Political Demography at Play in the U.S. and Elsewhere

Underlying all of the demographic analyses about the U.S. election, as well as the Brexit vote, is that the demographic divide is about the "other." In the U.K., the (mis)perception that immigrants were undermining English society helped people (especially those with no real interaction with immigrants, as I noted at the time) to vote to leave the European Union. In the U.S., it was especially less educated whites who wound up giving Donald Trump the electoral college votes he needed from swing states in the midwest. Justin Stoler linked me to an NPR piece on what the exit polls taught us and this conclusion was particularly noteworthy:

... 6. And that leads to what might be the biggest story of the election — Democrats' cratering with blue-collar white voters.

Ohio and Iowa went by huge margins for Trump –- almost 10 points in Iowa and 9 in Ohio. Trump won Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (by less than a point), leads in Michigan (by an even smaller margin), and lost by less than 2 points in Minnesota.

These are all states that went for Democrats in six straight presidential elections. They were crucial to the Democratic Blue Wall, and Trump took a sledgehammer to it.

These are people who feel they are being forgotten by the country's "elite" and their anger has turned to immigrants and others who are different (classic xenophobia) and to those who support the "others." Donald Trump clearly fed into and hyped up that kind of rhetoric, but he didn't invent it. The demography of the U.S. and of Europe is changing and political leaders have paid insufficient attention to it. Why? Probably because the problems are large and complex. However, there is no going back on the demographic trends in place in the world--no matter how much some people might wish for that. Things are changing and politicians have to start coping with this reality--including the people who feel they are being left behind. This is what political demography is all about. My son, Greg Weeks, and I have contributed to the political demography literature in our book Irresistible Forces, which examines the forces underlying migration from Latin America to the U.S., and another good resource that everyone in politics should read is the book Political Demography: How Population Changes are Reshaping International Security and National Politics, edited by Jack Goldstone, Eric Kaufmann, and Monica Duffy Toft.

The Uncertain Future of Women's Reproductive Rights in the U.S.

Among the many uncertainties associated with Donald Trump's election, especially when combined with the continued Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, is what will happen to women's reproductive rights in this country? Despite the fact that abortion has been legal in the U.S. for more than four decades, opponents have ramped up their attacks on abortion providers over time in a clear effort to scare away physicians and patients alike. One of the people sounding the alarm in a very personal way is Dr. Warren Hern, who runs an abortion clinic in Boulder, Colorado. Demographers know him for his excellent and ground-breaking work on fertility among the Shipibo people in Peru. That research helped him to earn a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Carolina, Chapel Hill, but most of his professional life has been dedicated to helping women who needed an abortion. Yesterday, he published an online letter of concern:

I have survived, but some of my colleagues and friends have been murdered by anti-abortion fanatics.

Donald Trump has said that women should be punished for having abortions. Trump’s running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, has used attacks on abortion as the principal focus of his public career.

In fact, one week ago I received a chilling letter from Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the most ferociously anti-abortion member of Congress, who chairs the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives.

The letter demanded that I submit a wide variety of documents, including patient medical records in cases of gestations greater than 22 weeks. I have until Nov. 21 to comply.

The panel is looking for evidence that I am selling “baby body parts.” It has the power of subpoena and can cite me for contempt of Congress if I don’t comply by the deadline.

It is frightening. It is a witch hunt.

I am a physician helping patients, and I am being treated like a criminal.

The star chamber proceedings of the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives is a target identification program for the anti-abortion assassins. It is terrifying.

At a deeper level, I have no confidence that Trump and the current Republican leadership will protect my life and liberty because of the work I do to help women. Their public harassment of me increases my risk of assassination.

We should all be terrified that the situation is already this bad for physicians performing abortions. Whether or not you are in favor of abortion, the fact that it is legal means that no one should fear for their life to be either physician or patient--and it seems likely that the situation will get worse before (or if) it ever gets better. 

