Did Working Class Whites Abandon the Democratic Party or did the Democrats Abandon Them?

Politics & Elections
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Although the White Working Class (defined broadly as non-college educated whites) was considered the “backbone” of the Democratic Party, they haven’t been that way for some time now: They supported McCain over Obama by 20 points and Romney by 29 points. They are the only demographic that is supporting Trump over Clinton in polling.

There are two common theories on which party is to blame.

Some people believe that pervasiveness of Neoliberalism was what caused the exodus of working class whites. The party suddenly shifted from welcoming rust belt coal miners and instead was one of professionals and of course academia. The economic priorities of the party changed and working class whites, despite not being overtly conservative on social issues, still found a home with the Republicans who they felt had a better grasp on their economic interests.

Other people point out that even with the influx of neoliberalism that the Democratic party was still one with better policies for working class whites, however they left anyway because they were at odds as the party increasingly became the party of civil rights. Just as there was white flight from urban areas, so there was from an increasingly urban Democratic party.

Like most divorces I feel that both sides have some culpability in the breakup, but I think more of the blame goes to the working class whites who were unable to see that they had a lot more in common with the minority groups that the Democratic party championed than the Republicans.

I feel that the Democrats didn’t lose on policy, but on PR - their messaging sucked. Being unable to communicate correctly that they were better for working class whites on policy, those voters left and never came back.

I think it’s important for us to figure out why this happened and see if it can be reversed. Some think that the Democratic party doesn’t need working class whites (Obama won both times relatively easily without their support) and should stop groveling to a group that isn’t that into them while others see them as natural allies who should be courted because even if the party did change focus, it’s hard to point to current Republican policy as a panacea for the working class.

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Before continuing, it is needed to be pointed out that currently the support by this demographic is for Trump, but it is not overwhelming. The bigger problem for Trump is that it is more likely that the white worker woman vote will make up the difference, and then the minorities have to be included.

While it may be the case that the working white class is for Trump, there are factors and reports that point to Trump eventually losing even that advantage.

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/283520-union-leaders-see-no-evidence-of-migration-to-donald-trump

More for the white women’s vote that is just about half of the white workers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/05/10/can-trump-really-win-with-blue-collar-whites-keep-an-eye-on-the-women/

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I’m not sure how many members of the working class are members of unions anymore so I’m not sure how many votes unions deliver anymore.

Also I’m not sure that the voting difference between white women who haven’t gone to college and white men who haven’t gone to college is that great.

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That is why I also added the second cite, it looks to people that are not just in unions.

IIUC is not that great alright, but it points to this demographic we are talking about in the OP as not being the big danger as some are telling us.

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Two comments on this thought in particular:

First, it’s this line of thinking that makes me think racism/civil rights is the bigger issue in the breakup than any other single factor. Someone who is committed to a world view that doesn’t include civil rights is going to put other policies on the back shelf. It’s not a failure to communicate other policies, it’s a mismatch of priorities.

Second, the economic interests of a coal miner do not align with many of the policies promoted by the Democratic party. You can promise nice things to the working class all you like, but as long as environmental issues are a major plank in the platform, you’re still under-cutting their economic interests. “You’ll be out of a job, but we’ll increase your welfare benefits” is hardly a compelling argument.

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It actually is pretty sizable. Mind you Trump still leads Clinton in that demographic but by much narrower margins than past candidates have.

It’s pretty consistent. From another article:

As to the op I think we need to get a bit more granular than non-college educated or even working class and note the rural vs urban and increasingly suburban divide. I think the what you are seeing is more an entrenchment of the White rural vote into the GOP and the Democratic side winning cities and increasingly suburbs, with non-college educated just being a marker of rural location probability.

And yes I think the Democratic side needs to pay more attention to the very real problems that rural America is facing.

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The job of a political party is to get its message across to its constituents. If it doesn’t do that, there is no one else to blame except the political party. If the party doesn’t recognize that, it will never win the lost constituents back except maybe by luck. If you want to count on luck, keep blaming the people for being too stupid to “get it”.

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Some constituents you need to let go. The working class Whites who are turned off by social liberalism and who are threatened by diversity? The Democratic party likely won’t win them back.

But those are weighted towards older and again more rural working class Whites.

Millennial working class Whites and urban/suburban working class Whites, to the degree that they have gone GOP in the past, are winnable. Thing is winning them requires actually delivering on addressing the hollowing out of the middle class, not just slogans of economic populism.

