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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Dems target white working men

The Columbian
Published:

Democrats were once the party of the white working man — but that was a long time ago.

In the 2012 presidential election, Barack Obama won only one-third of the votes of white working-class men, a modern-day low. Mitt Romney, who didn’t seem much like a blue-collar guy, swept the votes of those working stiffs by a huge margin. In the 2014 congressional election, Democratic candidates did even worse, one of the main reasons they lost nine Senate seats and their Senate majority.

That imbalance has tormented Democratic activists, who still see themselves as champions of the working class, the party’s core identity for most of the last century.

“If Democrats can’t figure out how to appeal to today’s working-class voters, then they don’t deserve to lead,” said Stan Greenberg, a political strategist and pollster who helped Bill Clinton win the presidency in 1992.

So they’ve done polls and held conferences. They’ve launched a grass-roots campaign to connect with blue-collar workers who aren’t union members. White non-college voters — which is how pollsters define “working class” — have become the Democratic Party’s great white whale.

That may seem like a silly hang-up in view of conventional wisdom that Democrats have a virtual lock on the next few presidential elections by virtue of demographics; white men, after all, are a steadily shrinking piece of the electorate. When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, about one-third of all voters were white non-college men. By 2012, their share was only about half as large: 17 percent.

The groups that are growing — women, minorities, young people — tend to vote Democratic. The party’s next nominee could still win the White House based mostly on their turnout; that’s how Obama won his second term.

But abandoning the hunt for white working-class men would make Democratic candidates vulnerable to any Republican candidate who could win a healthy share of minority voters, as George W. Bush did in 2000 and 2004. Equally important, because of the concentration of minority voters in urban districts, it would doom the Democrats to second place in congressional elections.

So it’s a practical problem, not just a sentimental one.

Almost by definition, identity politics is one source of the problem; some white non-college voters have come to view Democrats as a party that cares about women and minorities more than it cares about them. “I think this is where Democrats screw up, you know?” former Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., told Yahoo News recently. “I think that they have kind of unwittingly used this group, white working males, as a whipping post for a lot of their policies. And then when they react, they say they’re being racist.”

The biggest driver of white working-class disaffection, however, is clearly economic insecurity, combined with a sense that big government hasn’t done much to stand up for the little guy.

How do Democrats plan to get out of the hole they’re in?

Part of the answer is easy: They’ll adopt some version of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s economic populism. They’ll denounce the excesses of Wall Street and demand a better deal for the working class. But Greenberg has proposed adding another piece to the Democrats’ message: a more serious commitment to both campaign reform and a leaner, more efficient federal government — an updated version of Bill Clinton’s 1996 pledge that the era of big government is over.

White working-class voters “are skeptical of government and skeptical of Democrats,” he said. “They’re surprised to hear Democrats say they want to change politics and change government.”

That message, he said, “is a precondition to reaching them on other issues.”

Democrats don’t expect to win a majority of white working-class voters next year — let alone white working-class men. But they’d like to stop their slide. And, of course, Republicans will compete for the same votes.

At least working-class voters will get plenty of rhetorical attention. That won’t solve their problems — but they won’t be able to complain that nobody’s thinking about them anymore.


Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Email: doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com.

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