The Big Sort (38 page)

I asked campaign organizers if this had been a conscious application of religious proselytizing to political campaigning. "A lot of us are very active in Evangelical churches, the witnessing churches," Thibodeaux answered. "So it was kind of in our DNA anyway to talk about what you want to do and bring people together to a party. I go back and forth. A lot of this stuff used for evangelism and churches I use in politics, and [I use] stuff I learned in politics in churches." Patrick Donaldson said, "We weren't there to convince anybody. We were there to give testimony of why we were for George Bush. And that's very religious."

As the Savage Mafia followed the strategy prepared by Dowd and Karl Rove, it probably didn't hurt that the Democratic Party nominee in a state representative race in Scott County was also the co-chair of the Queer Student Cultural Center at the University of Minnesota. "Ashley Sierra was just the perfect thing from a political standpoint," Robert Thibodeaux said of the student who won the nomination from clueless Scott County Democrats. But the Savage Republicans didn't need the help. The Big Sort had made Scott County overwhelmingly Republican. The Bush campaign's organizing strategy was aimed at affirming the homogeneous community's sense of itself. The navigators linked the president directly to Scott County; the ability to micro-target individuals allowed the campaign to deliver messages tailored to individual concerns.
²⁵
' The campaign held parties and tapped into the existing networks of schools, kids' sports teams, and churches that threaded through the county. The vote in November wasn't so much the reelection of a president as an affirmation of a way of life.

One of the older suburbs in Minneapolis, and certainly one of the richest, is Edina. Edina gave Barry Goldwater a landslide victory in 1964, favored Richard Nixon by 9,000 votes over former Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and gave Ronald Reagan an 11,000-vote victory over Minnesota senator Walter Mondale in 1984. There's a locally famous Richard Guindon cartoon of a very proper mother telling her child, "Daddy and I weren't born in Edina, dear. We achieved Edina." That's the kind of place it was—rich, satisfied, and Republican—until 2004. That year, Edina voted for John Kerry. The headline in the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
the day after the election pretty much told the story:
KERRY CARRIES EDINA—AND PIGS FLY, RIGHT?

Despite the presumption that Republicans ruled the suburbs, places like Edina had been turning away from the Republicans since 1992, and not just in the blue-leaning upper Midwest. Older suburbs in the South were becoming more Democratic, as were those in the North and the rest of the Midwest.
²⁶
The shift surprised Republicans and Democrats alike in 2004. The Bush campaign was certain it would win Washington County, in suburban Portland, a community filled with executives at Intel and Nike—platinum-card-carrying members of Bush's investor class. But Kerry won there instead, by 6 percentage points, and a local Republican campaign official said that the results "flummoxed" the Washington, D.C., party headquarters. If Rove, Dowd, and Mehlman were bewildered by the vote in Washington County, Edina must have blown their minds.

Morningside, the eastern section of Edina, looks like my Democratic neighborhood in Austin. The houses are older and close together, and France Avenue, which runs along the edge of Morningside, has that lived-in city look. There's a bagel shop next door to a coffee joint, and near the corner of France and Sunnyside, the Convention Grill specializes in fudge banana malts and burgers. "I love to talk about my neighborhood," said Joni Bennett as she spread out precinct lists and maps that documented Kerry's victory. Bennett was forty-nine the year of the election and a forever Democrat—her first campaign was for George McGovern when she was in high school. She's also a Columbia law school graduate, a mom, and one of those bright-eyed, short-haired women who can carry a neighborhood on her back.

All of Edina didn't vote for Kerry, she explained. The neighborhood west of Morningside, where the houses are larger and farther apart, still supported Bush, though barely. The precincts in Morningside had changed in recent years, Bennett said. There were "urban pioneers" moving in because the neighborhood, next door to downtown Minneapolis, had a city feel. People who "support the vitality of urban life" were coming here, she said. There was a lot of "self-selection" taking place. The people attracted to Morningside were of a different tribe from those settling in Scott County. Two gay couples had moved to her block in the past few years. "If you have gay couples moving in, then it's different than what it used to be," she said.

