While I (and seemingly every other political analyst) am still licking my wounds over missing the presidential election outcome so badly, I did get the opportunity this morning to revisit some analysis that I mostly got right. I went back and looked at a piece I wrote in December 2015 called Trump and the Missing White Voters. It was an eerie experience reading it and it gave me a sick feeling.
I looked at some analysis Sean Trende had done in 2013, and some competing analysis done then by Karl Rove, over whether or not the Republicans needed to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill in order to ever compete in a national election again. I concluded that Donald Trump was well-poistioned to execute Trende’s strategy of opposing immigration reform and winning the presidential election by turning out white voters who had not participated in 2012.
Now, this is an interesting and important debate, but there’s something that both sides agree about. They agree that there is a big pool of white voters out there who voted for McCain but not for Romney. And they agree that their profile is basically that of blue collar workers in the Midwest rather than evangelicals in the South. They are, roughly, the “Reagan Democrats” of Macomb County, Michigan first identified by Stanley Greenberg back in the 1980’s.
It seems to me that these are the type of folks who are gravitating to Donald Trump. I need more data to confirm my hypothesis, but here are some supporting indicators. A USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll just found that 68% of Trump’s supporters say that they would support him in a third party bid while only 18% said that they would not. As for the important first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucuses, Sen. Ted Cruz leads the polls when a tight likely voter model is used but Trump leads when a looser screen is utilized. In other words, folks who didn’t vote in the 2008 or 2012 caucuses are more likely to support Trump than voters who did participate. Trump is attracting new voters and voters who had dropped out.
His platform, if you can call it that, is pretty well designed to appeal to this demographic. He opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Mexican immigration, and he promises to keep scary Muslims from entering the country. He’s not hammering on traditional social values issues that don’t interest these disaffected voters. He’s making more of a generalized racial, religious and tribal appeal. And he’s saying he’ll make America great again, with the unstated premise that he can preserve what’s great about America and restore what’s been lost. If you want to get missing white voters to the polls, Trump’s approach seems capable of doing that.
But these voters probably aren’t going to turn out in the same numbers for a Republican who seems like a Mitt Romney retread. They may have some pretty conservative or even intolerant attitudes, but they aren’t necessarily Republicans at all. They’re probably as likely to nod their heads at a Bernie Sanders speech about breaking up the big banks as they are to cheer a Trump proposal to stick it to the Chinese. Their default position at this point is, I believe, to just stay home. They didn’t vote in 2012 and they won’t vote in 2016 unless they get something significantly different on the menu.
This is why having Trump in the race, even as independent candidate, will probably boost overall turnout.
The problem is that the election won’t be decided just by who shows up but also by people who change their mind. For every disaffected white voter that Trump brings out of the shadows, there will be a newly motivated voter who shows up just to oppose him. And there will be plenty of Romney voters who can’t bring themselves to vote for Trump, just as there were Bush voters who couldn’t vote for McCain and Palin.
Still, to maximize right-leaning turnout, Trump needs to be on the ticket. He can be on the ticket as a Republican or not, but a lot of his voters won’t turn out without him.
We still need to examine the turnout data from the election, but we already know that Trump did better with blue collar midwestern voters who delivered him Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. We know that Trump did this despite alienating lots of Romney voters and despite convincing lots of suburban voters to turn against the GOP, and despite motivating lots of people to show up just to vote against him.
Back on July 2nd, 2013, I wrote a piece called The GOP is Moving in the Wrong Direction. It was in response to an article Benjy Sarlin had written for MSNBC in which he detailed the transformation that occurred in Republican circles as they moved from following the RNC autopsy report’s analysis (that insisted on passing immigration reform) to following the analysis of Sean Trende.
What Mr. Sarlin doesn’t broach is the subject of how conservatives might be able to grab a higher percentage of whites and how they might go about driving up white turnout. The most obvious way is to pursue an us vs. them approach that alternatively praises whites as the true, patriotic Americans, and that demonizes non-whites as a drain on the nation’s resources. This is basically the exact strategy pursued by McCain and especially Romney. It’s what Palin was all about, and it’s what that 47% speech was all about.
