The Opinion Pages|Contributing Op-Ed Writer
How Democrats Can Compete for the White Working Class
On the surface, the Democratic Party’s bid to win back the votes of the white working class looks like an impossible task.
Between 2008 and 2012, President Obama’s already weak support among these voters dropped from 40 percent to just 36 percent.
Looked
at from a different perspective, though, Democratic prospects do not
seem so gloomy. There was a wide disparity in Obama’s performance among
white working-class voters in different sections of the country: awful
in the South and significantly better in much of the rest of the
country. This suggests that a targeted regional strategy could
strengthen the Democratic Party’s chances with what was once its core
constituency.
Before we get into regional subtleties, let’s examine the question from the national vantage point.
The results of two national surveys released last year in March and in July by Democracy Corps, a polling organization sponsored by Democrats, provide little ground for liberal optimism.
In response to my request, Erica Seifert,
a senior associate at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, which conducted the
Democracy Corps surveys, provided detailed results comparing the views
of white, noncollege-educated voters with the views of all voters.
For
Democrats, one of the more worrisome findings that Democracy Corps
turned up is that these voters are far more suspicious of government
than the general public. This is in contrast to Democrats generally, who
are by most measures far more pro-government than the rest of the
electorate, according to American National Election Studies,
Democracy
Corps found that less well-educated whites agree, by a huge 46.2
percentage point margin, with the statement “When something is run by
the government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful.” This is 11.6
points more than all voters.
Similarly,
the general public agrees that “It is the responsibility of the
government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves” by a
19.5 percentage point margin, while whites who did not go to college
agree by half that.
Asked
to choose between two statements — “I’m more concerned we will go too
far in cutting spending and will cut off programs that middle- and
working-class people rely on” or “I’m more concerned we won’t go far
enough in cutting spending and our deficits will continue to grow” — all
voters came down firmly on the side of worrying about cutting too much,
58-42. The white, noncollege voter was evenly split.
According
to Democracy Corps, working-class whites fall on the more conservative
side of the spectrum on a broad range of issues, including military
spending, gay rights, immigration, public works spending and the
potential expansion of pre-K classes.
There
are a few — but very few — issues on which the white working class is
more liberal than the general public, all of which capture the group’s
bread-and-butter concerns: expansion of family, maternity and sick
leave; a belief that “Wall Street hurts the American economy more than
it helps”; and support for the protection of Medicare benefits.
Let me stress here that the Democracy Corps findings are from national surveys.
A far less pessimistic analysis of Democratic prospects among working-class voters emerges from a major study
that the Public Religion Research Institute released in September 2012,
“Beyond Guns and God: Understanding the Complexities of the White
Working Class in America.”
The
key finding in the P.R.R.I. study is that working-class whites in the
South are – no surprise — far more conservative than their counterparts
in the rest of the country. Lumping all of these voters together
exaggerates this constituency’s overall rightward tilt.
The regional differences are striking in the cases of both partisan voting patterns and how voters feel about particular issues.
The
pre-election P.R.R.I. study found that white working-class voters in
the South backed Romney over Obama 62-22, compared to a 46-41 Romney
advantage in the West, a 42-38 edge in the Northeast and an Obama lead
of 44-36 in the Midwest.
Similarly,
while working-class whites in the South opposed same-sex marriage by
61-32 in the P.R.R.I. survey, in the Northeast they favored it 57-37; in
the West they were split 47-45; and in the Midwest they were modestly
opposed, 44-49. In the case of abortion, majorities of non-college
whites outside of the South believe the practice should be legal, while
those in the South were opposed 54-42.
In
general, the findings of the P.R.R.I. study suggest that outside the
South, Democrats should be able to make significant inroads among
working-class whites – and, in fact, they have. In 2008, when Obama was
losing nationally by 18 points among noncollege whites, in Michigan he carried these voters 52-46; in Illinois, 53-46; and in Connecticut, 51-47.
In the South, the anti-Obama margins were staggering, which did not go without notice. Noncollege whites in Alabama voted against Obama 90-9; in Mississippi it was 89-11; and in Georgia 78-22.
The P.R.R.I. study did point to one Democratic stumbling block: affirmative action and “reverse discrimination.”
Three
out of five working-class whites believe “that discrimination against
whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and
other minorities.” This view is strongest in the South, at 69 percent,
but it is the majority conviction of working-class whites in all regions
of the country, where it is never lower than 55 percent.
In
another key measure of white working-class racial resentment, the
P.R.R.I. survey found that by a margin of three percentage points, the
white working class agreed “that the government has paid too much
attention to the problems of minorities.” White noncollege voters were
split down the middle on this issue in the Northeast and Midwest. In the
South, 58 percent agreed.
Thirty
years ago, in the aftermath of the 1984 presidential election in which
Ronald Reagan crushed Walter Mondale, Democrats were deeply alarmed over the defection of blue-collar voters.
Stan
Greenberg, the Democratic pollster, conducted focus groups in 1985 in
the white working-class suburbs of Detroit and found that “these white
Democratic defectors express a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment
that pervades almost everything they think about government and
politics.”
The
perception of reverse discrimination was an even more acute source of
anger: “The special status of blacks is perceived by almost all these
individuals as a serious obstacle to their personal advancement. Indeed,
discrimination against whites has become a well-assimilated and ready
explanation for their status, vulnerability and failures.”
A
separate study that year, financed by the Democratic National
Committee, found that white working-class voters were convinced that
“the Democratic Party has not stood with them as they moved from the
working to the middle class. They have a whole set of middle-class
economic problems today, and their party is not helping them. Instead,
it is helping the blacks, Hispanics and the poor. They feel betrayed.”
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Over
three decades, at least on the part of less educated whites outside the
South, the intensity of the hostility toward the Democratic Party has
clearly ebbed. In Ohio, according to a different P.R.R.I. study
conducted after the 2012 election, white working-class voters were
almost evenly split, 44 percent for Obama, 46 percent for Romney.
Ohio
provides a valuable test case for the viability of Democratic Party
efforts to make gains among white noncollege voters in the North.
Both
the 2012 Obama campaign and its allied “super PAC,” Priorities USA, put
on a full-court press to win over these key voters in a crucial
battleground state, producing commercials featuring factory closings
that were explicitly aimed at the white working class. By splitting the
white working-class vote in Ohio, Obama was able to go over the top
among all voters in the state 51-48.
White
working-class voters outside the South are becoming more open to the
Democratic Party because, as the P.R.R.I. polling on abortion and
same-sex marriage shows, they are coming to terms with the cultural
transformations stemming from what sociologists call the “second demographic transition.”
As I wrote
last September, one of the more visible dividing lines between left and
right in American politics is the extent to which voters in a
particular state or region have adopted the values of this second
demographic transition — a lessening of sexual constraint, extensive
nonmarital cohabitation, delayed childbearing, reduced fertility, family disruption, a stress on personal autonomy and individual self-expression, declining religiosity and growing acceptance of women’s rights.
For
decades, the cultural conflicts that emerged from the 1960s gave the
Republican Party highly effective wedge issues to build support among
white working-class Americans.
These voters were first the “silent majority,” then “Reagan Democrats” and subsequently “angry white men,” but they were crucial at every point to
the conservative coalition that produced presidential victories for the
Republican Party in five of the six elections between 1968 and 1988.
The
declining commitment of white noncollege voters outside the South to
conservative values has been masked, politically and culturally, by the
continued ferocity of sociocultural and racial conservatism among
working class whites in the South. But insofar as the second demographic
transition is taking hold among these voters in the North, the Midwest
and the West, Democratic prospects may well be better than national
polling data suggests.
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