CQ WEEKLY
– IN FOCUS
April 27, 2008 – 3:23 p.m.
The Vote That Democrats Can’t Afford to Lose
By David Nather, CQ Staff
On the morning after Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York won the Pennsylvania primary, David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, tried to play down the long-term significance of her appeal to white, working-class voters in that state.
“Let’s understand that the white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections, going back even to the Clinton years,” Axelrod said on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. “So, this is not new that Democratic candidates don’t rely solely on those voters.”
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Axelrod wasn’t just flinging another casual slight at his rival consultants in the Clinton camp. He was trying to undermine one of Clinton’s strongest arguments for her candidacy — that she is the one Democrat who can appeal to a crucial demographic that her party is likely to need to win the White House. In doing so, he waded right into the heart of a debate that has raged for decades among Democratic leaders and strategists: How hard should the party try to win this group of voters that has been drifting away for years?
Party regulars and independent analysts still largely agree that the Democrats should be trying hard. It’s true that the white working-class bloc will probably never be as central to the modern Democratic coalition as it was during New Deal days. But the prevailing wisdom also holds that no Democratic presidential nominee can hope to win the White House if he or she loses this bloc as badly as did Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.
“It’s absolutely critical,” said Ruy Teixeira, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who is co-directing a project with the American Enterprise Institute on “The Future of Red, Blue and Purple America.”
“Neither one of them is going to win white, working-class voters in November,” said Teixeira, who recently wrote a paper on the group’s political impact. “But the Democrats do need to keep the deficit down to 10 to 12 points to have a solid victory.”
There is less consensus, however, on whether the results of the primaries so far tell anything about which candidate would do better with these voters in November against Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
Clinton’s allies argue that the primary results give at least a general sense that she’d pull more of those votes away from McCain. “It’s fair to say that with any voter group you choose, a candidate who’s doing better with them in the primaries will do better with them in the general,” said Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and a former domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton.
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Other analysts, however, say it’s impossible to tell how well either Democrat would do, since the dynamics would be different against a Republican than they have been when the Democrats compete against each other.
“The thing that is striking to me is, why do people report on the results of the primaries as if they’re going to apply to the general election?” asked Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg. Teixeira agreed. “Clinton has been getting 15 percent of the black vote in the primaries,” he said. “You really think she’d get 15 percent of the black vote in November?”
Obama made much the same point late last week when a reporter asked him about his perceived limited appeal to the party’s white, working-class voters. “There have been concerns in Ohio and Pennsylvania,” he conceded. “But in both those states, if you look at the polling, those Democrats are more than likely to vote for me in a general election.”
The Vote That Democrats Can’t Afford to Lose
Toward a Working Consensus
There’s a disagreement among demographic experts about how to define working-class: by education level, occupation or income. Each is rough and somewhat arbitrary.
By most indicators, though, Clinton’s appeal to the white working class — by hammering Obama’s comments about small towns, by defending gun owners’ rights and even by downing the now-famous whiskey shot at a campaign stop in Indiana — appeared to have paid off. Among voters without college degrees in Pennsylvania, for example, Clinton defeated Obama by 58 percent to 42 percent, according to exit polls. Among union households, she beat him 59 percent to 41 percent.
There was also a clear difference in their support within income groups, though it was more complicated than a simple link to the working class. Obama bested Clinton among the poorest voters, those with incomes under $15,000. Clinton drew more votes at all income levels between $15,000 and $150,000, well into upper-middle-class territory. They were virtually tied up to $200,000, and Obama defeated Clinton among voters who earned more than $200,000.
Clinton’s performance has caught the attention of Republican pollsters. They are becoming convinced that Obama would have more trouble with so-called Reagan Democrats — working-class voters who veered away from the Democratic Party to vote for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s — than Clinton would. “These voters you would define as Reagan Democrats have been voting for her in wide margins,” said GOP pollster David Winston.