An added element was introduced by Barack Obama, whose controversial pastor and Kenyan ancestry opened up avenues for both veiled and nakedly racist appeals to the white voter. A white Democratic nominee would be less of an easy target for talk about secret Islamic sympathies and fraudulent birth certificates, but that would only make other racially polarizing arguments more necessary.
The problem is that these attacks have already been made, and they failed in even near-optimal circumstances. Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses, has been proven insufficient. The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.
That is, indeed, how the party is perceived in the Deep South, but it would be criminal to expand those racial attitudes to the country at large.
The Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.
The key part of that is that in order for the Trende/Trump strategy to work, the Republicans needed to get northern whites to behave like southern whites. And I don’t mean this in any kind of lazy way that just relies on stereotypes about redneck culture. In the South, whites have basically created a one-party system ever since the Civil War. At first, it was monolithic opposition to Lincoln’s Republican Party. Now it’s monolithic opposition to Barack Obama’s Democratic Party. Race has always been the key driver of this behavior but what distinguished it in American politics was that whites in the South voted as an ethnic group. The North has always had virulent racism that expressed itself politically, but whites in the North have split their votes enough to create a vibrant two-party system.
As I noted yesterday, rural whites in places like Pennsylvania voted for Trump in close to the same numbers that you typically see whites in states like Mississippi vote for the Republicans. Where Romney might have gotten 70% of their votes, Trump frequently got around 80%.
Back in 2013, I said it would be “criminal” for the Republican Party to deliberately racialize our politics in the North to the point that they resembled what we see in the South. I said that to accomplish this, the GOP would have to use “a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.”
I didn’t say the strategy couldn’t or wouldn’t work.
It did work.
And here’s what Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has to say about the result:
Yes, we’re all supposed to come together after an election, let bygones be bygones, and march forward unified as neither Democrats nor Republicans but patriotic Americans celebrating the triumph of the democratic process. But it’s difficult to link arms when the home of the free embraces the leadership of a racist.
Let the other groups denigrated and threatened by Trump speak for themselves. The women, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, the LGBT community and others who now must walk through the streets of their country for the next four years in shame and fear, knowing that their value as human beings has been diminished by their neighbors. I only speak for myself as an African-American and I speak with the rage of betrayal.
For Democratic strategists, this creates a conundrum. If they concede 80% of the rural white Midwest to the GOP, they’ll never win back control of the House, or control those state’s legislatures, and they’ll be vulnerable to more Electoral College disappointments. But they can’t back down in the face of this “rage of betrayal” without feeding and further justifying it.
The reason I talked about an aggressive antitrust push yesterday is not just because it’s good policy. Policy doesn’t win elections except in perhaps a slow grinding way over time. Antitrust is also good politics, especially for a situation like this.
Because if the Democrats let this become a racial fight between their multicultural base and the white rural counties of the North, that’s a recipe for the political Southification of the entire country. That’s what the GOP has been doing in a gradual way for 36 years, and it’s the basis for Trump’s coalition and for his reelection in 2020.
Avoiding a fight on those terms is essential even though everyone will be demanding it and one party will be pursuing it for all its worth. Once these fights get started they get a life of their own, they snowball, and the political damage becomes entrenched. The Democrats need a plan that prevents eighty or ninety percent of white rural northerners from feeling like they’re the enemy, and continually insisting that they are the enemy is not that plan.
Antitrust!
Good twitter thread about this comparing the situation to Turkey. This must be understood or we will be in the wilderness for a long long time. Sandersismo has to be the future. No more technocratic neoliberal bullshit:
Read:
https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/796703445629698049
I quoted her here in the summer.
She noted that jobs ARE IDENTITY. Which is why the working class is so angry – their identity is being taken away.
Zeynep was the best political analyst of the cycle by far.
Her name is Zeynep Tufekci.
I’ll give her credit. She is hit or miss on some things but this is spot on.
Agree, she’s good. Thanks for the link.
The Dem platform certainly didn’t sneer at the economic concerns of the middle class or rural America. Plenty of attention was paid to job creation and tax relief for middle America. Der Trumper proposed nothing for rural America except vague opposition to “terrible trade deals!” Was this all it took? Yes, Clinton was not the best messenger for trade problems, but how could Conman Trump really be accepted as a better messenger?
It is becoming very suspicious about what the rural middle class whites voting for Der Trumper really “want”.
