Some are trying to understand Obama and the Hillary states in terms of the red-blue dichotomy. I think that Elazar’s State Political Culture typology works much better.
Elazar wrote that each state has its own political culture shaped by the original settlers in the state. The Puritan and later the Scandinavians settled in the North and migrated across the country. They were motivated by the belief that they could establish "a city on the hill", that politics was a place for improving the community. States with a moralistic political culture (blue on the map) have high levels of political turnout, more progressive politics, and less control from party elites.
The individualistic states (yellow on the map) were settled by the Irish and the Jews who came to US to improve conditions for themselves and their family. Politics was seen as one route to improve one’s position. States with this culture tend to have higher levels of corruption, have more control by party elites and lower levels of turnout.
The traditional states (orange on the map) were shaped more by the plantation lifestyle, rather a particular immigrant group. Their culture is based on preserving hierarchy and status quo. They also have high levels of party control, which explains Hillary’s good show down there.
So, if you look at Utah, not as a red state, but a moralistic state, then Tuesday’s primary makes a lot more sense.
Elazar’s Map
Tuesday’s Primary
Apt. 11d 
Bah, it’s all V.O. Key (at least in the South). The central question of southern politics remains the position of African-Americans, although now that blacks are enfranchised the meaning of that position is different. Obama won, and will win, the deep south states because they have higher black populations than the peripheral south states (thanks, in no small part, to WJC’s missteps in South Carolina).
Moving beyond Key, outside the South, he won the states in which the Democratic electorate is young, Anglo, and highly-educated (this group is also part of the “Obama coalition” in states where blacks make up a substantial part of the Democratic primary electorate, primarily the Deep South). Clinton won the states where Democrats are older, more likely to be Hispanic, and more likely to be working-class and/or high-school educated. That these are also “blue” states is not surprising, because these are states in which there is a critical mass of Democrats to achieve pluralities in presidential elections in coalition with the Obama supporters. In “red” states, the “Obama coalition” lacks the critical Democratic mass to win presidential elections; many of the voters who demographically would be Clinton’s natural allies in those states are independent or Republican due to low labor union organization and GOP success with wedge issues.
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Maryland was not founded or influenced mainly by immigrants– it was founded by a Catholic queen and the Catholic church still have a big presence in the state. It has a high population of immigrants now, and also a high population of people from other states due to its proximity to DC, but I’m not sure this thesis works out for MD.
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I get that with broad categorizations like this, you miss a great deal of detail. But, having lived in both Nebraska and Pennsylvania, I find it hard to buy any theory that lists them as having a common political culture. Especially in terms of corruption. Both do have their share of Irish people, but there aren’t many places that don’t.
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I’m really not buying it. To begin with, there are huge differences between different regions of states. Huge, desolate desert-like rural eastern Washington is different from the central Seattle/Microsoft corridor, which in turn is different from lush far-western Washington, with its prisons, big timber, very small-time farms and tourism. I was never involved in politics in Washington state (left too young), but it makes no sense at all to think that Washington state as a whole shares a single political culture–the population has always been much too diverse. bj?
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I’d probably go with Chris Lawrence (plus the party elite argument – these things are difficult to grasp for a European), but somehow I find the image of Obama as Scandinavian attractive.
In Sweden, all party leaders with one exception are on record as hoping for a HRC victory in November.
The exception is the Conservative leader and prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. He, of cause, supports Obama.
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I’m writing a dissertation about the settlement of Nebraska and the Dakotas, with a focus on immigration and economics, and Elazar’s map doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Maybe his analysis is more complicated and he looks, not at settlers but at the groups who exercised the greatest political power at the crucial moments, but any story that draws some great division between Iowa and Nebraska is nonsensical to me. Not to mention the vastly different eras in which each group of these states formed its political culture, or the ways in which certain states (Pennsylvania certainly among them) have had multiple political cultures over time, or the even greater ways in which different states have more than one regional political culture, or …
I could go on and on and on. But it’s Saturday and I’m supposed to be staying off the computer.
My historian’s impulse is to see someone trying to explain present trends by shoehorning past events, and doing it crudely, and ignoring enormous swathes of history in the process.
