David Frum and Michael Barone are urging the GOP to "go upscale" because of what Frum is calling "Bristol's myth":
Many conservatives carry in their heads a mental image of American society that's a generation out of date. They imagine the existence of a huge class of socially conservative downscale voters, ready to vote Republican because of abortion and gay marriage.
The story of Bristol Palin should help puncture this illusion. ...
...It is marriage that creates culturally conservative voters – and young downscale Americans are not getting married. When they do marry, they do not stay married: While divorce rates among the college educated have declined sharply since the 1970s, divorce rates among high school graduates remain ominously high.
True enough. But isn't there an aspirational quality to "values voting"? After all, 95 percent of Americans have pre-marital sex, and that has been true since the 1950s. Yet that hasn't stopped a significant portion of the American electorate from supporting various policies that seek to curb and shame sex outside of marriage. Just as people who earn far less than $200,000 a year oppose tax hikes for those who do, voters sometimes make choices based on their social aspirations, not on their actual circumstances.
It isn't the poorest, most economically distressed Americans who vote aspirationally, but those who are broadly middle class and stable. In terms of the GOP's ability to appeal to younger white folks in that demographic -- such as Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston -- I'd look less at marriage rates and more at religiosity. Seventeen percent of American evangelical Christians are under the age of 30, and they are very likely to hold religious/political beliefs that will turn them into social conservative voters, regardless of their own "chaotic and undisciplined" lifestyles, as Barone puts it. He writes, "Isn't the tension between traditional values and personal behavior one of the enduring themes of country music? I don't think that unwed motherhood or frequent divorce is going to guarantee that young downscale whites won't ever become family values voters." Agreed.
Hat tip: Ed Kilgore.
--Dana Goldstein
