Creative Class

Andrew Gelman tallies the big-county/ small-county; rich-county/poor-county votes.

A blogger shares perspective:

In short, I believe place, not just people, won this election for Barack Obama. And here’s why: cities are made up of three types of people.

1. Young people who migrate to them for college and professional opportunity.

2. Professionals who migrate to them for career advancements and financial gain.

3. Wealthy people who have gained enough money in their careers to stay in them over generations…

And credit the Obama campaign for doing such a good job of tailoring messages to this group. They’ve done a great job of making young urbanites feel good about those $25 political donations not to mention the volunteer numbers that come out of this group of voters. In a way, the Obama campaign emails make you feel like you’re not doing enough to make history if you didn’t at least volunteer on election day. And it’s worked like a charm in cities… Again, the Obama campaign – particularly in places like Philadelphia and D.C. – should get a lot of credit for being so well organized in cities, so much so that you would think he was running for mayor in places like Chicago and Raleigh, NC.

The critical feature of the creative economy is that it makes place the fundamental feature of politics, culture, and economics.

With all of the hoopla and celebrating over the Obama victory, many Americans may have looked past the country’s continued rejection of fundamental civil and human rights for gay and lesbian people. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

Same-sex couples will no longer be permitted to legally marry in the Golden State. With 95 percent of the vote counted Wednesday morning, a ballot initiative to ban gay marriage headed for a narrow victory. It’s a public repudiation of a landmark state court ruling in May that found same-sex couples have a right to marry. Voters in Florida and Arizona also approved constitutional bans on gay marriage on Tuesday. Just two years earlier, Arizona was the first state to defeat a gay marriage ban at the ballot box.

A gay friend in Florida writes, “A really bad night for gays in Florida and California, very upsetting, despite Obama’s victory.”

Gay rights is the civil rights issue of our time. Those who oppose them are simply on the wrong side of history. (For some perspective on what being on the wrong side of history means, check out what the daughter of George Wallace has to say.).

While stabilizing the economy and dealing with what Paul Kennedy dubbed America’s imperial overstretch have to be the new President’s first priorities, if Obama is to fulfill his historic role and transformative promise, he cannot back away – in fact he must lead – on this fundamental issue.

Barack Obama rode to his resounding victory on the enthusiasm of two constituencies, the young and African Americans, whose support has driven his candidacy since the spring. Yet arguably the biggest winners of the Nov. 4 vote are located at the highest levels of the nation’s ascendant post-industrial business community.

Obama’s triumph reflects a decisive shift in the economic center of gravity away from military contractors, manufacturers, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, suburban real estate developers, energy companies, old-line remnants on Wall Street and other traditional backers of the GOP. In their place, we can see the rise of a different set of players, predominately drawn from the so-called “creative class” of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the younger, go-go set in the financial world.

These latter business interests provided much of the consistent and massive financial advantage that the Illinois senator has accrued since early spring. The term “creative class” was popularized by former George Mason professor Richard Florida, who used it to describe those with both brainy business acumen and a very liberal cultural agenda borrowed from the bohemians of the ’60s.

I’m dumb-struck. The rest here.

Obama’s victory last night is a great victory for humanity – global humanity. Desmond Tutu compared it to that of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. For my money, after eight years of deteriorating conditions in America, in the Middle East, and around the world, it is nothing less that an American glasnost.

I watched both speeches and both men closely last night. It was the best speech I have ever seen McCain give. He was eloquent, forward looking, and optimistic.

Obama was, in a word, amazing. He sounded all the right notes about moving beyond America’s divides and engaging the entire country and the world. Like so many of you, I was deeply moved by the scenes of the crowds in Chicago and elsewhere around the U.S. and the world. And Obama’s effort to reach out immediately and instinctively not just to his opponent but to all those who voted against them and to assure them that he is their president and will work ever harder for them is a poignant move toward healing the deep divisions that plague America.

Obama’s gifts are plentiful. In my entire life, I cannot remember an incoming president with so many natural and developed talents. I found myself thinking about Carolyn Kennedy’s comment about how she had at long last come upon a political leader who inspired her the way so many people say her father inspired them. I find Obama to be more inspiring, more serious, and more in touch with his nation and the entire world’s moods and needs. There will be plenty of challenges ahead, but he has the gifts and the ability to make his mark and lead the U.S. and the world. I have never, ever felt so very proud to be American.

