated with both Republican share for governor (.37) and Senate (.55), and negatively associated with Democrat share for Senate (-.46), though the correlation for Democrat share for Senate (-.22) is not significant. The patterns are also weaker than in the 2008 presidential election, especially on the Democratic side (.63 for McCain and -.59 for Obama).

From Tom Tancredo in Colorado to Carl Palladino in New York, we’re constantly reminded that immigration and gay rights remain significant wedge issues in American politics. We employ openness to immigrants and gays and lesbians (based on share of adult population) as proxy measures for opennesss – another key marker of post-materialism. States with higher percentages of gays and lesbians and higher percentages of immigrants went for Obama in 2008 while those with lower percentages went for McCain, and these trends also continue to hold. The percentage of foreign-born residents is positively associated with Democratic share in both Senate (.38) and governor (.36) races, and negatively associated with the Republican share in each (-.27 governor, -.5 Senate). These associations have weakened more on the Democratic side (.52 for Obama) than for the Republicans (.-51 for McCain).

The percentage of gay and lesbian residents is positively associated with the Democratic share in both Senate (.58) and gubernatorial (.47) races, and negatively associated with Republican share (-.68 for Senate, -.46 for governor). These associations are comparable for 2008 (.57 for Obama, -.57 for McCain) and among the strongest of any in our analysis. Clearly, openness remains a key factor in state-level politics.

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Despite all the attention that has been paid to the effect of current economic conditions on the upcoming midterm elections, structural factors remain the central axis upon which American politics turns. Yes, richer states are more likely to be Democratic and poorer ones Republican. But it’s more than money. States that have transitioned to more knowledge-driven creative class economies are more likely to be blue, while working class states are more likely to be red, echoing former Republican Congressman Tom Davis’s blunt statement: “Economic development works” – meaning that it tends to turn places to more open-minded, liberal bastions. In line with this and with Inglehart’s notion of the shift toward post-materialist values and cultures, states with higher percentages of immigrants and especially gays and lesbians continue to tack Democratic.

Cyclical factors do play a role in elections and this one is no exception. If Obama benefited from the enthusiasm of creative class voters in 2008, economic conditions have undoubtedly tempered this somewhat this time around. Gays and lesbians have been vocally disappointed with Obama’s failure to act on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — a frustration that may well turn out to be discernible in lower turnouts. And, of course, anti-incumbent sentiment is at an all-time high. And “throw the bums out” inevitably takes a greater toll on the party in power.

American politics is periodically recast by “critical realignments” long ago identified by Walter Dean Burnham, like the elections of 1896 and 1932. These political realignments shift the power balance between the parties and, in doing so, provide the political underpinnings for major public policy change which helps the nation better adjust to structural  economic change. Though our economy is currently in the midst of a similar great reset today, whether or not our politics realigns remains an open question.

The connection between creative class states and the Democrats, and working class states with the Republicans is a clear break from the old pattern of the New Deal and post World War II. But it’s equally clear that both parties are constrained by their connections to long-held special interests. By paying excessive deference to the social conservatism and extreme anti-statism of its right fringe, the Republicans are unable to attract the creative class broadly, even though many of its members are drawn to its individualist ethos and fiscal conservatism. Democrats, meanwhile, remain captive to the housing-finance-auto industrial complex which literally defined the old order. As the Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey quipped some years ago, “Here, in the first decade of the 21st century, the rival ideologies of left and right are both pining for the ’50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there.” A sustained political realignment will only come about when one or the other of the two major parties is able to shuck off the interests that tie it to the past and develop an agenda that is in line with the future.

Unless and until that happens, the United States is likely to remain stalled at its current impasse, lurching between economic and political cycles, while failing to address the deep structural challenges it faces – and unable to develop the much-needed reforms, new economic policies, and broad infrastructure investments required for a new round of sustained prosperity.

Here’s the long version of my column published in today’s The Globe and Mail.

Canadians often point to the angry red versus blue divide that is such a hallmark of American politics, with higher-income, more economically advanced places voting Democratic and less-affluent, more working class locales trending Republican, as a problem that Canada has risen above. But this same kind of cleavage has become increasingly apparent in Canada – glaringly so in Toronto’s upcoming mayoral election.

The most recent Nanos poll shows Rob Ford leading in Etobicoke, North York, and Scarborough, while George Smitherman leads in old Toronto. The conventional wisdom is that this is a product of amalgamation and the rise of the mega-city, which brought two distinct constituencies into one political jurisdiction in 1998. But it runs far deeper than that.

My Martin Prosperity Institute research team overlaid a map of the strongholds of the various mayoral candidates with another showing where creative, service, and blue-collar workers work. The division isn’t just urban-suburban.  Toronto’s economic and political geography takes the shape of a “T” that divides the city on an east and west as well as a north to south axis.  Higher-paying, higher-skill, creative class jobs – in fields spanning science and technology; business and management; arts, culture, and entertainment; health care and education – are concentrated along subway routes radiating out of the downtown core of the city in both directions. Lower-skill, lower-wage jobs are concentrated at the periphery of this T in both the core and more outlying areas. There are only a handful of districts left in the city where working class jobs predominate. One of them, up in the far left hand corner of the map, is Ford’s. Smitherman’s former riding and Pantalone’s ward are right smack in the middle of the T.