Many working class Whites perceive that they are over-represented in the group that is, relatively, dropping in economic and social status. They are not completely wrong. While that perception exists some will be most attracted to voting for whatever is the “throw the bums out” movement of the moment

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Over the decades, the Democratic Party moved left to the point where it just wasn’t possible to keep that large working-white-class constituency anymore. The two had drifted apart.

And the Democrats didn’t need them either. The voting bloc of minorities and other folks has grown large enough to the point where the Democrats can easily win presidential elections with only a small minority of the white working class vote.

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For most of the past, people divided into parties largely on economic, social, or geographic lines. Farmers opposed cattlemen; rural regions stood in opposition to urban manufacturing centers; the working class opposed managerial and rent-seeking classes.

But there has been a shift in recent decades; now political alignment is as likely to depend on cognitive style as economic policies. I started a thread in IMHO hoping to discuss the reasons for and implications of this shift; however these questions apparently attracted no interest.

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I found this particularly chuckle-worthy.

Love it when chickens come home to roost…

12

Left on what issues? The Democratic Party moved to the left on cultural issues consistently to the point that it has now adopted an absolutist stance on abortion but it has at best boomeranged on socioeconomic issues moving to the right for a while before only returning to the left (partially) under Obama. Take a look at the 1968 Democratic platform which called for full employment and measures to ensure a minimum standard of living among other things.

That said, the white working-class didn’t necessarily all start voting Republican, much of it simply stopped voting. Consider that for all the talk of Trump’s working-class support the average income of his supporters is 72,000 dollars and that similarly despite Bernie Sanders’s socialism and Hillary Clinton’s strong minority support, the average income of their supporters are both 61,000 dollars compared to the national average of 50,000 dollars. Solving the problem of the abandonment of the white working-class has as much to do with mobilizing nonvoters as with turning Republican voters.

It’s also obvious the Obama coalition will at best have a hard time of winning Congress and state governments whereas the New Deal coalition was able to have a nearly constant control of Congress. Also as Nate Cohn demonstrates, Obama’s dependence on white working-class strongers was larger then previously thought.

Even beyond that, there’s the problem of where a Democratic Party

What do you mean by “chickens come home to roost”? Anyways, it shouldn’t be surprising there’s little love lost between Trump and the construction unions due to the former’s record of wage theft against his contractors. Incidentally, I hope these blatant injustices by the Donald against small businesses and workers are blasted out over the airwaves 24/7 this wall, instead of the endless retarded “zomg Drumpf is so dumb lol only untermensch rednecks will vote for him” bullshit.

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Left-leaning parties tend to have more diverse views, but this can result in incoherence. In Canada, the NDP (the most left-leaning party in my province) supports environmentalists… and unionized nuclear power plant employees. I actually don’t think nuclear power is that bad for the environment (compared to coal!) but good luck writing policies that will satisfy both groups.

Welfare policy is one reason the Democratic Party has lost a lot of the “working class whites”. There is no single welfare program, so when people think welfare, they’re usually thinking of TANF or food stamps. Welfare doesn’t pay much at all, so living on the dole usually results in a struggle… but if you’re a precariously-employed worker, you’re also struggling while working. If you’re working poor, you may literally live next to a welfare family, and your incomplete and biased observations show they’re living a better lifestyle. An SUV for their large family, cheap daycare for their part-time job (if they have one), subsidized rent for their larger apartment… If you saw something like that, you are likely to think they’re lazy and taking advantage of your tax dollars. You might vote Republican just to put a stop to that.

The Democrats did well under Bill Clinton by reforming the welfare system (among other political tactics). They put a five year cap on welfare (the average welfare recipient in Canada and the US spends less than two years on welfare). There were various “workfare” requirements (you must look for a job or work part time to keep your benefits).

British Columbia once tried something like this, but failed. They ran into reality. The reality is that not all welfare recipients are the same. Roughly half of people who have ever been on welfare are on welfare for a short period of time, but the other half will be on welfare for life. The government imposed criteria (eg you must not have any sort of disability, must not have certain barriers to employment, etc) and found they could remove maybe a hundred people. (BC has about three million people, but I don’t know how large the welfare rolls were at that time.)