The analysis to Turkey and Erdogan seems apt, yet we can’t even really be certain of the definition of the “problem” at hand.
The Dem platform certainly didn’t sneer at the economic concerns of the middle class or rural America. Plenty of attention was paid to job creation and tax relief for middle America.
How was it done though? Not by stuff as simple and easy as Medicare or Social Security. Have you ever tried to use the ACA(aka ObamaCare)? There is a reason it’s no where near as popular as Medicare or Social Security.
I’ve used it every year since it’s inception, and never had any problems except at the beginning…when I had to send proof of who I was.
You’re buying into right wing memes, but no worries Phil.
It’s gone in six months.
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It’s very obvious that as a general rule the critics of Obamacare have never used it.
I have tried to use it. How long did you spend comparing plans or any of that? The time spent using it is what I’m talking about. It’s not simple. But yeah, keep on doing what you’re doing.
The media will chase after and coo and coddle the white voter, and we will be told that’s all that matters because that’s Real America. Rural whites will be pandered too and rewarded for their hate. That’s a helluva drug.
At this point we can only hope Republican bumbling governance and/or a recession occurs for any hope in 2018 or 2020.
One group that will definitely be thrown under the bus will be Muslim-Americans and immigrants.
Universal basic income.
Dems/the left should get behind this with a laser focus.
The primary beneficiaries will be these low-income rural voters and their children, and they are free to spend it at Walmart.
This is a popular solution amongst the Silicon Valley elite, since it hits at the problem of low-skills jobs lost to automation. There could be sufficient support among centrist political elites if they see their political power foreclosed by populist demagoguery.
Who would be against it? The small-gov fanatics, low-tax proponents, maybe some big business which could see this drive down the availability of low-wage workers, and of course Republican politicians purely since it tries to steal their political power base.
Is this something that blue states could team up to do together, separate from the Federal gov, and force red states to adopt/pressure national repubs to accept to not lose great swathes of population as they follow the money?
blue states have most of the money here, we know that. Can this be framed as a racially-blind transfer of money from blue states to red?
And I don’t think that UBI is in conflict with a big anti-trust push. Synergistic in fact.
As was noted above “…jobs ARE IDENTITY. Which is why the working class is so angry – their identity is being taken away. “
UBI is an awesome, and perhaps ultimately necessary “fix” for the natural growth of inequality and shrinkage of needed workforce being driven by automation (and globalization), BUT UBI risks being seen more as “welfare” than something that people should be entitled to.
People would prefer jobs since that’s generally how we define ourselves presently and getting a shift away from that is going to be hard. Especially since republicans/right-wingers will absolutely push the UBI==”your hard earned money going to undeserving people” angle that they’ve been quite successful with in the past. Resentment is a powerful thing.
Anti-trust has a possibility if we can find a way to frame it trusts/oligarchs as where we can place our “blame” for their circumstances perhaps in an emotionally compelling way. I don’t see UBI working quite so well.
UBI is egalitarian. EVERYONE gets the same basic, NO exceptions. No resentments.
Tie it to community service. I dont mean a direct requirement. But make sure its there, that is there are tasks that can be done by those who do not work a regular job. Tasks they can point to and say I am making my little piece of the world better. So their identity becomes helping their town or neighborhood.
Hell even some of the rightwing reformers like the idea of UBI.
I agree that UBI is inherently egalitarian, it’s just that the messaging is tough because “free checks=
welfare **welfaremoney for undeserving dark folk" is pretty deeply ingrained, and that we'd have to break the jobs=self definition/meaning link that’s even more deeply ingrained.
Darn formatting weirdness:
That should be:
“free checks”
="welfare" AND "welfare"=”money for undeserving dark folk”you can easily expand it to make it a job, like the WPA.
The baseline should be a job for anyone who wants it.
How elegantly naive.
The greatest thing done for the middle class in fifty years was the ACA. The Supreme Court proceeded to gut it, the republicans voted to repeal it 50+ times, Republican states refused to implement it, and Trump voters HATE it because right wing media (all media really) trashed it nonstop and they consider it welfare for POC.
Here’s what your future is…the ACA will be repealed, so will the voting rights act. Several departments will be decimated (EPA, DOE), the DOJ will become something horrifying.
