cwemory
Joined: 14 Jan 2006
Location: Gunpo, Korea
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 Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2006 4:32 am Post subject: Could global warming melt the Republican majority? |
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Could global warming melt the Republican majority?
By Bruce Reed
Heat Wave: As Washington braces for another August of record-breaking heat, the Republican leadership has at last decided on its response to global warming: From now on, Congress will begin its August recess in July.
The success of Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, has prompted a flurry of articles on how global warming will transform our politics. Michael Grunwald imagines "a climate-conscious politics � where a policy's atmospheric costs would be evaluated along with its fiscal costs, a politics of inconvenient truths." Clive Crook suggests a long-term plan to lower the long-term impact of climate change, but points out that we'll need policies to adapt to it as well: "Whatever happens, we will have to live with higher temperatures."
Every night since they saw the Gore movie, my children have followed its cue to pray that people have the courage to change. But as both Grunwald and Crook observe, the long term is something Washington just doesn't do. If we want action on climate change, we need to put it in terms that, even in these deeply partisan times, the political world can understand.
Never mind the impact of global warming on the migratory patterns of the black-throated blue warbler. Those concerned about the long-term survival of the Republican species should worry that climate change may fundamentally alter the migratory patterns of the American voter.
Southward, Ho!: One of the defining trends of the past 40 years has been the dramatic shift in population from the Frost Belt to the Sunbelt. In 1960, the three largest northeastern states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts had a combined 93 electoral votes. Now they have 64. People voted with their feet, and we know where they went: In 1960, Texas and Florida had a total of 34 electoral votes; now those two states have 61.
Climate wasn't the only reason the U.S. population shifted from north to south, but it was a significant one. For Arizona to grow from 4 electoral votes in 1960 to 10 today, while Iowa shrank from 10 to 7, plenty of people must have been willing to brave the desert summer to escape another winter on the plains.
The southern migration of American politics has brought on a long, painful drought for the Democratic Party. For a century, the South had been a Democratic stronghold. But the Sunbelt's population began to explode just as the South was turning away, punishing Democrats for doing the right thing in the '60s by standing up for civil rights and opposing the war in Vietnam.
Apart from a few states on the Pacific Coast and in the mid-Atlantic, Democrats are now a captive party of the Northern Tier. We haven't won an electoral vote in the South so far this century.
Seeing Red: In fact, the electoral map looks increasingly like the weather map in USA Today: Most red and orange states are red; most blue and green states are blue. If you chart the average temperature since 1960, you might as well be looking at Karl Rove's list of target states.
By my calculations, 21 of the 27 states with an average temperature over the last half century of more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit voted for Bush in 2004, providing 241 of his 286 electoral votes. In the 23 states with an average temperature below 50 degrees, by contrast, Democrats cleaned up in the electoral vote, 141 to 45.
The political climate is the same in the House of Representatives. Democrats actually have a 10-seat majority in cold states�and Democratic hopes for reclaiming the House in 2006 rest in large part on seats in Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere in the Northeast.
Republicans owe their current House majority to a nearly 40-seat advantage in hot states, as symbolized by two notorious sons of the Sunbelt, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay. The margin would be even more lopsided if not for California, the Democrats' one significant inroad into milder climes.
Flying North: Republican strategists will no doubt try to persuade themselves that global warming is good for them�that if the country gets hot enough, every state will hurt red. But what will happen to Americans' migratory patterns if northern winters become easier to bear and southern summers become unbearable? After half a century, will all the snowbirds who've flocked to Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California suddenly turn around and head north?
If temperature alone is not enough to tip the balance, hurricanes might. Let us hope that we never see another forced resettlement like the aftermath of Katrina. Yet it's not hard to imagine the next wave of retirees foregoing the drama of Florida and other southeastern coastal states in favor of colder but calmer places up north.
A significant population shift to higher latitudes would help offset a current hitch in Democrats' northern strategy: We have to carry nearly every northern state (and most of both coasts) to win.
Of course, turning the North back into the center of electoral gravity won't save Democrats if we don't do a better job of winning over Americans who vote with their feet. For two decades in the '70s and '80s, we consistently lost suburban voters until Bill Clinton won them back. In this decade, we've lost voters who moved from the suburbs to the exurbs � although some, like Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, have shown how to win them back.
High Hopes: While Democrats have lost ground in most growing areas, the party has won big in the coldest ones�ski towns. Sun Valley, Idaho, made the highest donations per capita to John Kerry of any community in America. Aspen was the only county where Kerry ran ahead of Colorado's popular new Democratic senator, Ken Salazar. Kerry's snowboard strategy worked, after all�there just weren't enough snowboarders in Ohio.
Demographics aren't destiny, and neither is climate. As even Rove realizes, the Republican species cannot survive in its current form. And Democrats certainly shouldn't wait to win an election until the North stops freezing over.
Still, with the thermometer running 60 points higher than Bush's popularity, it's worth reminding Republicans to change now, before their margins melt away�not to mention their planet. We won't see Tom DeLay's like again once folks have surfboards in Sugar Land, Texas. |
http://www.slate.com/id/2146980/?GT1=8483 |
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