I’m in favor of imposing harder rules on getting into and staying on welfare, I just realize that a lot of people won’t get off welfare (as they couldn’t be excluded due to their barriers). And even then there’s a political dichotomy. Democrats think these barriers are not the fault of the welfare recipients. Republicans think they are. It’s probably a combination of both. For a random example: It wasn’t your fault one of your kids has asthma and you have to keep skipping work to take care of them (resulting in numerous firings and inability to keep a job), but it is your fault that you decided to have five kids, the first before the two of you finished high school.

The media onslaught against cultural conservatism (which the Republican Party opposes) converts a lot of people. Same with changes to schools. In Ontario, the government recently updated the sex-ed curriculum in a perfectly reasonable way. Kids should know body parts earlier, know that not everyone is straight, etc. Lots of parents opposed this, claiming it was exposing children to this material too early. I have no doubt the Liberal government here instantly converted numerous parents to the Conservative Party when doing so. While some media coverage was reasonable, depicting parents as concerned but misguided, others media depicted these parents as dinosaurs. Many of the parents were brown-skinned people from South Asia, and the media (which will otherwise rip into racist commentary) delighted in reporting on this … for some reason. I suspect similar things happen in the United States.

Left-wing social overreach. Marlise Munoz, a pregnant woman, was rendered brain dead a few years ago. Her husband Erick wanted the hospital to pull the plug immediately, but Texas law made that difficult in the case of a pregnant woman. Eventually scans showed abnormalities in the baby’s development and the line was pulled. Erick Munoz is now trying to make it easier to pull the plug in similar situations in the future.

Link: Family of Brain-Dead Pregnant Woman Now Fighting to Change State Law - ABC News

I’m a pro-choice person. So for me, what was wrong with that story? At least the way the media reported it, Erick Munoz wanted to pull the plug before the baby could be scanned. To my way of thinking, abortion is not about convenience and should never be taken lightly. I have no doubt Mr. Munoz will become a caricature of a heartless pro-life person in the next election.

(The right frequently overreaches over abortion too. Take a look at the Florida abortion “Red Letter” law. Link: Shaming Unwed Moms Was the Law in Jeb Bush’s Florida And I thought Jeb Bush was sane.)

Small family farmers are a generally white, again, not particularly wealthy and shrinking class of Americans who “work with their hands”. The left imposes (common-sense) rules on nutrient management. They impose rules on animal cruelty that are probably moral but not helpful for business. (Implying an entire class of Americans abuse animals is not a good way of getting their votes.) Democrats are more likely to support organic farming, and most farmers are not in favor of this. Democrats support higher gas prices (for reasons beyond me, farmers have to use lots of gas). I think the Republican Party supports the large farming companies and only pay “lip service” to small family farmers, but they do a better job of this than the Democrats.

I once did a study on farmers, which really drove home that urban people like myself know nothing about them. But why do farmers oppose cattlemen? Aren’t cattlemen farmers?

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As a guess, I’d say the death of the labor movement played a role. I’ve seen articles showing how working class whites who are members of unions support the democrats by fairly large margins, while those who are not support the GOP. So that could also play a role.

Resentment because of immigration and racial tension probably plays a role. Blacks and latinos compete for the same jobs as working class whites, which drives down their wages and drives up their economic insecurity. Democrats are friendly to latinos and blacks, republicans are hostile. That could also play a role.

NAFTA played a role too I’m sure, but even though Clinton signed it that was bipartisan legislation.

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I started a thread to address this very question. I stumbled on a key fact which has been ignored but which, I think, may help explain the peculiar shifts in American politics that lead citizens to vote against their own interest.

I consider this an important discovery. Am I wrong? Maybe. But nobody has spent a single keystroke articulating why I’m wrong. Or spent a keystroke in support for that matter.

I suspected all y’all had me set to Ignore until this:

So someone took interest in my post! And seized upon the most minor and least relevant phrase in the post, or in the entire thread to which it links. Uhh … thanks I guess?

Anyway, I’ll play along and answer your question with a cite. … And before we waste a round of rejoinders, note that my post very clearly compared the present with the past.

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Modern farming involves heavy use of gasoline-consuming machinery and lots of fuel is needed to transport agricultural goods to distributors, processors, and markets.

I don’t know whether they are opposing groups now, but in the 19th century, there were frequent clashes over land use. Ranchers depended on access to (often government-owned or subsidized) open land for grazing, which interfered with farmers’ needs for large parcels to grow crops and to keep livestock away from their crops.