In 10 years or so, when democrats finally win all three branches of government again and can actually pass laws, it will take twenty years of fighting to get right back where we are right now.
We are truly fucked, and your discussing creating a UBI. Another entitlement that the republicans will, with the help of the media, define as pandering.
You do know that Clinton cleaned up with people under 40,000 in income, right? Trump won those NOT under economic pressure.
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Sure, I feel naive proposing it, knowing the reception it’ll get from the right. But Trump just won by embracing things that other republicans have only run away from for the past 30 years (while dog-whistling it). Turns out that a lot of people wanted it. Who’s to say that won’t work for us? And the things we want but are afraid to fully embrace have the advantage of being not morally repugnant.
Mainly I would ask, do you want to keep fighting the right on the same terrain as always? that hasn’t worked out so good, and they have both defined the field of battle and defined us. To keep on with the military analogy, we have to displace or continue to suffer their fire.
Plus it would seem that a lot of the voters that came out for Trump don’t really give a shit about right-wing-conservative orthodoxy (would be fine taxing the rich). And welfare checks? Don’t Alaskans love their dividend checks?
I think you’d have to think very carefully about how you would respond when this gets painted as a giant welfare program, and what the financing would look like. While I now think that I know next to nothing about the electorate, given Tuesday’s results, I do feel like this could very easily go down in flames. It might be better to create some type of universal subsidy for job training programs, maybe an agricultural subsidy, etc. – cash incentives tied to work or the effort to find work.
Make it a job people do to support the community, if they choose. a basic income would allow people to go to college or other training.
Why not also promote the idea of the government as employer of last resort, perhaps at a little more money? Give everyone who wants a job something to do and contribute, including health care benefits. Allow people to cycle on and off the program and pay a living wage. Surely there are things around your town that they could do. Hell even create a WPS program for infrastructure projects. The idea of having any unemployment should be anathema. It is simply not necessary.
Some years ago I was playing around with numbers was kind of startled by the AZ exit poll.
The Hispanic vote was growing, but in response the White vote was polarizing. So more Hispanics was offset by white support for the GOP increasing.
I thought, and wrote here, that that was the strategy that the GOP would choose.
What I didn’t expect though was the following:
Margin change from 2012:
Hispanics: -8
Asians: -11
African Americans: -7
I have note seen any liberal discuss those sets of numbers. But our margin went DOWN among POC in the exit poll.
I kind of have my doubts – but if this is true it suggests we are being squeezed at two ends of the Obama coalition.
If the AZ data is what is really going on, then political competition via policy proposals is hopeless. It means voting isn’t any longer about public policy.
Are the minority margin changes you list (sexist) males? Who would vote for a (male) Trump rather than a (Dem) woman? Another problem, then.
Very hard to see what to do.
The shift was mostly in males, so, yes, sexism is suspect in the minority changes. You should be a little suspicious of the Latino changes, though, because Spanish-language exit polls found a lot less support for Trump (18%).
Except MALE hispanics. Trump got a larger percentage than Romney. That’s where the misogyny is.
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Voter restrictions?
That is percentage of those who voted.
Trade? Jobs? POC have the same issues with employment (or tougher) than the working class whites everyone keeps talking about. What if we talked about the “working class” and leave it at that?
And I don’t think that UBI is in conflict with a big anti-trust push. Synergistic in fact.
A Totalitarian racialization of the electorate seemed to be Der Trumper’s clear strategy, we doubted it could really succeed after a somewhat White-lite strategy failed in 2012. Racialization of the electorate seems to have been the recipe for victory in the rust belt states, yet Trump got fewer votes than RMoney nationwide, didn’t he?
It’s important to remember that Der Trumper lost the popular vote and that he is (yet another) Repub electoral college prez. He is a political minority president. Our failed constitution allowed the racialization strategy to succeed, and our failed constitution is the basis for the coming Apocalypse. The electoral college allowed Trump’s vile racialization strategy to work. Yet this is not mentioned by Dem leaders, and cannot be.
Because the bigger problem with the analysis here is that, however correct it may be, it simply cannot become acknowledged as what happened because the Repub victors will not ever admit that this is what they pulled. Nor will the Midwestern white voters who just committed it admit to being pulled into the shit. So how does a nationwide “discussion” of what just happened ever begin? The useless corporate media is still the useless corporate media, and now they will revert to their drooling lap-dog mode given monolithic Repub control of the federal gub’mint.
