Posted by Joseph Y. Calhoun, III

Based on the post mortem on the election, Obama won primarily because he won the rich vote and the youth vote. Yes, he added minority voters in all categories, but it was the rich and the young who put him over the top. Andrew Gelman provides some graphics and Will Wilkinson provides a good explanation for the shift:

This last one is the stunner. After about 110K, voters in this election became less likely to vote for the ostensibly anti-”spread the wealth” candidate.

Obama also had a huge pick-up in 18-29 year-old voters. What explains all this? Here’s my conjecture, in one word: secularization.

Rich people who don’t go to church are especially socially liberal. The richer they get, the less they prioritize economic issues over social issues, as Inglehart’s “post-materialism” theory predicts. And, if I recall from recent surveys, there has been a big decline in religiosity among the young, which tends to go along with an increasingly socially liberal cast of mind. The overall effect is that the Republican Party has become too socially conservative for increasingly secular wealthy people and increasingly secular twenty-somethings. The GOP is now pretty clearly the party of the religious, white, middle-aged and elderly middle class–not a group with a shining political future. The increasing popularity of the Democrats among the rich is going to move the economic policy preference of the median Democrat “right” and the economic policy preference of the median Republican “left”. In the short term, this might make for a decrease in polarization on economic policy, which may produce bipartisan support for policies that will horrify libertarians. In the long term, the Democrats will continue to become ever more “socially liberal and fiscally conservative,” despite the attempt of the ideological left-leaning media and academic opinion elites (who are full of New New Deal ideas) to prevent this.

I think there is another alternative - the rich and the young (especially the young) could be captured by a libertarian party. Socially liberal and fiscally conservative describes the vast majority of libertarians, although there is quite a bit more to economic matters than just being fiscally conservative.

The Democratic Party has the easiest course to capturing these libertarians and rendering the Republicans a fringe party. All they have to do is get sane about economic policy. Well okay maybe education policy too. And affirmative action. And environmental policy too. Okay, so never mind about that. What we need is a new Party that embraces a socially liberal/fiscally conservative/anti war/free trade/sound money platform. The Libertarian Party has too much baggage to be taken seriously and the Democrats have been captured by the extreme wing of their party just like the Republicans. We need  a fresh start. Who wants to start a politicial party?