George Packer has an interesting article on working-class whites in Ohio and the Dems and Obama. Now I know that Obama has made massive gains in Ohio and other industrial-belt states recently, so the article is already a little old.
Nonetheless, the article has really interesting ideas as to why Dems have had trouble with these voters ever since the 70's, and continue to have trouble. The basic idea: it's not the cultural and wedge issues making them vote against their economic interests (the Thomas Frank theory). Rather, as argued in a study by 4 sociologists from U. Arizona last year,
"Beginning in the mid-to-late 1970s, there was increasing reason for working-class whites to question whether the Democrats were still better than the Republicans at promoting their material well-being."
More after the jump.
Packer argues that the basic issue is a fundamental one, as to whether government can make the lives of these voters better, or whether attempts at an activist government will just end up raising their taxes and making their lives worse -- an issue that Obama may, at last, be beginning to turn around, but it's still a potent one:
"Last year, four sociologists at the University of Arizona, led by Lane Kenworthy, released a paper that complicates Frank’s thesis. Their study followed the voting behavior of the forty-five per cent of white Americans who identify themselves as working class. Mining electoral data from the General Social Survey, they found that the decline in white working-class support for Democrats occurred in one period—from the mid-seventies until the early nineties, with a brief lull in the early eighties—and has remained well below fifty per cent ever since. But they concluded that social issues like abortion, guns, religion, and even (outside the South) race had little to do with the shift. Instead, according to their data, it was based on a judgment that—during years in which industrial jobs went overseas, unions practically vanished, and working-class incomes stagnated—the Democratic Party was no longer much help to them. "Beginning in the mid-to-late 1970s, there was increasing reason for working-class whites to question whether the Democrats were still better than the Republicans at promoting their material well-being," the study’s authors write. Working-class whites, their fortunes falling, began to embrace the anti-government, low-tax rhetoric of the conservative movement. During Clinton’s Presidency, the downward economic spiral of these Americans was arrested, but by then their identification with the Democrats had eroded. Having earlier moved to the right for economic reasons, the Arizona study concluded, the working class stayed there because of the rising prominence of social issues—Thomas Frank’s argument. But the Democrats fundamentally lost the white working class because these voters no longer believed the Party’s central tenet—that government could restore a sense of economic security."
Most of the article involves specific examples from talking to Ohio voters. He sees a lot of cultural issues -- racism, people believing the internet smears of Obama. But he also sees examples of this fundamental doubt as to whether government can help them. Here's one:
Snodgrass, who has always voted Democratic, was paying close attention to the Presidential campaign—she had taped both candidates’ Convention speeches, and watched them when she had time—but her faith in politicians was somewhere close to zero. She wanted a leader who would watch out for people in the "middle class," people like her who had no one on their side. "I think McCain is going to be just like Bush the next eight years," she said. "I don’t see how it’s going to change." To her, Sarah Palin, a working mother close to her own age, felt more like a token choice than like a kindred spirit. "I think McCain picked her so women can relate to her, not because she’s the best person for the job," Snodgrass said. "She’s more of a show for the American family." Hillary Clinton had been better, but even she couldn’t fully apprehend Barbie Snodgrass’s predicament.
She remained uninspired by Barack Obama. His Convention speech had gone into detail about his policy proposals on matters like the economy and health care, which seemed tailored to attract a voter like Snodgrass, but they filled her with suspicion. His promise to rescind the Bush tax cuts for wealthier Americans struck her as incredible: "How many people do you know who make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars? What is that, five per cent of the United States? That’s a joke! If he starts at a hundred thousand, I might listen. Two hundred fifty—that’s to me like people who hit the lottery." In fact, only two per cent of Americans make more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, but that group earns twelve per cent of the national income. Nonetheless, the circumstances of Snodgrass’s life made it impossible for her to imagine that there could possibly be enough taxable money in Obama’s upper-income category—which meant that he was being dishonest, and that she would eventually be the one to pay. "He’ll keep going down, and when it’s to people who make forty-five or fifty thousand it’s going to hit me," she said. "I’d have to sell my home and live in a five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment with gang bangers out in my yard, and I’d be scared to death to leave my house."
Snodgrass reacted with equal skepticism to Obama’s proposal for expanding health care. "It scares the heck out of me," she said. "If the employers are going to cover more, we’re going to get less in our raises. My raise every year is like a cost-of-living raise. How are they going to be able to give me more money?" The margin of error in her life was so slim, she felt, that any attempt to improve lives with ambitious new programs could only end up harming her. Obama’s idealistic language left Snodgrass cold. "He’s not saying to me how he’s going to make my life better," she said. She wanted to hear exactly how the next President was going to remove some of the tremendous financial weight bearing down on her—reduce gas prices, cut the cost of medicine—not in the distant future but right away. A friend of hers who worked three jobs refused to support Obama on the theory that he was a Muslim, but Snodgrass said that it didn’t matter to her what race or religion the next President was, nor did the ugly tactics of the campaign have any effect other than to disgust her. What mattered was "your daily life, your daily day, job, family, what you do that keeps you from robbing the video store down the street."
Snodgrass sat talking for much longer than she had initially offered; by the end, her words tumbled out in a plaintive rush, as if under some inner pressure. "You want somebody there who’s going to take care of us," she said. "I’m very scared about who they put in there, because it’s either going to get a lot worse than it is or it’s going to keep going where it is, which is bad." She almost gasped. "Just give us a break. There’s no reprieve. No reprieve."
At least that one voter can't see how Obama's populist proposals can really work for her. Connecting with these voters in ways that lead them to understand and believe that government programs can work for them, not against them -- that's a fundamental issue we as Dems will continue to face for a long time. I think Obama's doing as good a job on this as any presidential candidate has for a long time, but that doesn't by a long shot mean the job is done.