Posted on 12/08/2011 7:05:34 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Has Barack Obama’s Democratic party given up on winning the votes of the white working class? Thomas Edsall, the longtime Washington Post reporter now with the Huffington Post, thinks so.
Surveying the plans of Democratic strategists, Edsall wrote in the New York Times on November 28 that “all pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned.”
Of course, an Obama campaign spokesman issued a prompt denial. No campaign wants any groups of voters to know that it has written them off.
But Edsall is plainly on to something. Obama campaign strategists have made it known that they are concentrating on states like Colorado and Virginia — states with high percentages of college-educated voters, young voters, and minorities.
Obama carried both these states in 2008, even though Republican presidential candidates had carried Virginia in every election and Colorado in all but one election between 1964 and 2004.
Not all Democrats accept the Colorado/Virginia strategy. William Galston, a top domestic aide in the Clinton White House, has argued that the Obama campaign should concentrate on states like Ohio, with an older and more blue-collar population.
Only one Democrat in the last century has won the presidency without carrying Ohio, Galston points out. If John Kerry had run just two points stronger there in 2004, he would have been elected president.
And Ohio’s demographics look a lot like those in Pennsylvania, which Obama carried by ten points in 2004 but where he is now running behind in the polls.
But Galston’s advice has been spurned, and perhaps that just reflects an acceptance of a longstanding reality.
For the Democratic party has not been the party of the white working class for a very long time. Democrats lost the support of white non-college voters starting in the late 1960s, as rioters burned city ghettos and college campuses were beset by student rebellions.
Democratic politicians responded by seeking to assuage what they considered to be righteous grievances.
For more than 50 years, from 1917 to 1968, the Democrats were the more hawkish of the two major parties, more likely than Republicans to support military intervention. Since 1968, they have been the more dovish party.
For more than 30 years, from 1933 to 1964, the Democrats pushed programs designed to help the working class: Social Security and Medicare, FHA home-mortgage loans, support for labor unions. But since the middle 1960s, when anti-poverty programs took center stage, Democrats in Washington and big cities have pushed welfare programs for the poor and lenient measures against crime.
The Democrats’ shift produced vote gains in some segments of the electorate. Blacks, who voted 62 percent for John Kennedy, have voted about 90 percent Democratic starting in 1964.
Democrats’ dovishness and liberal stands on cultural issues won them support from the growing percentage of college-educated voters. But those same stands cost them support among those who came to be called “Reagan Democrats.”
Talented Democratic strategists like pollster Stanley Greenberg and elections analyst Ruy Teixeira struggled for decades to come up with strategies to bring the white working class back to what they considered their natural political home. But even Bill Clinton was unable to get them back.
You can see the results in the 2008 exit poll. Barack Obama got a higher percentage of the total vote than any other Democratic nominee in history except Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.
But he did it without capturing the vast middle of the electorate. He won with a top-and-bottom coalition, carrying voters with incomes over $200,000 and under $50,000, and losing those in between. He carried voters with graduate-school degrees and those with no high-school diplomas, and ran only even with the others.
Obama lost among non-college whites by a 58 percent to 40 percent margin. And in the 2010 House elections, non-college whites went Republican by 63 percent to 33 percent.
So maybe it makes sense for Obama to write off the white working class. Yet he is doing it in an odd way, by enacting New Deal‒like programs and expending great energy on raising taxes on high earners.
Historically, that was the way to win working-class votes. But it plainly isn’t doing so now, and it seems poorly calculated to enthuse the top half of the top-and-bottom coalition. Class warfare is a dubious strategy when you’ve written off the working class.
— Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
I guess that’s why he’s been doing his best to reduce the “working” class. The only middle income class doing well in the last 3 years are government employees. Few if any layoffs, and still receiving pay increases and generous retirement and health benefits. The private sector is dead in the water or in recession.
Obama has given up on the concept of work all together
Nah Berone, there is no sudden admiration for Republicans. They are likely to vote against whoever is in power. The fate of Bush and Obama awaits the next President.
The working class sees no support from neither party. Democrats bend over backward to advance welfare recipients and Republicans bend over forward to protect campaign contributions from millionaires.
The working class is still interested in a job with enough income to support a family, buy a home, educate their kids, afford a doctor when sick and put something aside so they retire not eating dog food.
The see jobs being exported by both parties. They are the Tea Party and the 99%ers. They are the only ones not better off in the last 8 years. They are the ones most likely in the military body bags.
The party that produces jobs will get them. Right now they would vote a Third Party.
No surprise for someone who’s never had a real job in the private sector.
At state and local levels, there have been massive layoffs, salary cutbacks, and freezes. Not every state, also, was Wisconsin and staged a temper tantrum....many of those employees accepted the cuts as necessary.
Moreover, Federal employees have been under an Obama pay freeze - they have been working without a raise in pay for 2 years now, and it will last at least another year. Keep in mind this was a complete unilateral action by Obama. While he was decrying modest state Republican efforts to get the unions to accept 1-2% increases in pay, he was freezing Federal salaries. It was, and is, hypocrisy to the max.
Even further, tens of thousand of DoD Federal employees have lost their jobs under Obama. Of, the Health and Human Services and TSA goons of the government are expanding, but the DoD is in a crisis of cutbacks.
In New York (and many others states), cops, firemen, and others can still legally "pad" their final year with "overtimes" and then calculate their retirement pay based on their final year of work.
Federal retirement is much, much less lucrative. Military retirement is based on 50% of base salary at 20 years - which equates to about $25K a year for the average. Not rich by any standard, and much less than the State Educrats.
In Philadelphia, we had an African-American female who was forced to resign. She got a package of nearly $925,000 - and applied for unemployment (which she will get).
However, it is still true that Obama froze the salaries for everyone at the Federal level: it didn't matter if you were a NASA Engineer, an FBI agent, or a Queer Womens Studies Equal Opportunity Counselor. Moreover, it is still true that thousand upon thousand of Defense Department employees are losing their jobs.
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