Still, I was miffed by so much of the coverage which focused on a single dimension of the contest – race. As someone who was born in Newark in 1957 and whose very being was shaped by the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, I found myself riveted in ways I cannot even begin to explain by the sight of African-Americans rejoicing – and I was deeply touched by the sight of Jesse Jackson with tears welling in his eyes and rolling down his cheeks.

Obama is much more than an African-American figure. When Tom Friedman reduces the election to: “And so it came to pass that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man — Barack Hussein Obama — won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States,” he reflects a parochial, American-centrist, out-moded, boomerist sentiment.

Obama is bi-racial – the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother. He is both global and multi-cultural – his early years spent in Jakarta Indonesia, not only a developing economy but one of the most diverse and multi-racial societies in the world, before being raised by his white grandparents in Hawaii, another multi-racial and multi-cultural society.

The rise of Obama promises much, much more than the end of “the American Civil War.” His victory signals the rise of a truly global, post-racial world – the possibility that we can transcend racial categories.  This is what young Americans see. And it is why billions of others of all ages and races across the world rejoice today.

Columbia University political scientist and Rich State, Poor State author (and great friend of the Prosperity Institute), Andrew Gelman tells the story in charts, facts and figures.

The youth vote really mattered.

But the country remains split, as Gelman notes, ” The red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing.”

What a great day for the world! The election of Barack Obama has highlighted, once again, the exceptional nature of America’s cultural, economic, and political systems (see Lipset, De Tocqueville, and Weber).

While many will be celebrating for the foreseeable future, our President-elect is surely hard at work right now – he has already been challenged by Russia, as VP-elect Biden predicted a few weeks back.

The question is: what should an Obama administration do first? What should the first 100 days look like? Any ideas?

There’s been lots of discussion but little actual research on the so-called Bradley effect. David Stromberg, an economics professor at the University of Stockholm and Princeton economics Ph.D. takes a detailed look at 431 elections for House, Senate, and Governor over the 1998-2006 period involving 26 black candidates – 17 Democrats and nine Republicans. He finds that the Bradley effect in the election will be closer than many Obama supporters think and polls indicate, but that Obama should still prevail.

Should Barack Obama worry about the Bradley effect? The much-discussed effect refers to observed discrepancies between voter opinion polls and election outcomes, in which African-American candidates receive a smaller vote share than would be predicted using opinion polls. In this column, I study US congressional and gubernatorial contests from 1998 to 2006 – black candidates on average receive a 2-3% lower share of the two-party vote than non-black candidates with similar numbers in the polls. If an effect of a similar size would appear in the current presidential race, then it would lower Obama’s probability of winning from 85% to 53%. However, black Republican candidates drive the result, so it may not apply to Obama’s campaign.

The full article is here.

In light of all the terrific comments to my original post, here is the original unedited version of my column.

Two years ago almost to the day, I sat at a coffee shop in Washington, D.C. talking about the upcoming U.S. election with a good friend who was an editor at a major political monthly. Having never been a fan of George W. Bush, I said nonetheless that the president might be a transitional figure, his administration essentially holding back a tectonic populist, rightward shift in American politics. I told my friend I was fearful of what could come next. He looked me squarely in the eye and said simply: “That’s not what frightens me. What has me terrified is the right-wing backlash that will come when a more liberal, left-leaning administration takes office in January 2009.”

I’ve since come round to his way of thinking. Barring some unusual unforeseen event, Barack Obama can count on victory in next week’s election. He is running a considerable lead in the national polls and even in the electoral college, and he appears to have mobilized huge numbers of younger and African American voters who will push him to victory in the key swing states he needs to win the Electoral College. He has the money – more than $150 million dollars raised just in September – to counter virtually any negative advertising. But his job once in office will be harder than he could have anticipated.

When people like Colin Powell say Obama is a “transformational figure,” they’re suggesting that an Obama administration can somehow heal the deep divisions within the American electorate and move the country forward, the way Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression. And certainly projected Democratic majorities in Congress make that kind of transformation appear plausible.

I wish that would happen. But I doubt it will, and the reason is simple: the divisions run too deep. The realignment that propelled and kept FDR in office is not happening today. American politics is distinguished today by shifting electoral coalitions, candidate-centered elections, and what some political scientists call de-alignment. America isn’t just suffering from political polarization but a burgeoning economic divide and class war.

