Demographic Keys to the 2008 Election

Elections, Demographics, Immigration, Race, Religion

Event Summary

This November could bring to fruition many demographic trends that are decisively reshaping the political landscape of the United States. A new book from Brookings Press, Red, Blue and Purple America: The Future of Election Demographics (2008), edited by Brookings Visiting Fellow Ruy Teixeira, puts these trends in context.

Event Information

When

Monday, October 20, 2008
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Where

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Map

Contact: Brookings Office of Communications

E-mail: events@brookings.edu

Phone: 202.797.6105

On October 20, Brookings hosted a discussion on these key trends and their impact on the 2008 election. Teixeira analyzed the white working class and the 2008 election. He also moderated the session among book contributors and commentators which included Brookings Senior Fellow William Frey, who discussed race and immigration in the 2008 election; Brookings Senior Fellow William Galston, who discussed religion and the 2008 election; Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center, who discussed young voters and the 2008 election; and Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Robert Lang, who discussed suburbia and the 2008 election. Karlyn Bowman, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, provided overall commentary.

After the program, the panel took audience questions.

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Transcript

RUY TEIXEIRA: Okay, let’s get things rolling here. We’ve got a lot of material to get through. Welcome to the session on Demographic Keys to the 2008 Election. My name is Ruy Teixeira. I’m a Visiting Fellow at Brookings here in the Governance Studies in Metropolitan Policy Programs. I’m also a Fellow at the Center for American Progress at the Century Foundation, maybe a few other places I’ve forgotten about.

Today we’re going to be talking about kind of connecting some work we’ve done for a new book to the 2008 election. This book, which I urge you all to go out and immediately order from Amazon or perhaps you can even buy it in the back; Red, Blue, and Purple America: The Future of Election Demographics which comes out of a Brookings American Enterprise Institute project that I co-directed with Karlyn Bowman over there.

We had a conference in January and February on all of this stuff and basically what we sought to do was look at seven demographic, geographic trends that are transforming the American electorate. Trace them over time, look at where we are today, project forward to the future in terms of how these changes and these trends are going to reshape our politics in the future.

And I think we came up with a very interesting set of papers which have a lot of implications for the 2008 election and that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today, connecting these trends, some of these trends to the 2008 election.

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