A House Divided: US Election Demographics

As the global shock of Donald Trump's election transitions to coping with it, data are emerging that remind us how markedly divided the country is geographically, demographically, and politically. The NYTimes put together exit poll data from nearly 30,000 people, including phone interviews with mail-in and early voters. These data obviously capture voters, so there is no issue with figuring out who is a likely voter. There may still be some non-response bias, but the in-person interview technique outside polling places almost certainly reduces that considerably. Anyway, here are three pieces of information that seem noteworthy to me: (1) a majority of men voted for Trump, while a minority of women did, but it was a pretty high minority of women; (2) the less educated you were, the more likely you were to vote for Trump, but Trump still grabbed almost half of white college graduates; and (3) as expected from the electoral maps and discussions ahead of time, the farther away you were from a city center, the more likely you were to vote for Trump.

The data also suggest that the win for Trump was as much about people not turning out to vote for Clinton, as it was about people voting for Trump. He got about the same number of popular votes as did Romney, but she got fewer votes than did Obama. Her team was worried that this might happen, and it did. Nonetheless, she still received more popular votes than did Trump, even though fewer electoral votes. This has happened five times in U.S. history--three times in the 19th century and twice in this century (Bush and now Trump).

Is the Syrian War Changing the Country's Demographics?

Thanks to Abu Daoud for linking me to an interesting story from ABC News suggesting that President Assad of Syria is using the civil war there to somehow shift the country's demographics. Which demographic characteristic is at issue? That of loyalty to the government of Assad. I admit that I have never before thought of "loyalty" as a demographic characteristics, but there it is.

The opposition accuses the government of President Bashar Assad of using under-the-radar methods to discourage populations it sees as disloyal from returning, changing the demographics to help consolidate control over a corridor running from Damascus to the Mediterranean coast.

The government says it is doing all it can to bring people back.

"The main goal of the Syrian government is to return all displaced Syrians to their homes," National Reconciliation Minister Ali Haidar told The Associated Press last month.

More than 11 million people, nearly half Syria's population, have been driven from their homes by the war since 2011, including 5 million who fled abroad as refugees.

Without question, the entire world would breathe a collective sigh of relief for the civil war there to end in such a way that people could return and the country could be rebuilt. There is actually an implicit assumption that this will happen built into population projections by the UN Population Division and by the Population Reference Bureau, which assume that by 2030 the Syrian population will have increased from its current (maybe) 17 million to more than 25 million. 

Keep in mind that the birth rate in Syria had been dropping rapidly prior to the onset of violence, from 7 children per woman as recently as the 1980s to a level currently estimated to be slightly fewer than 3 children each. Of course, even at this lower level, children account for one out of every three Syrians, which is why photos of refugees always show so many children. However, a key demographic in the country is that fertility has been lower among the Alawites (an offshoot of Shia Islam and the religion of the ruling Assad family) and Christians than among the majority Sunni Muslim population. That is, in my opinion, the key demographic of the country.

The Power of Polls to Demographically Deceive Us...

Like many people I was very worried that Donald Trump might win the U.S. presidency, but I didn't really think it would happen. Why not? Because, like many people, I paid too much attention to the polls, even when I knew how flawed they can be. The problem is two-fold: (1) response rate to pollsters is very low (9% is a widely cited figure for the Pew Research polls), and (2) figuring out who is going to vote is difficult, even in the best of times. Dealing with both problems requires weighting schemes to adjust the collected data so that they presumably reflect the responses that you would have gotten with a very high response rate and a high level of voting certainty. The weighting is done almost entirely on the basis of demographic characteristics--age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, and place of residence being the major factors that are associated both with voter turnout and voter preferences. 

Where do the weights come from? Mainly from previous elections, based on demographic data from exit polls and from questions asked by the U.S. Census Bureau in the Current Population Survey.  If the weights are wrong, the results are wrong. Why might the weights be wrong? Because in the three most recent high profile cases of pollsters it getting wrong--Scottish independence vote, Brexit vote, and Donald Trump--there wasn't a sufficient history of voting in these unusual circumstances to allow pollsters to get the weights right.

I'm not blaming pollsters for Trump being elected. There are lots of reasons for that and experts will be debating those reasons for years to come. Pollsters just gave us incorrect information about what to expect and thus twisted our expectations about what was happening. We should have known better. Nate Silver's famous approach to the polling issue has been to average data from a lot of polls, focusing on those that seem--after the fact--to generally be closest to the truth about expected voting behavior. That seems to work reasonably well in more or less conventional situations, but at the moment we are living through unconventional times, and I expect that we are going to have more surprises ahead of us as the demographics of the country and the world continue to evolve.