Collective Conscious

I apol­o­gize in advance for the unusual for­mal­ity of this post. It’s clipped from a project I’m work­ing on.

Over the course of the 2010 cam­paign cycle, the Repub­li­can Party began sep­a­rat­ing into two ide­o­log­i­cal camps. The right-​​wing “Tea Party”, affil­i­ated with high-​​profile par­ti­sans like Sarah Palin and Rush Lim­baugh, became known for its unique brand of reac­tionary con­ser­vatism. But despite the var­i­ous crit­i­cisms of the movement’s pol­i­tics, it appeared to be enor­mously pop­u­lar, espe­cially among Repub­li­cans, with one poll sup­port for the Tea Party at 43% among inde­pen­dents and 49% among Republicans[1].

Many “main­stream” Repub­li­cans, includ­ing some long­time incum­bents, were defeated in pri­mary elec­tions by can­di­dates affil­i­ated with the Tea Party. The move­ment thereby infil­trated the insti­tu­tional struc­ture of the Repub­li­can Party. Some con­ser­v­a­tives saw this evo­lu­tion as an ide­o­log­i­cal refine­ment of the party, while oth­ers saw it as an impend­ing dis­as­ter. By Elec­tion Day, some 138 can­di­dates were pub­licly affil­i­ated with the Tea Party — 8 in Sen­ate races and 130 in House races. Just 32% of Tea Party can­di­dates won their races, but because they were spread among a wide range of dis­tricts, this sta­tis­tic is mean­ing­less by itself. If Tea Party can­di­dates sys­tem­at­i­cally out­per­formed their main­stream coun­ter­parts in com­pa­ra­ble dis­tricts, then the Repub­li­can Party must take into account this suc­cess when devis­ing strat­egy for the com­ing Con­gress. If Tea Partiers sys­tem­at­i­cally dis­ap­pointed in their races, then the Repub­li­cans would be wise to ignore their new pres­ence on Capi­tol Hill.

To ana­lyze the rel­a­tive suc­cess of Tea Party can­di­dates, we employ a regres­sion analy­sis on this year’s elec­toral returns. Because of the small sam­ple size of the Sen­ate and its geo­graph­i­cal redun­dancy with House elec­tions, we uti­lize the lat­ter only. As the inde­pen­dent vari­able, we use the Repub­li­can share of the vote. We exam­ine a num­ber of regres­sors. First, we include the share of votes won by John McCain in 2008 in each dis­trict. Prior analy­ses have shown that this vari­able accounts for about a sig­nif­i­cant pro­por­tion of observed vari­ance in con­gres­sional elec­tions and should cer­tainly be con­sid­ered a base­line for per­for­mance in any race[2].

For addi­tional explana­tory power, we include the num­ber of terms which a given seat’s incum­bent has served in Con­gress, regard­less of whether the incum­bent is run­ning for re-​​election, and sep­a­rate this vari­able by party affil­i­a­tion. We then test sev­eral mea­sures of unem­ploy­ment in var­i­ous regres­sions: the observed unem­ploy­ment rate in 2009, the change in unem­ploy­ment from 2008 to 2009, and no unem­ploy­ment treat­ment. Both of these vari­ables have been shown to be sig­nif­i­cant in national elections[3], and so vari­ances among con­gres­sional dis­tricts should be exam­ined for significance. Finally, we exam­ine the impact of the Tea Party. We include two terms: first, the dummy vari­able for a can­di­dates Tea Party affil­i­a­tion as reported by the New York Times[4] and, sec­ondly, an inter­ac­tion term equal to the Repub­li­can vote share in 2008 if the can­di­date is a Tea Partier and equal to 0 oth­er­wise. This term reveals the impact of a district’s pre-​​existing par­ti­san­ship on the per­for­mance of a Tea Party candidate.

Regres­sion analy­sis yields sev­eral inter­est­ing results. First, we find that unem­ploy­ment is not sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant in any treat­ment. We also find that incum­bency has a sig­nif­i­cant impact on per­for­mance, and that the mag­ni­tude of this effect varies with the incumbent’s party affil­i­a­tion, but, on aver­age, ben­e­fits the incum­bent. We also affirm the sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance of the McCain vote share mea­sure, find­ing that one per­cent­age point increase towards McCain implies nearly a full point in favor of a Repub­li­can candidate.

When exam­in­ing the impact of the Tea Party, our vari­ables yield one major con­clu­sion. The Tea Party vari­able is sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant; how­ever, it also varies dra­mat­i­cally with the pre-​​existing par­ti­san­ship of a given dis­trict. We find that for those dis­tricts with between 0% and 32% vote share for McCain, Tea Partiers are indis­tin­guish­able from or slightly favored over aver­age Repub­li­cans. How­ever, once the 2008 vote share exceeds 32%, the per­for­mance of Tea Partiers lags behind that of main­stream Repub­li­cans, and this gap grows with the pro­por­tion of votes received by McCain.

We pro­pose the fol­low­ing expla­na­tion for this result. From the per­spec­tive of a typ­i­cal Demo­c­ra­tic voter, Repub­li­cans and Tea Party can­di­dates are indis­tin­guish­able, which explains the con­ver­gence as the Demo­c­ra­tic share of the elec­torate grows. How­ever, as the con­ser­v­a­tive bloc expands, its inter­nal ide­o­log­i­cal divi­sion is more clearly vis­i­ble, and mar­ginal mod­er­ate Repub­li­cans and inde­pen­dents begin to express a pref­er­ence for Demo­c­ra­tic can­di­dates if the alter­na­tive is a far-​​right Tea Partier. This model is appeal­ing in part because it inte­grates well with exist­ing con­cep­tions of the polit­i­cal process, includ­ing median voter the­o­ries. We sus­pect that it will prove fruit­ful to con­tinue to inquire along these lines in the future, per­haps expand­ing the analy­sis to blocs within the Demo­c­ra­tic party, such as self-​​identified Pro­gres­sives and Blue Dogs.

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[1] Andy Barr, “Poll: 28% sup­port tea party,” Politico, 5 Apr 2010.

[2] Matthew S. Lev­en­dusky, Jeremy C. Pope, and Simon Jack­man, “Mea­sur­ing Dis­trict Level Par­ti­san­ship with Impli­ca­tions for the Analy­sis of U.S. Elec­tions,” The Jour­nal of Pol­i­tics, 24 Feb 2007

[3] Andrew J. Healy, “Indi­vid­ual Unem­ploy­ment, Lay­offs, and Vot­ing in US Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tions,” 20 Jan 2009.

[4] Kate Zernike, “How Tea Party Can­di­dates Fared,” New York Times, 4 Nov 2010

(Photo: RBerteig)