Back in Austin, Dowd explained to me, "As people make lifestyle choices about where they live, it means whole neighborhoods adjust." It's not a single issue that changes a community. Politics today isn't about issues. It's about a place, a way of life, a species. So a community doesn't shift three or four people at a time. When Dowd looked at the suburban counties that switched from Republican to Democratic in the 2005 Virginia governor's election, neighborhoods tipped wholesale. Entire communities "shifted in groups"—or, in Donald McGavran's language, as "peoples." That's exactly what happened in Edina.

Morningside voted heavily for Kerry, but Edina turned Democratic in 2004 because the entire town was tipping. Tim O'Brien was Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair in Edina during the early 1980s. Over the last generation, he's seen "the old inner-ring suburbs going through this metamorphosis, changing from being solidly Republican to, not Democratic, but moderate," he told me. The old Edina residents were largely self-employed businessmen, country club Babbitts. The newer residents are professionals. They read the
New York Times,
he said, and both husband and wife have been to college. They want a connection to urban Minneapolis. By contrast, voters in Scott County have "no association with the inner metropolitan area whatsoever," O'Brien said. "They read the story in the paper today about four kids arrested for murdering somebody, a horror story, and they are damn glad they are living out in Scott County."

What about the people who have moved into Morningside? I asked. These are people who want a "city lifestyle," he answered. "I think you could say that the people in Morningside wouldn't move to Scott County if you put a gun to their head," O'Brien concluded. "And vice versa."

Back in heavily Republican and rural Crook County, Oregon, the local Democratic Party meets monthly at the Panda Chinese restaurant in Prineville. The night I visited, party regulars numbered in the high single digits. They wore their colors—a Prius in the parking lot and a
RELIGIOUS LEFT
pin on a lapel—and they collected donations for future campaigns in a Folgers coffee can. (The cumulative offering that night was $414.13.) That Democrats gathered at all in Prineville was somewhat new. Regular meetings at the Panda had begun only after the election wars of 2000. The goal of Crook County's underdog party in 2004 was modest. According to county chair Steve Bucknum, the Panda Democrats set out to "make it just okay to be a Democrat, to not be laughed out of town."

The Crook County Democrats fought guerrilla style, and their weapon of choice was the political sign. "The Democratic Party for years here had been afraid to put up signs during campaigns," explained Bucknum. "This last election cycle, we made it our major focus just to get signs up, as many signs as we could." They planted signs, and when those signs were ripped up and left for mulch, the Democrats replaced them. They weren't trying to convince the Republicans of anything. The goal was only to survive.

In the heat of the 2004 race, the Panda Democrats staged a bold daylight attack in downtown Prineville. They festooned cars with Kerry/Edwards signs and
PROUD TO BE A RURAL OREGON DEMOCRAT
bumper stickers and then parked these IEDs (improvised electoral devices) on the street in front of the Republican headquarters. A Democrat loitering in a nearby store overheard an irate citizen dialing the Prineville police department. The Republican sympathizer expected the local constabulary to come right away and tow the vehicles. Another person stuck his head out a door and yelled that the Democrats should be put in an insane asylum. That was the prevailing attitude in Crook County, Bucknum said. If you were a Democrat, you belonged in either the pokey or a padded room.

Rural America defected en masse from the Democratic Party in 2000. Between the second Clinton election in 1996 and the first Bush election in 2000, 856 counties changed allegiance. Exactly 2 of those 856 counties switched from Republican to Democratic. Both were metro communities: Charles County, Maryland, in suburban Washington, D.C., and Orange County, Florida, otherwise know as Orlando. The 854 counties that switched from Democratic to Republican were mostly tiny places. Half of them had fewer than 8,300 votes. The wholesale shift of rural Americans to the Republican Party wasn't isolated to one region or even two. The entire country broke apart, rural versus urban.

Rural people have always seen things differently from folks in the cities. But with television, the Internet, and increasing levels of education nationwide, it originally seemed that those differences would diminish. Instead, rural and urban Americans have grown further apart, a split that was plain to see in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Among rural young people (ages eighteen to twenty-nine), the Republican vote jumped from 48 percent in 1996 to 69 percent in 2000. Rural voters with some college education were evenly split in 1996; in 2000, 68 percent of them voted Republican.
²⁷
Rural America made its own political rules. The stereotype of the rural voter is a white male—undoubtedly toting a weapon.
^*
Although rural white men did vote Republican in 2000 and 2004, the dramatic switch to the right after 1996 was among rural white women. Married white women in rural counties gave Bush a 30-point advantage in 2004. Seventy percent of white women without a college education living in rural communities voted for Bush. Democrats had enjoyed a large advantage among all women voters throughout the 1990s, but the steady io-point gap was reduced to only 3 percentage points in 2004. The decline in the gender gap between the parties was due largely to rural women voting Republican.
²⁸