In the United States, that political divide is also a jurisdictional divide – pitting city against suburb. Joel Kotkin, who I have debated many times, has written about the increasing Balkanization of California along competing lines of class and occupation, with its affluent clustered along its coast and its farmers and middle class suburbanites concentrated in the state’s interior. The result, he writes, “is two separate…realities: a lucrative one for the wealthy and for government workers, who are largely insulated from economic decline; and a grim one for the private-sector middle and working classes, who are fleeing the state.” He might as well have been writing about Toronto.

But in Toronto it is taking place inside the city itself.  This inconvenient but unavoidable truth runs counter to a deep and long-standing perception: A social and political consensus – shared by NDPers, Liberals, and Conservatives alike – that Toronto, for all its demographic and economic variety, is at bottom “one” cit, and that it is a fair and equitable place. George Smitherman, Rocco Rossi, Joe Pantalone, and even John Tory, despite their differences, all reflect that same consensus — one that has streteched all the way from David Crombie and Mel Lastman to David Miller. The current election campaign shows how frayed that consensus has become. Ford, as Chris Hume wrote some time ago, “has tapped into a deep well of exurban fear and loathing… He personifies anti-urbanism, which makes him a hero.”

There has been considerable discussion in this campaign about whether we should concentrate on building more subways or light rail; much has been made of Ford’s adamant opposition to new bicycle paths. But these discussions ignore the basic fact that transit is bound up with Toronto’s class divide, as MPI research has shown. The members of Toronto’s struggling service and working classes – the ones who need public transit most — are woefully underserved. Forty-five percent of creative class members work within 500 meters of a subway line. Among the service class, that number drops to 31 percent. Buses could pick up some of the slack, but they don’t — they all too often run infrequently and on indirect routes. A five kilometer commute to the central city can take up to 40 minutes. Whether justly or not, Toronto’s working people feel that the city’s government is bloated and elitist and complacent, they believe that it benefits upscale urban dwellers and does not work for them.

Government did not cause Toronto’s (or for that matter, California’s) cleavages — they are the result of a fundamental economic restructuring that has brought enormous boons to some and left others out in the cold. As manufacturing shifts abroad and the technology and knowledge economy burgeons, innovative companies, highly skilled people, and the jobs that employ them have formed dense clusters. It is this very process which drives economic development forward, spurring innovation, generating new entrepreneurial firms, and creating new opportunities. But it also drives up housing values and splits up and sorts people by work and income.

The logic of capitalism is filled with contradictions. Those contradictions create new wealth and simultaneously bring new divisions and new social costs. Toronto, like virtually every other major city in North America, stands at a critical inflection point. Its recent economic success has, in effect, split it right down its middle.

When I first moved to Toronto, I believed we still had a chance to avoid the fraying of the social compact that is eating away at the states. But it has happened here too and it will not go away.

This, it seems to me, is the real subtext of this election, the understory that we have not wanted to acknowledge. Toronto has fallen victim to the same spiky structural forces that are concentrating economic assets and dividing communities across the globe, here in North America and right here in our very own city. We cannot push this under the rug. Regardless of what happens on election day, we must all face up to the fact that we are no longer one Toronto. That is the central challenge that the next mayor and all of us will be dealing with long after this election is past.

Here’s a letter signed by many leading Canadian researchers (including me) urging the Canadian government to restore the recently canceled Census long-form. This is a key source of data and serious trends-analysis of the Canadian economy, its cities and regions. It needs to be restored.

On July 13, 2009, I wrote this comment Pollyanna Has All the Friends…. Here we are exactly six months later and my premonitions have been born out. The Senatorial election in Massachusetts was an earthquake – make no mistake about it – and unless there is change there will be many more. Massachusetts was not just tea-baggers or the health care debacle — the level of anger on Main Street is rising. This can be seen in the Bernanke renomination fight, which, though likely to be approved, is probably the last stand for what I believe is a Chicago School of Economics-driven flawed analysis of the current crisis. The anger will dramatically grow if, as I expect, the market takes another terrible fall during 2010.

The Obama victory was as fundamental as that of Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s victory heralded the appearance of the mass production industrial working class on the political scene. He galvanized their demands into the New Deal. The result, after World War II, was U.S. global leadership. I suggest everyone read Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address. It is a statement of vision, leadership, commitment to change, and a recognition that a new order was in birth.

Many of us, me skeptically included, saw Obama as the harbinger of a different sector of the U.S. economy and polity, what Rich has called a “creative class,” moving into power. We all know what has happened since. Essentially, Obama felt it necessary to succor the old order, while not clearing the way for a new sensibility.

