How Democrats can compete for the White Working Class-Thomas B. Edsall, NY Times

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"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."...

3/11/14, "How Democrats Can Compete for the White Working Class," NY Times op-ed contributor, Thomas B. Edsall

"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.”

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."