There were also frequent clashes between cattle ranchers and sheep herders, which use open grazing land in ways that interfere with each other.

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Well you had buried it in IMHO rather than in GD where you might’ve found more takers … but sure a few keystrokes here. Yes, I think you are wrong. The wiki article you link to is very weak on the evidence and the simple fact remains that we are still parties defined to very siginificant degrees by a variety of demographic splits, not brain structural or even cognitive style differences.

As already mentioned the rural-urban divide is one of the biggest. This map is a fun way to visualize it.

Which is not to say that the concept is without any value. In fact it has been explored here already but from the perspective of the GOP attracting a variety of voters who are authoritarian in cognitive style, something that Trump has exploited well. Making that into a brain structure discussion though detracts rather than adds.

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NAFTA is used as a boogeyman and a scapegoat and was not in fact the Big Bad that it’s been out to be. It could be a few GD threads of course …

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I agree that the “brain structure” aspect is rather tangential to the key point — though I am very curious whether the brain differences are present at birth or develop from interaction. But that there seem to be observable brain differences does “ground” the key point better.

Does anyone disagree that political alignments in America have undergone upheaval? There was a time when labor voted for the pro-labor party. But now, white male blue-collar workers now overwhelmingly support the anti-labor party!

In America, “social” issues like gay rights, guns, etc. now dominate the political divide, until we have a large portion of professionals and rent-seekers joining the partly nominally for labor, and vice versa. This is the big trend that defines this discussion. Workers leave the Democratic Party NOT because they really think GOP serves their economic interest better, but because the GOP fits their emotions, social stances and, yes, their cognitive style.

Party alignment no longer closely follows traditional alignments: economics, class, geography, etc… I think it’s the big important story.

20

This goes back to Nixon.

There were three major reasons why the Democrats went from a landslide victory under Johnson in 1964 to a landslide loss under Nixon in 1972. Civil rights/bigotry; Viet Nam; crime/law and order.

Urban whites started fleeing cities for the suburbs after WWII. They had lots of legitimate reasons for doing so - new housing units had essentially stopped being built at the start of the Depression and the baby boom provided huge incentive to move to areas with new housing more conducive to raising children. In addition, factory jobs moved out of obsolete factories inside Rust Belt cities to newer ones elsewhere, especially in the non-union South. However, these new areas were either redlined, i.e. in places where banks would not offer mortgages to blacks, or in Southern cities hostile to blacks. This trapped blacks inside cities while taking jobs away. Crime and poverty inevitably rose at a time when city services fell, providing more “justification” for whites to flee. The culmination were the urban riots of the mid-1960s.

Nixon was the law and order candidate, which was code for repression of all the groups acting out against the Establishment. That included blacks, Hispanics in their few areas of concentration, hippies who were anti-Establishment in all ways, and antiwar protestors who were deemed traitors. Nixon was agin all of them. He also had a special hatred for anyone who supported these groups and were against him and his policies, which included the Democratic and intellectual left. Protests of all stripes were widespread during his administration; conservatives hated all protestors and gleefully joined Nixon in hating them. So did a California governor named Reagan, who wrapped himself in the flag and insisted that First Amendment rights should be denied to anyone who didn’t agree with his picture of America.

The general revulsion against Nixon and Watergate allowed Carter to become President but in hindsight that obviously was an aberration. Reagan and the conservatives dominated national politics for three terms, time enough to allow the more slowly changing local politics to catch up and deliver dependable Republican officeholders in lower offices all the way down.

The parting was mutual. Republicans happily embraced and encouraged bigotry of all sorts and made it their top priority. Democrats had no stomach for doing so while they were busy purging the party of the horrors of its Southern branch.

The irony of today’s politics lies in the fact that when you hate everyone you make a large number of enemies. The various scorned groups became overwhelmingly Democratic and their numbers increased hugely while the conservative whites stuck in the past diminished proportionally. (Republicans ask why? why? why? would blacks and Hispanics be against them? Why indeed?) Diverse areas are more tolerant; homogeneous ones less so. That coincides roughly with the urban/rural split mentioned above and ends in the Blue State/Red State dichotomy. Over time, conservative horrors again became the ones being protested against and the younger voters again started to repudiate them. Again you’re seeing this first at the national level, with the local races presumably following over time.