In my estimation, President Obama has about one month to dramatically change course or I fear his presidency will, for all intents and purposes, be finished and the nation will have three years of dangerous drift, while a hurricane rages around us. These are the things I think he must do now:

1. Military spending must be cut massively and the two wars in Central Asia must be rapidly wound down. Iraq appears quiet, but Afghanistan is ramping up and will be far more costly than Iraq ever was. As an example, it costs $400 to deliver a gallon of gasoline to our troops there, and $1 million per year for every soldier there! This is unsustainable.
2. Money must be withdrawn from bailouts, maintaining unsustainably low interest rates, and subsidizing mortgages in a vain effort to keep home prices high.
3. The funds saved must be redirected toward jobs programs of all sorts, a Greentech roll-out, the arts, infrastructure renewal, education, and research. Most of these are low-cost, high labor-intensity.

Do you think my July premonitions are that far off where we are today? What is it that will be required to create a transition to a new order?

So last Wednesday I was invited to York University to come do a little guest lecture in a class called Creativity and Cities in Urban Politics and Planning 4800. Heather McLean, the courses professor, is a PhD candidate and member of the City Institute at York University but I first heard about her in an article entitled “Why Richard Florida’s Honeymoon is Over.” She teaches a cool course, with a cooler M.O: Subject the creativity discourse that is leading much of contemporary urban policy to some intelligent criticism.

By looking at an old Wall Street Journal article and two very different conversations that emerged about it here on the Creative Class Exchange – one that is perhaps more celebratory of how the creative class theory is attributed to this situation, and one that I wrote that is perhaps a bit more critical of the role creative class theory might be playing – I tried to impart on them that it’s really important that they bring their content to the table when looking at dominant theories, and to sift these theories through that content to see if they pan out.  That content could be their cultural leaning, their ethnicity, age, political leaning, or whatever lens that they are most invested in, but it’s important that they understand that they’re empowered by that lens to see things that others who aren’t as invested as they are don’t see.  They should ask questions about what they see. Or moreover, what they don’t. Prepping to do that lecture brought me back to when I first met Richard, which is kind of an interesting story about the value of critique and about the mettle of Richard Florida as well I guess.

So before all of this DJ/bureaucrat business I was a young(er) DJ/student/journalist writing for the Ottawa Xpress. In school I was studying cities, and for the paper I was writing music and reviewing books. Richard Florida was coming to town for the Tulip Festival, and his then new book Who’s Your City? had come into the office to be reviewed. I’d just been into a lot of Richard’s research journals, and the Elizabeth Currid stuff was just coming out too, so this was an interesting time to be talking. In all of the reading that I had done I really didn’t see myself represented in the creative class – either as a Hiphopper, or as a North American Black person. So in our interview I respectfully stepped to him on those issues.

From my article/review of Who’s Your City?:

“I am a rock-ist,” he admits, “and my students have informed me of this, but I’m learning.” As it turns out, Florida reveals that one of his future projects will look at the relationship between music and the city, and that he was already taking that opportunity to look at hip-hop culture…

and then on race…

How is the movement of the creative class affecting these [racial] communities? “Probably the reason I don’t write about it [race] is that when I wrote about gay issues, I had a gay collaborator. So I felt, as a straight person, that I could then work on gay issues. It’s probably a part of my age, I’m very sensitive when trying to weigh in on those issues.”

And while I’m the first to recognize that this isn’t him leaping to engage that problematic, you ask him a direct question, you get a direct answer. At the end of the interview we kept talking about where I saw room for engagement within his theory, and eventually we started doing this thing that you’re reading right now.

Recently there has been a lot of good critique of the Creative Class and Creative City theories. Here in Ottawa at Carleton, Sarah Brouillette  is studying the Commodification of Creativity. Profs like Heather and groups like the the Creative Class Struggle are keeping a critical voice in the discourse.  And as much as there are things that I think it would be interesting to see Richard address, one thing I can say about him is that he’s always willing to host me to address those things, and likewise with other critics. A good example is Ian David Moss’ incredibly fine grained and detailed deconstruction of the creative class over at Createquity.com, and Richard’s response to that criticism. Or while I was in Toronto visiting the MPI a few months ago I met Philipp Oehmke who had just spent time doing the interview that leads the article he wrote about the Hamburg squatters in Das Spiegel which captures the nuance of the situation really well.

In this discourse the traditional skirmish lines seem to be skewed. All of the ire from the left seem to evaporate into a vacuum of hugs from what we thought was the right. In Hamburg the artists occupy, and the city sends talkers and crews to make sure the building is safe. In my interview, I ask this guy tough questions about the exclusion of race and Hiphop from his ideas and he invites me to answer them myself on his site. Coming from the “Fight the Power” generation, this is certainly not what I expected when challenging a dominant ideological discourse. Sometimes I don’t know what the hell is going on myself. All I can say is that, for now at least, it seems to be as broad a conversation as you want to have. Yes there are still barriers but, surprisingly, listening seems to be an emerging trend. I think people are still correct to question the root of that  - why are people listening? – but in my opinion, it’s more important that people like those students are taking the time to grow and use their critical skills to make this discourse broad enough that their content and concerns can either find their place within this discourse or expose where improvement of it is necessary. That’s a creative class if I’ve ever seen one.

Music.