Who are the 22% of Democrats who once thought themselves GOP?
In the course of reading a piece by Michael Barone on Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck’s The Politics of Polarization, we came upon the following:
There has been a Great Sorting Out, with many people changing party identification, and the winners from this process have been the Republicans: Galston and Kamarck show that 38 percent of Republicans say they used to think of themselves as Democrats, while 22 percent–a substantially smaller number—of Democrats say they used to think of themselves as Republicans.
We are quite familiar with the many who, like us, have made the long voyage from liberal to conservative over the last few decades. But who are the 22% of Democrats who once thought of themselves as Republicans? To find out, we went to the source in the footnote of the Galston and Kamarck report, which is a Pew Center study called The 2005 Political Typology. Page 33 features this chart:
The chart is (unintentionally?) humorously titled: “Fewer Democrats Change Party over Lifetime.” But that’s misleading, isn’t it, given that Democrats have gone from 60% share of the electorate forty years ago to 37% last year, as we have documented. Rather, the title more properly might be “Democrats deserting party in droves.”
Still, who are the 22% of Democrats who were once Republicans? They are liberals. Liberal Republicans became liberal Democrats. We can see from the chart that they are predominantly liberal Republicans — 26% of Democrats who now call themselves liberal — who have switched sides, although when they did so is not clear. So a quarter of liberal Democrats were once liberal Republicans. You will forgive us for repeating this point over and over, but it seems kind of shocking to us that in a random group of liberal Democrats, one out of four will have been a Republican.
Who are these people, how old are they, and where do they live? Unfortunately, neither the Pew study nor Galston and Kamarck have any additional information on this. But here’s perhaps a useful shorthand way to think of this: the Rockefeller Republicans became the Rockefeller Democrats. The Heinzes became the Heinz-Kerrys.
Our guess is that the Pew chart understates the dynamism of the shift from Democrat to GOP. We would guess that the liberal Republicans who became liberal Democrats are on average a generation older than those making the more recent shift to the conservative and Republican side, and we also would be not at all surprised to see high concentrations of these folks in some of the declining Democratic strongholds of the Northeast. We’ll follow up with an email or two and tell you what we learn.
October 14th, 2005 at 6:21 am
“Humorously” titled? How about “dishonestly” titled?
The title clearly seeks to imply that Democrats are more loyal to their party. But what the data actually says is that fewer Republicans change their affiliation and come INTO the Democratic Party. So the title actually completely inverts the meaning of the data.
You too are suggesting that the title is misleading, but you are focsing on the decline of the percent of the electorate represented by Democrats, etc. But the title of the chart is simply false based on the actual data contained therein, with no other factors needing to be considered. There is a name for this technique for presenting data: it is called “lying”.