Is there any more room for high school educated whites to move to the right

[Wesley_Clark]

@LSLGuy

A question for the OP ref his title vs post #33.

Is the question whether low SES whites can vote for the Rs in greater number or is it whether low SES whites can become more extreme in their beliefs?

Which is really to say are you asking whether the leftish fringe of low SES whites is shrinking or whether the rightish fringe is either growing,becoming more extremist, or both?

IMO those are two very different groups of people being driven by very different cultural and economic forces. Their different problems have different solutions.
My take (unsurprisingly) on how the Ds might win back the low SES whites is to make a full on push for widespread unionization. They flocked to Trump for many things, but his noises about somehow bringing back high paying secure jobs were the most attractive and semi-principled things he ever said.

As long as the Ds can be painted as the lackeys of Wall Street they have a massive credibility challenge. Many of the low SES people recognize that healthy big corps are necessary. And they implicitly understand that a healthy GM is not the same as a healthy JPMorgan.

How much of the belief that the Ds are Wall Street lackeys is pure R propaganda and how much has basis in believable fact is an open question.

It may take a generation or two and perhaps a mini-revolution to get back to an era when both parties and their boosters are just spinning different POVs on the same truth rather than simply inventing and propagating totally false shit from whole cloth.

Its a question of whether low SES whites can give larger margins to the GOP than what they already give. In 2008 they gave the GOP about a 14 point margin. That was 28 points by 2012 and 39 points by 2016.

Is there room for the white working class to give the GOP a 40-50 point margin on the national scale, or have they reached critical mass and everyone who would shift to the right already has?

Seeing how almost every group moved to the left compared to 2016 in Virginia, but the white working class didn’t, that may mean there is still room for them to give bigger margins to the GOP.

Among college educated whites compared to 2016, the democrat did 6 points better, the GOP canddiate did 1 point worse. Among the white working class, the democrat did 2 points better but the GOP candidate did 1 point better also. College educated whites moved 7 points to the left, the white working class moved 1 point to the left. Since the 2017-2020 elections are going to be very dem heavy, if the GOP keeps their margins among the WWC that to me implies the WWC is still moving to the right and may put up 50 point margins in the 2020s unless dems can find a way to win them back.

In Virginia it didn’t matter because college educated whites and minorities still voted dem and drowned out the white working class. But college educated whites will start shifting back to the GOP when Trump is out of office.

[Fuzzy_wuzzy]

@gatorslap

There is a belief out there that people tend to be more liberal when they’re young and grow more conservative as they get older. But I think it’s more generational. For example, in 2000, voters 18-24 were split evenly.

We all know that younger voters went for Hillary by a lopsided margin and older voters for Trump by a lopsided margin. I haven’t found detailed demographic data that breaks things down by age within specific groups, but I am pretty sure it holds consistently across most groups that Hillary performed better among the younger set than she did with the older set. I don’t think non-college whites are an exception. Trump is pretty unpopular, and I don’t see that changing, so he’s not winning many new people over to his side. **So, barring some major political shakeup **in the near future, I’d expect non-college whites as a group to move more towards the center as older voters die off and younger people come of age. That’s assuming that voters aged 14-17 in 2016 are similar to their slightly-older peers, which I think is a pretty good assumption.

A major political shake-up is on the horizon within a decade or so. As baby boomers retire the Federal budget is about to become squeezed. Taxpayers are about to get a whole lot less government services whilst simultaneously paying more in tax. The voting public won’t put up with that without becoming angered. A number of political careers and isms will be destroyed. I suspect the Right will benefit from this more than the Left but that remains to be seen. What is as good as guaranteed is that a political shake-up will occur.

[adaher]

The complicating factor is that the right is now also the party of the elderly, which means a transition to a European style right wing party: supportive of the welfare state(for white people). Meanwhile, the left will become more willing to cut entitlements because while they love old age social insurance, they also like to feed hungry young people and we won’t be able to do both.