Since 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was first elected, the U.S. economy has been undergoing a shift more thorough and massive than the rise of industrial economy a century and a half ago. Since then, 20 million jobs in the creative sector have been created, and the ranks of what I call the creative class has grown to 40 million – nearly a third of the workforce. That group has become a powerful force in American politics, and they are squarely behind Obama. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently reported that Republicans have all but lost creative professionals working in law, medicine, and high-tech. Obama leads McCain among those with a post graduate education 59 to 36 percent; and among those with a college education 50 to 44 percent. And the Democratic candidate leads younger 18-29 year old votes, 65 to 31 percent.

Up to this point, Republican party strategists have exploited this shift to their party’s advantage, beginning with the ever prescient Kevin Phillips’s identification of the “silent majority” of white working-class voters in 1968. The rise of the creative economy generated not just a new class, but a shift in social values. Tolerance, diversity, and self-expression became prized, and not just because of the hippies, student movement, or even what Christopher Lasch called the culture of narcissism. Diversity and self-expression are necessary for the creative economy to flourish and function. It’s little wonder than that Silicon Valley, ground zero of the high-tech revolution, grew up in the shadow of San Francisco.

As the creative economy grew and became more concentrated in locations like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C. – what we now know as blue America – the working class fell further and further behind. Globalization was shipping jobs overseas and the main institutional supports that led to higher working-class incomes during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s – powerful U.S. companies and powerful unions – were simultaneously being undercut. The great genius of Karl Rove was to seize upon the church as the one remaining constant in the lives of working Americans, and use it to his political organizational advantage.

The rise of ”hockey moms,” of “Joe Six-Pack,” and “Joe the Plumber” in this election cycle testify to this growing sense of unease. This is the kind of economic split that Obama tried to capture with his now infamous “bitter-gate” statement, which he now says he regrets. But what can we expect from people who know that the economic system is leaving them behind?

This class divide is overlaid on America’s economic and political geography. The rise of the creative class and its geographic centers which form the innovative engines of the U.S. economy, are also reshaping its politics. This goes beyond traditional Democratic bastions like big city New York, Chicago, and L.A. and, high-tech centers like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C.; or university districts like Austin, Boulder, and Raleigh-Durham.

My team and I looked at the state-by-state polls and compared them to our measures of the creative economy – a broad index of technology, talent, and tolerance. Blue states had a median creativity index score of more then red states (.68 versus .38), with purple swing states in the middle. Virginia and Colorado, two former staunchly red states that Obama is currently winning by six or seven percent, have seen significant increases in their college-educated populations in recent years.

As these states have become more highly educated, more urbanized, more high-tech, and more diverse, notes Financial Times columnist Edward Luce, they have moved from Republican red to Democratic blue. As Republican congressman Tom Davis recently opined, U.S. politics, including his own district of Northern Virginia, is being reshaped as high-tech economies lean more Democratic. As he put it simply: “Economic development works.” He decided not to seek reelection.

Political scientist Andrew Gelman show that economic geography now outweighs personal income as the key faultline in American politics. Richer Americans continue to vote Republican and poorer ones are overwhelmingly Democratic, but upper-middle class, richer states like California, Massachusetts, and New York vote and perhaps now Virgina and Colorado vote blue, because richer more creative class voters there are more open-minded and no longer simply vote for their immediate pocketbooks.

And both states are microcosms of the deeper class divide across America. Outside of high-tech, highly educated, ultra-professional and diverse Northern Virginia and away from the creative class Denver-Boulder corridor, both are hot-beds of socially conservative populism – where anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and anti-urban sentiments run high. Colorado after all is home to the ultra-conservative Focus on the Family, while Virginia Beach is the headquarters to the Christian Coalition originally founded by Pat Robertson.

These class divides will only deepen as the economy worsens, and America’s economic geography becomes ever more polarized and unequal. And a strange kind of reactive populism, much worse than anything we’ve seen before, is likely to rise. McCain’s defeat in 2008 at the hands of Obama will shift the balance of power toward the conservative wing of the Republican party – toward figures like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin who combine social populism with uncanny media skills and the ability to project themselves onto America’s popular culture. Unless Obama can fashion a broad inclusive appeal that extends the benefits of the creative economy to working and service economies, the bitterness he himself acknowledged, in a moment of uncanny candor, will only grow deeper and America will grow more divided and ever more polarized.

If you think the stock market has been volatile, we are in uncharted political waters. Get ready for an extended period of volatility and conflict in American politics. You heard it here first.

