Steve M. is basically correct that the GOP is a party that represents the rich and the people who like to root for the rich, but he’s missing something when he says that white working class voters see people who are using public assistance as them rather than us. We’re all familiar with the way the right has pitted poor whites against poor blacks, and poor whites against darker immigrants. Yes, it’s a very effective strategy. But there’s also the pitting of the undereducated against the intellectuals, and the southerners against the northerners and the rural against the urban, and the conservatively religious against the more progressively religious and secular.
Where Republicans are weakest among the white working class is on this concept of rooting for the rich. No doubt, it works to a disturbingly large degree, but it would never be sufficient by itself. One of the advantages of facing off against a northern, urban, mixed-race, progressively religious president is that the Republicans don’t need to rely on rural white working class religious conservatives rooting for the rich. They have four or five reasons to reject everything Obama has to say before they even consider their pocketbooks. There is no doubt in my mind that a President Mark Pryor would get a much fairer hearing from these voters for the exact same proposals, and the Republicans would have to shift a lot of their rhetoric from birth certificates, and economic takers and anti-colonialism and elitism and questions about the president’s faith, and anti-intellectualism…and they would have to double down on getting working class white folks to root for the rich guys.
Keeping this in mind, there is no reason for people like Ross Douthat not to think ahead a little bit. If the presumed Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, actually captures the nomination, the Republicans will have to adjust their game plan substantially just to get back to the losing position they found themselves in in 2008 and 2012. They’ll have to deal with the working class women who just want to see a woman in the Oval Office. They’ll have to deal with folks who do vote their pocketbook unless they’re put-off by the race of the candidate. They’ll have to deal with the folks who feel comfortable with the Christianity practiced by the Clintons but not the Christianity practiced at Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s predominantly black south side of Chicago. They’ll have to deal with the Clintons traditional relative strength in the South and, frankly, with the exact kind of voters we are discussing here.
These are not considerations of policy, but then neither, really, are all these cultural appeals based on racism and economic insecurity and regionalism and religiosity.
There’s a second major problem for the GOP, too, that Steve M. doesn’t touch on. That is, that since the last time a Clinton ran for the presidency, the playing field has tilted the other way in the Culture Wars. So, for example, what once were minority opinions on immigration, gay marriage, and marijuana legalization are now rather strong majority opinions. What this means is that the GOP now pays a higher price than they used to when they make cultural appeals to white working class voters. The price for holding these folks in their column is the maintenance of policies and rhetoric that are broadly unpopular. For a while, they can get by on the idea that one impassioned potential voter is more valuable than two apathetic potential voters, but that balance tips at a certain point and pimping cultural conservatism becomes an unambiguous loser.
I don’t think anyone but the troglodytes truly believes that Mitt Romney wasn’t severely harmed by his harsh anti-Latino rhetoric, for example. It doesn’t matter how much you prime the pump if the well doesn’t have enough water to get the job done.
So, thinking about white working class voters as irretrievably lost to the Democratic Party is the wrong way of looking at it. The Republicans have to find a way to keep these folks in the tent, and if appealing to their racial, regional and religious prejudices is insufficient, particularly against a white, woman candidate with natural appeal within this group, then some economic concessions will need to be made.
Of course, the moment they begin to make economic concessions, they run into trouble with their business base and their big funders, so the first instinct is to rejigger the rhetoric with the hope that the big money folks will go along with a wink and a nod. Actual, substantive economic concessions are much harder, but the beginning is to dispense with the 47% makers/takers rhetoric which will be even less effective against a white candidate who can point to her husband’s broadly popular economic record.
There’s no easy way out of this jam for the GOP, but simply assuming that they will continue to get their share of the white working class vote is a recipe for electoral suicide in 2016.
