Over at his site the New Majority, David Frum
points to a fascinating
new survey (pdf) of Pennsylvania voters who have recently
switched their party affiliation from Republican to Democrat.
It's not an insignificant number of people: The Democrats'
advantage in voter registration in the state leapt from 550,000
in May 2006 to 1.2 million by November 2008. Why did these
650,000 ex-Republicans become Democrats?
Demographically, these Pennsylvanians look very much like the
voters the New Majority is worried the GOP is repelling. Almost
half (49 percent) have at least an undergraduate degree and more
have graduate or professional degrees (24 percent) than just high
school diplomas (21 percent). Less than 1 percent of the
Republican defectors are high school dropouts. These
allegiance-switching voters also skew toward the financially
comfortable: 37 percent report incomes above $80,000 a year and
the largest single group earns more than $100,000 a year (25
percent).
Yet their main reasons for leaving the Republican Party don't
entirely comport with the reasons the New Majoritarians tend to
give for the GOP's decline. President Bush himself drove many of
them from the party of Lincoln and Reagan (68 percent). The Iraq
war was cited as a major factor by 54 percent. That's followed by
the GOP's positions on foreign policy more generally (49
percent), environmental issues (45 percent), and taxes and
spending (44 percent).
Even though 67 percent of these voters self-identified as
pro-choice, only 38 percent of them agreed that the Democratic
Party's positions on social issues like abortion and same-sex
marriage were closer to theirs than the GOP's. Only 34 percent
agreed that the religious right's influence led them to leave the
party. Those aren't insignificant percentages of people turned
off by social conservatism, of course, but it is less than the
number of people who said they were more Democratic in their
views on taxes and spending (46 percent). Majorities did agree
that the Republican Party was too extreme in its positions (53
percent) and that George W. Bush's presidency sent them heading
for the exits (52 percent).
Now, I'm not sure that self-described moderates (37 percent) and
liberals (27 percent) who disagree with the Republican platform
almost across the board represent the most auspicious set of
recruits for a new Republican majority. But it's not clear that
every "extremist" who turned people away from the GOP was a
social conservative or that socially liberal hawks for the flat
tax are necessarily the best people to win them back.
