You see lots of articles about demographics and presidential elections. You see lots of articles about what percentage of what demographic the president needs to win in order to get a second term. I find these articles interesting and they often help inform my analysis of American politics. It’s also helpful to see statistical analysis of past presidential elections. Census data is interesting. But none of it means a thing in a race between President Obama and Newt Gingrich, or President Obama and Herman Cain. There’s an assumption that people will vote one way or the other because that’s the way they voted the last time around. But the last time around Latinos were faced with a Republican candidate who tried and failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform, not one who wants to build an electrified fence along the Mexican border. The last time around, John McCain had a Cap and Trade program on his website, not a delusional plan that assumes that more carbon burning will solve our environmental problems. Some people voted against Obama over fears that never materialized, others for him based on hopes that have been dashed. Obama did poorly in 2008 among uneducated whites. The Democrats did very poorly among uneducated whites in 2010. The assumption is, apparently, that they will do very badly with them in 2012. That could be true. But it could also not be true.
In 1980, how many people do you think predicted that Massachusetts would vote for Reagan in 1984? In 1988, how many people predicted that the Democrats would win Montana and Georgia in 1992?
Here’s the deal. The Democrats aren’t targeting uneducated whites for a simple reason. It’s not because they don’t want their votes. It’s because they’ll have already won a crushing victory by the time they’ve converted uneducated whites. In a matchup between Gingrich and Obama or Cain and Obama, almost every swingable vote in the country will swing to the president. And that includes a lot of uneducated whites. It probably includes most of them. But they’ll be the hardest to convince and the last to make up their minds.
In a matchup against Romney, it should be a more traditional election. But, even there, Obama will clearly outclass his opponent. My point is that statistics and models don’t mean much if one party doesn’t nominate a plausible president.
My point is that statistics and models don’t mean much if one party doesn’t nominate a plausible president.
I wish I agreed, but I remember 2000.
Ah, but then everyone was colluding to make it seem like he was a plausible president.
It’s harder to do that now with the same level of blanket chorus. Yes it’s more powerful, but there are also more chances to get the truth out.
Yes. There is that.
Yet, I’d say that Gore is no Obama and Dubya had advantages that none of the current crop has.
And Bush lost.
well that didn’t stop him from occupying the oval office for 8 years, starting unfunded wars, fucking up the tax code, and incompetently expanding government in oppressive ways.
abandoning white working class voters is, to my mind, a big fucking mistake, the same way it was with the DLC decided democrats couldn’t possibly compete in the south. Dean showed what a dumb strategy THAT was.
adding, I am only now reading the “future of the obama coalition” piece in the NYT, and I feel ominously like I’ve seen this movie before. It sounds a lot like fighting the last battle.
well, we’ll see how it all turns out.
What keeps running through my head is Pelosi’s “don’t worry”, a media blitz about a group of whacks called the “Tea Baggers”, and the most serious Democratic Party ass-kicking in 70 years.
Which is to say I think you’ve got it backwards: The real issue is whether there is enough of a Democratic Party organization to retake the house. The ‘ground game’ starts and ends with those reps, not the Prez.
I often wonder if Obama had convinced Dean to stay and not replaced him with Kaine, and actually let Dean continue on the path we’d already gone down, what would have happened in 2010.
I’m not saying it would have swung the election but Kaine was arguably a total failure as head of DNC, as the people he governed in Virginia were telling us he would be when President Obama put him in that post.
. . let Dean continue . .
Exactly. There are fifty states, no ‘swings’, 330 million people.
I’m surprised to write this, but I think you’re underthinking it, Booman. (I’m surprised because your analyses are usually the best out there.)
The external factors are going to overwhelm the campaign in my opinion. Specifically the financial crisis, part 2. Europe is already in recession. We’re likely to be entering recession in the beginning of next year. China is slowing down so it won’t be able to serve as the engine of the world economy. That means unemployment might be 10% again by the election, and all the indicators will likely look pretty bad because a recovery won’t begin in earnest until 2013 at the earliest. There’s even the possibility that the financial crash that ensues is as bad or worse than 2008, since there’s little willingness or ability to bail out banks if they fail again (this time due to sovereign debt rather than mortgage debt).
The sad thing is that the media loves to claim Gingrich as an idea man (never mind his ideas range from wrong to insane), and in a time of upheaval they might jump on board with him as someone who has something other than more of the same.
I guess my point is that individual issues don’t matter, and the fact that Gingrich or Cain aren’t plausible doesn’t matter. What will likely matter is the way the candidates are perceived to be responding to world events.
As far as the economy is concerned, I think the most important question is whether any of the Republican candidates will be willing or able to buck the party orthodoxy and offer something other than tax cuts and deregulation as a solution. Maybe Gingrich? Because no matter what kind of crisis we have on our hands in November 2012, I don’t see how anybody is going to get elected by calling for even yet still more tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.