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BTW, it’s true that the earliest groups of Norwegian immigrants had a pietist streak that made them more interested in social action, but later Norwegian immigrants were far more individualistic in their habits. But even taking into the account the strong pietist strains of the Norwegian Lutheran hierarchy, many Lutherans went their own way religiously pretty quickly, and that’s before we talk about Swedish Baptists or the pesky problem of German immigrants being a huge social force throughout the upper Midwest.
Any political analysis that harkens back to immigrant history to try to explain voting trends, but fails to account for the Germans, makes no sense whatsoever to me. But maybe Elazar just didn’t want to address the fact that the Germans can’t be shoehorned into one camp or another, what with being Catholic and Lutheran, from the North and the South (in Germany), and who had been emigrating since before the nation’s creation.
Ack! I’m not supposed to be on the computer!
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Jody,
Please go on when you have time. Looking at the three color Elazar map, I’d note that (perhaps with the exception of California) the blue “moralistic” states are historically very white, racially homogeneous places. (When I used to fly DC-Seattle, it was like the White People Express.)
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Jody,
I hope you include the Irish who settled in Nebraska after invading Canada didn’t appear to help things much.
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Whaaa? California settled by Puritans and Scandinavians? BWAHAHA. Cali is definitely a blue state, but in a league of its own. For one thing, it was first settled by MEXICANS. Sure, they did want to establish a Catholic base but what they really wanted was to exploit California’s abundant natural resources. Since then, we’ve attracted three sorts of folks: 1) more people who want to exploit resources (e.g. the Gold Rush), 2) rogues, outlaws and misfits (e.g. the Gold Rush – convicts came in from Australia, sailors jumped ship, and of course “What was your name in the States?”) and 3) businesspeople, often making lots of money off of categories 1 and 2 (see: Levi Strauss, A.P. Giannini, Hewlett and Packard, Steve Jobs).
BTW, the Latinos in California overwhelmingly went for Hillary Clinton – male and female alike. Latino men seem immune to Hillary-heebie-jeebies. Many of the Asians in CA voted for HRC, too. Obama attracted African-Americans and young, educated whites. Older white Democrats, like my mom and her Red Hat friends, all voted HRC.
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Ailurophile,
Actually, you probably need to at least add a category 4: sickly midwesterners who were sent to Southern California for their health. I forget the details, but I had a college class on “Reporting LA” where the professor was mad about background knowledge, and that fact stuck. Also, if we are picking nits, do we want to say that California was originally colonized by Mexicans or by Spaniards?
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I forgot to mention that I agree 100% that the “Puritans and Scandinavians” thing is a real stretch.
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Let’s not forget the Grapes of Wrath contingent, either.
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I had no idea about the sickly Midwesterners, Amy – but I can see it. And you are right about the Okies, another major migration stream. And let’s not forget the actors and other creative types who coalesce around Hollywood.
Boiled down, I would say that California attracts businesspeople on the one hand, and various nonconformists on the other, and the twain often meet (see, erm, our Republican immigrant governor, an actor-businessman-turned-politician). Which makes for a blue state where almost all the Republicans are socially moderate-to-liberal, fiscally conservative and very pro-business; there’s NO WAY (or very little way) that someone like Huckabee could establish himself here.
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Elazar says it was the Puritans and Northern European who originally settled in New England set up a certain political culture that spread West. That culture was spread to whoever later settled in that region and then later migrated West. But get away from the settler argument. Elazar says that there are certain patterns of politics that are shared in those states…. gotta run… kid with a belly ache..
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Question:
Are there some areas where the dominant political culture is indifference to politics?
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I agree with the notion that Elazar’s political culture theory is simplistic, but I think it does a better job of laying of the broad contours of the race. Obama’s message is moralistic in that it is about direct citizen participation and Clinton’s is more individualistic in that it panders to individual constituencies (i.e. government as a means for group advancement). I talk about this more here:
http://thickculture.blogspot.com/2008/02/democratic-race-and-political-culture.html
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Elazar’s map worked better back when he came up with it (I think back in the 1950s). Demographic shifts and the increasing federalization (and nationalization) of policy across the country have muted his categorization, and in some states assigning them to one category was already simplistic (Illinois being a classic example, with Chicagoland having an individualistic culture while most of the rest of the state was more moralistic, with a traditional culture in the southern part of the state).