John Kerry's response to the cultural division between rural and urban America was to borrow some camouflage clothing one day and sacrifice four ducks to the gods of the Second Amendment. When he traveled to rural America (or the fast-growing exurbs), he was painfully out of place. The Kerry campaign thought that it could drum up votes in rural counties by talking about new roads and the term-paper-sounding Manufacturing Extension Partnership. "That an upper class Bostonian encountered difficulty in connecting at the human level with everyday, largely more conservative, rural voters ought not to surprise," wrote political consultants Anna Greenberg and Bill Greener in 2005.
^*
29
Crook County Democrat Steve Bucknum put it more bluntly: "The problem with the Democratic Party is elitism."

Meanwhile, the rural Republican vote engendered a hostile reaction from some urbanites. The editors of Seattle's alternative newspaper, the
Stranger,
published a widely distributed manifesto titled "The Urban Archipelago," which was the inevitable result—and unwitting proclamation—of Big Sort politics: "Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion ... And we are the real Americans. They—rural, red-state voters, the denizens of the exurbs—are not real Americans. They are rubes, fools, and hate-mongers."
³⁰

Political scientist Seth McKee compared the rural and urban ballots over time. After the 2004 election, he found that "never before has the gap in the presidential vote choice of rural and urban voters been so wide."
³¹

We vote with a vengeance in my neighborhood, so when my wife and I marched to the polls in November 2006, there was a line out the door of the Congress Avenue Baptist Church, with people dawdling almost to the end of the building. We chatted with neighbors and took pictures of our polling place for an Internet site created to collect photos from every American precinct. I snapped a shot of a smiling brown Lab with voters waiting in the background. I asked the owner the dog's name. "Che," she answered.

It's not a scientific poll, but when a dog picked at random at a polling place has been named for a South American Marxist revolutionary, odds are that the precinct will have a liberal bent. This wasn't the only hint that my neighborhood hadn't changed much in the two years since the 2004 election. There were still the same worries circulating that the election would be stolen by devious voting machine companies or that campaign tricks would turn another sure Democratic win into a Republican theft. (My wife dubbed such elaborate explanations for transgressions not yet committed "pre-spiracies.") The neighborhood was still engaged in activities that wouldn't likely be happening in, say, southern Georgia. For example, some good citizens were spending several Saturdays that November improving the local middle school's feng shui. A rice blessing had already been performed in the principal's office—"Many amazing results are occurring on the campus as a result of these first two hours," the organizer of the project had announced—and on the Saturday after the election, volunteers would hang Music of the Spheres wind chimes in the school's courtyards. When the ballots were counted, I saw that my wonderful Che-remembering, rice-blessing neighborhood voted 45 percentage points more Democratic than Texas as a whole.

The 2006 midterm elections were in many ways an extension of 2004—only this time issues intruded. The war in Iraq, corruption, sex scandals, Hurricane Katrina, stagnant middle-class wages, and torture pushed a small percentage of former supporters against President Bush. Initially, a number of political commentators wrote that the results signaled major changes in the U.S. electorate. The
Washington Post
reported a few days after the vote that the '"God gap' in American politics has narrowed substantially."
³²
This was a bit premature. Seventy percent of white Evangelicals voted for Republicans in the House races, according to exit polls. In the House races two years earlier—back when it had seemed abundantly clear to everyone that white Evangelicals were taking over the country—Republican support among Evangelicals had reached 74 percent. White Evangelicals, supposedly disgruntled with Bush in the fall of 2006, voted for Democrats in the same proportion that gays and lesbians voted for Republicans (both at about 25 percent, according to the 2006 exit polls of those voting in congressional races).
^*
The story of the election wasn't big changes, but small, across-the-board shifts. Democrats picked up 3 points, 5 points, 7 points in every group. Gallup found the vote to be a "rising Democratic tide that lifted support in almost all key subgroups."
³³
There wasn't a surge of votes from any one group, no realignment or stunning desertion. There was just a general—perhaps even a momentary—change among a small percentage of the public.
^†