That’s the thing about Gingrich. He’ll come up with some crazy but “innovative” ideas and the media will push them as bucking the GOP orthodoxy, etc. (Of course anyone who looks at the ideas for more than 2 seconds will realize Gingrich is nuts, but few will.)
It’s a dangerous myth that it is uneducated whites who are the right wing of the Republican Party. In fact uneducated whites, because they have low incomes, tend to support Democrats. Who supports Republicans are those educated enough to be either self-employed or small business owners or members of religious denominations that were once havens for poor working folk and are now havens of marginal suburbanites, small town establishments, their parents, or their children. They are people that have had the ideology of personal responsibility work well enough for them to make them moralistic about other people’s difficulties.
I don’t think Booman is saying uneducated whites are the right wing of the Republican Party. He’s saying that they’re the Reagan Democrats.
Anyway, I agree with your post, I just don’t think that’s what he was arguing. Republican’s key supporters make around $70,000 per year I’d say.
Cain?
…Cain?! Did you write this post three weeks ago and just forgot to upload it? Am I in a time loop? Is it October again?
More and more I am realizing that Romney should be easy to beat as well, especially in a bad economy. He’s that MBA guy that took over the company, outsourced everything, laid off most of the workers, put the company into bankruptcy and looted the pension fund in the process. And then he parachutes out with millions. Everybody knows that guy. And nobody trusts him except his country club friends.
Bring on the Class Warfare.
Only thing to keep in mind is that the firebaggers are on the teabaggers’ side, working for an Obama/Democrat loss.
Too many found it psychologically too upsetting to admit this in 2010. That number is somewhat less this go ’round, but still not nil.
That’s not how Edsall sees it and the truth is you are doing your best to mask the long term and growing importance of the estrangement between the Democratic Party and the American working class.
Whether we say the right has successfully wooed them with appeals to their class resentments and racial, religious, and sexual bigotries or the left has alienated them with class contempt and a history of courtship of racial minorities pointedly at their expense, the conservative ascendancy has been powered by the massive defection of working class whites to the Republicans and the progressive abandonment of the working class by the Democrats.
Over the years, this has meant that both parties, being increasingly beholden to the rich, compete more and more over issues that cost them nothing like the sexual revolution, secularism, or racism rather than issues of class that would pit the Democrats strongly against the interests of the plutocracy that increasingly controls them.
True, the Democrats can’t win without picking up at least some of the white working class vote.
So they will always have to be in some measure the lesser evil on class issues per se since their positions on the culture wars and race are a thumb right in those working class eyes.
But as we have all seen over the years and the decades, as both parties become increasingly neoliberal, being the lesser evil is perfectly compatible with being ever more evil, just a few steps behind the leader in evil, the party of the people who imagine themselves to be John Galt.
I’m pretty sure I will vote for the lesser evil, myself, unless I just give up on voting and maybe even the whole wretched business.
But is it really healthy to just watch helpless at the decades long train wreck of American democracy?
And that’s probably the biggest part of the appeal of the #OWS movement.
Just as in the days of the civil rights and anti-war movements, the ordinary processes of democracy aren’t working because the enemy holds all the cards.
So there’s no place to go for any kind of satisfaction but the street.
Gaius, I have a lot of respect for Edsall and his work over the years, and I agree with what I take to be your main point about voting patterns among white working-class Americans.
However, your initial statement about “the long term and growing importance of the estrangement between the Democratic Party and the American working class” misses the point that that the American working class is increasingly non-white. And the Democratic Party—for whatever reasons—is increasingly connected with Latino, African-American and Asian-American working-class voters.
Furthermore, those voters are a growing segment of the working class, as well as being a growing segment of the American electorate as a whole.
P.S. If Democrats want to increase their share of white working-class voters, then they should make it easier to join unions. Voters who are union members vote Democratic in significantly higher numbers than non-union voters.
Massappeal,
The bigger the component of non-whites in the working class the more workers they can appeal to on racial rather than class issues.
Better for the Democratic Party, sure.
But for us working folks of all races it’s a bad thing.
We would be better off if they had to try more and try harder to enlist white workers by conspicuously favoring the 99% on class war issues.
As it stands, they have less and less need to do that as non-whites increase among the working population and whites proportionately diminish.
It’s entirely possible to win elections by attracting huge proportions of non-white voters on racial issues, alone, while letting all of us 99% of all races down more and more with every passing election cycle.
In fact, that’s exactly what has been happening, over the years.
And the presidency of Mr. Obama (for whom I voted and will again) is the most egregious illustration of this we have yet seen.
And I couldn’t agree more than I do with your PS about unions.
And what have Democrats in office increasingly done about unions?
Turn their backs.
Obama, case in point, made promises he has refused to keep.
All part of that same rightward drift of both parties.
reminds me of several conversations I had with people in nid-80. If you go back and read reports of the time, many of those left of center thought Reagan was unelectable.
Ever since then I have taken pieces like this one with a grain of salt. Gingrich is a terrible candidate, but if the economy tanks that won’t matter.
Right now Merkal may be deciding the US election.