My latest Globe and Mail column:

Two years ago almost to the day, I sat at a coffee shop in Washington, D.C., talking about the upcoming U.S. election with a good friend who was an editor at a major political monthly. Though never a fan of George W. Bush, I suggested that the President might be a transitional figure, his administration essentially holding back a tectonic populist, rightward shift in American politics. I told my friend I was fearful of what could come next. He looked me squarely in the eye and said simply: “That’s not what frightens me. What has me terrified is the right-wing backlash that will come when a more liberal, left-leaning administration takes office in January, 2009.”

I’ve since come around to his way of thinking. Barring some unforeseen event, Barack Obama can count on victory in Tuesday’s election. He is running a considerable lead in the national polls and even in the electoral college, and he appears to have mobilized huge numbers of younger and African-American voters who will push him to victory in the key swing states. He has the money – more than $150-million raised just in September – to counter virtually any negative advertising. But his job once in office may be harder than he anticipated.

When people like Colin Powell say Mr. Obama is a “transformational figure,” they’re suggesting that an Obama administration can somehow heal the deep divisions within the American electorate and move the country forward, the way Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression. And certainly projected Democratic majorities in Congress make that kind of transformation appear plausible.

I wish that would happen. But I doubt it will, and the reason is simple: The divisions run too deep. The realignment that propelled and kept FDR in office is not happening today. American politics is distinguished today by shifting electoral coalitions, candidate-centered elections, and what some political scientists call de-alignment. America isn’t just suffering from political polarization, but a burgeoning economic divide and class war.

Since 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was first elected, the U.S. economy has been undergoing a shift more thorough and massive than the rise of industrial economy a century and a half ago. Since then, 20 million jobs in the creative sector have been created, and the ranks of what I call the creative class have grown to 40 million – nearly a third of the work force. That group has become powerful in American politics, and it is squarely behind Mr. Obama. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently reported that Republicans have all but lost creative professionals working in law, medicine, and high technology.

Republican strategists have exploited this shift to their party’s advantage, beginning with the ever-prescient Kevin Phillips’s identification of the “silent majority” of white working-class voters in 1968.

The rise of the creative economy generated a shift in social values. Tolerance, diversity, and self-expression became prized. Diversity and self-expression became necessary for the creative economy to flourish and function.

As it grew and became more concentrated in locations such as San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C. – what we now know as blue America – the working class fell further and further behind. Globalization shipped jobs overseas, while institutional supports that led to higher working-class incomes during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s – powerful U.S. companies and powerful unions – were simultaneously being undercut. The great genius of former Bush political strategist Karl Rove was to seize upon the church as the one remaining constant in the lives of working Americans and to use it to his political organizational advantage.

The rise of “hockey moms,” “Joe Six-Pack,” and “Joe the Plumber” in this election cycle testifies to this growing sense of unease. This is the kind of economic split that Mr. Obama tried to capture with his infamous “bitter-gate” statement, which he now says he regrets. But what can we expect from people who know that the economic system is leaving them behind?

This class divide is overlaid on America’s economic and political geography, with the U.S. economy being driven by centers of innovation such as San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C.; finance, entertainment, and media cities such as New York and Los Angeles; and university-anchored tech centers such as Austin, Tex., Boulder, Colo., and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.

My team and I looked at the state-by-state polls and compared them to our measures of the creative economy – a broad index of technology, talen,t and tolerance. Blue states had a higher median creativity index score than red states (.68 versus .38). Mr. Obama leads John McCain among those with a postgraduate education 59 to 36 percent; among those with a college education 50 to 44 percent; and among 18-to-29-year-olds 65 to 31 percent.

As Republican congressman Tom Davis recently opined, U.S. politics, including in his own district in northern Virginia, is being reshaped as high-tech economies lean more Democratic: “Economic development works.” He decided not to seek re-election.

These class divides will only deepen. Fear and anxiety will probably get worse. And a strange kind of reactive populism, much worse than anything we have seen before, could be on the rise. Unless Mr. Obama can fashion a broad, inclusive appeal that extends the benefits of the creative economy to working and service economies, the bitterness he himself acknowledged, in a moment of candor, will grow deeper.

If you think the stock market has been volatile, get ready for an extended period of volatility and conflict in American politics.

“[Y]es, we need to fight poverty. Yes, we need to fight crime. Yes, we need to strengthen our cities. But we also need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution… Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America.”

Said to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in June, but I had not seen it before (more here via Planetizen). A quick look at the polls show a double digit Obama lead and significant margins in the electoral college, so this is encouraging news for all those concerned for cities and urbanism in America.