That doesn’t mean everyone sees the white working class as a growing voting bloc. This month, Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University, published a Brookings Institution paper about the “Decline of the White Working Class” that argued that fewer Americans fit the definition today than in New Deal days, by any measure.
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Once an integral part of the New Deal coalition, working-class whites haven’t voted decisively for a Democratic presidential nominee since the mid-1960s. There was a definite racial factor in the shift at the time, Teixeira and Abramowitz concluded, as the Democratic Great Society programs provoked resentment over a seemingly growing tax burden and were unable to defuse the building racial tensions.
But white, working-class voters also objected to social causes like the anti-war movement and feminism, solidifying the shift. And by the end of the 1970s, they also lost confidence in the Democrats’ ability to manage the economy. In 1960 and 1964, Teixeira and Abramowitz found, the Democrats averaged 55 percent of the vote among those white voters that didn’t have a four-year college degree. In 1968 and 1972, that average plummeted to 35 percent. Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale got roughly the same share of this bloc in the 1980 and 1984 elections.
Bill Clinton gave the Democrats a temporary reprieve, winning a small plurality of the white, working-class vote in both 1992 and 1996.
The next two elections, however, were disasters for the Democratic Party. Eight years ago, Gore lost those voters to Republican George W. Bush by 17 percentage points. And four years ago, Kerry lost them by 23 percentage points. “These are not voters we’re going to win without some effort,” said Reed. “They’re not the only group that matters, but they matter a lot.”
The Economy, Again
If anything, Democrats are more confident of their ability to appeal to working-class voters in this election than they have been in a long time. That’s because the economic slump has moved to the top of the national agenda alongside the Iraq War, and Democratic strategists believe such issues as the mortgage crisis will give either Obama or Clinton an opportunity to emphasize arguments that should speak directly to the concerns of the white working class.
The Vote That Democrats Can’t Afford to Lose
“Given where we’re at right now, it seems to me there’s a huge opportunity for the Democrats to speak to their economic anxieties, especially compared to McCain,” said Greenberg. “His idea of an economic stimulus is to cut the corporate tax rate to 25 percent.”
Also, congressional Democrats, collectively, did less badly among the white working class in 2006 than they did in 2004, losing the bloc’s vote by 10 percentage points in 2006, compared with 20 points in 2004.
Both Clinton and Obama have already been attacking McCain’s economic policies as out of touch. Obama focused most of his fire on McCain in his concession speech after the Pennsylvania primary. “I don’t think that the 232,000 Americans who’ve lost their jobs this year are seeing ‘great progress’ the way John McCain has seen it,” Obama said. Based on the results from states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, Clinton’s speeches in the same populist register should win her a stronger advantage with white, working-class voters. But that doesn’t necessarily mean she would do better against McCain overall, Abramowitz said, since Obama can just as easily argue he would win more votes among the young, people with higher levels of education, and African-Americans.
“The question would be, which candidate would be better able to pull together the Democratic coalition as it exists today?” said Abramowitz. “What I see is that each one is stronger within certain elements of the coalition than others.”
Clinton’s strengths with the white working class would only win that argument, Abramowitz said, if the national polls showed her doing clearly better against McCain than Obama would. Instead, the first Gallup tracking poll to be released after the Pennsylvania primary showed both of them tied with McCain among registered voters: 46 percent to 46 percent with Clinton, 45 percent to 45 percent with Obama. For indecisive superdelegates, that’s yet another reason to let the contest go on.
FOR FURTHER READING: Superdelegate battle, CQ Weekly, p. 482; workplace issues and the campaign, 2007 CQ Weekly, p. 2738; Democrats and middle-class policy agenda, p. 716.
Comments
People keep commenting about those people with incomes under $15,000 going to Obama, as though he's the candidate of the poorest of the poor. Actually, I'd guess a sizeable proportion of this group is college students, a demographic that already goes to Obama for other reasons.
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