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1966. Yes, there have been major shifts in population in places like CA and FL since Elazar came up with his typology. But I still think it works well in terms to predicting which states Hillary is going to pick up and which ones Obama will get.
Obama got another moralistic state this weekend, Maine. And I will put money on the fact that Hillary gets the next individualistic states — Ohio and Pennsylvania. This typology works so well in this primary, because one of the major differences between moralistic and individistic states is their level of party centralization. Hillary has the support of party leaders, and individualistic states have low voter turnout and high party centralization. She does less well where there is high turnout and weak party control (moralistic states).
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Laura: Care to make a delegate total prediction for Ohio and Pennsylvania? And, what’s going to happen tomorrow based on the theory (in DC, Maryland & Virginia). Does Hillary win in both individualistic & traditional states? So, she should win both Maryland & Virginia? (DC doesn’t seem to be on the list).
bj
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I am not so daring (and smart) as you. I can’t make a delegate prediction. The traditional category doesn’t seem to work so well in predicting an Obama or Hillary win. Elazar says that traditional states usually have high party control also, but the South has had the biggest changes since 1966. Obama seems to be doing best in the deep South.
I predict MD and VA for Hillary. Obama has DC. Off hand, I’m not sure how she’s polling in those states. I’m going to check it out.
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I might have to eat my words on MD and VA.
Pollster has Obama taking VA – http://www.pollster.com/08-VA-Dem-Pres-Primary.php
and polls are leaning towards Obama in MD also.
http://www.pollster.com/08-MD-Dem-Pres-Primary.php
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There may be such a thing as a moralistic/individualistic dichotomy in the northern/western states, but any attempt to tie that to specific dominant groups of migrants, at some undefined “settler” moment (most states have several waves of settlement, even during the early years, and that’s granting the dubious assumption that an early political culture sticks — consider central/eastern CT, for example, whose early Puritan culture has been heavily inflected by Italian immigration in the 20th century) — well, you lose me there. Too many demographic groups have to be dumped from the story, and too many intra-group battles have to be ignored.
The Puritan leaders in late nineteenth century Vermont recruited Norwegians heavily, in the hopes that the Aryan stock (not their term at the time, obviously) would rebuild a region decimated by out-migration without undermining Puritan values, but the Norwegians stayed about five years before high-tailing off to the abundant, more fertile lands that had already taken Vermont’s sons and daughters away. And as I already said, the Norwegian leadership may have been pietistic and moralist in its inclinations, but the people as a whole? A lot less inclined to play along, as a cursory reading of Rolvaag would demonstrate.
And then let’s consider the Swedes…..
Seriously, the political scientists need to stop doing history backward. They ruin what might otherwise be perfectly workable theories by trying to base their ideas on generalizations that don’t hold up.
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What about the Swedes? (I’m of somewhat Swedish ancestry, and the moralistic/pietistic stuff doesn’t really resonate with what I know of my Swedish ancestors, who were rough and ready and carved out farms in the middle of nowhere in western Washington circa 1880/1890.)
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Yep, Amy, and that’s exactly what you’d expect. Which pretty much makes mincemeat of the argument that Scandinavians were just like Yankees, an argument the Yankees tried to make in the context of their post-Civil War crisis about who was going to influence and protect American Democracy now that the sectarian crisis was waning, out-migration had hit record levels, and so many of the new European arrivals came from “the wrong places.”
The biggest problem with Elazar, however, continues to be the lack of attention paid to the Germans. Any typology that tries to explain the voting habits of the Old Northwest and the Upper Midwest and the Great Plains without addressing the Germans really falls down on the spot, as far as I’m concerned.
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The electoral map links CA and NY with AZ, NM, OK, AR, TN, which doesn’t agree with the social map.
Also, IL and MO are mixed with other states to the west and north electorally, even thought they should be opposed socially.
This is a theory with more outliers than data points which fit, it seems.
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