As for anti-trust as a winning strategy in future, however correct you are that Reaganite monopolization has wrecked the rural economies, the right-leaning federal courts have long ago gutted once-strong anti-trust principles. And major anti-trust actions have to be brought by the DOJ, and I think we know the likelihood of Guiliani’s DOJ doing this. But much more damaging to the strategy is that we just had a two term Dem prez and we didn’t really see any appreciable increase in anti-trust enforcement. So unfortunately this has become a dead end IMO—too much water under the bridge to challenge the monopolists/oligopolists now.
But yes, we must “avoid” the Southification of the North, without ever being able to describe what we are seeking to avoid! I unfortunately think that the only “hope” at this point is the economic downturn that complete Repub control of any government always portends. Their macroeconomic policies are reckless and incoherent and their foreign policy militaristic and belligerent, resulting in unnecessary wars (as we all know). Der Trumper will be baited into major military confrontations almost with certainty. Whether we avoid air and nuclear strikes on Iran and North Korea will be the question. Investing in America is now a very risky proposition. Hell, investing in the world is now a risky proposition!
“Conservatives” like the idea of America, but hate what it actually now is, a racially pluralistic nation. So the racialization campaign Der Trumper just ran is really the logical endpoint of all their rhetoric, and the success of the strategy means they aren’t about to give it up. We know what “Make America Great Again!” really means. Their ideal of a permanently dominant racial group is going to result in a large increase in domestic violence as well, which will be breathlessly covered by the local teevee stooges and add fuel to the fire by the week.
It’s a helluva mess we have on our hands.
Booman, I like the simple part of what you wrote. My gut analysis is that the Democratic party is perceived as the party of people of color and some smarties. In many people’s eyes we are perceived of as the party of “a basket of unworthies.” And for years these unworthies have been benefiting at the trough of the hard-working. Clinton’s whole campaign was about how the Dems are the multi-cultural party, where a Marine can be proud of his husband. Or gun reform, etc. Or other perceptions (not even policy positions) that white interests are second in order of priorities.
Now, I know (and I assume you know) that most $$$ from Federal government in the form of benefits goes to southern whites. Maybe to northern whites, too. And that money comes from NY and CAL and CONN. But facts don’t matter here.
So how do the Dems set the record straight? How do we remain committed to globalism, multiculturalism, etc. while shedding this imagine problem? I don’t think it’s as economic as everyone thinks. Folks aren’t unrealistic.
I was in Ohio visiting family. Big houses, bright future, good income. Really, nothing to complain about economically. But they were for Trump. Why? To shake things up. Clinton was hated as a liar and a fraud. To stop paying taxes to support those “other people.”
We need a Frank Luntz of the left.
Change in margin from 2012
Under 30 – minus 16
100 – 200 K – plus 9
… Luntz was much less concerned about the negativity than he was about the tenor of the discussion. There was a deep unfocused anger that crossed political, racial and economic boundaries. Something he says is much more dangerous.
Frank Luntz: How did we get to this point where everyone of you with different backgrounds, different politics, different objectives, all of you gave me a negative reaction? How did we get here? One at a time no more talking over each other.
Steve Kroft: You think they feel betrayed. By whom?
Frank Luntz: They were betrayed by politicians who didn’t keep their promises. They were betrayed by CEOs who left them behind, who shipped jobs overseas, didn’t give them the benefits that they thought they were going to get. They were betrayed by Social Security, which they don’t believe will exist when they retire. They were betrayed by things in their day-to-day life.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-american-voters-on-trump-clinton/
Yes, there is racial resentment. And social resentment overall. At being disrespected, mis-characterized and dismissed.
But I don’t think that drove the turnout of almost 60M US voters for Trump.
There is certainly economic pain.
There is also the real perception of two Americas. Of corruption and self-dealing rampant in the elites. At two-tiered justice, cronyism and unfair burdens. At the selling of the capital of the commons.
Good Government is something that most of us vaguely remember. The struggle is disappearing from the textbooks, for sure. It was bi-partisan, too.
I think a lot of those voters want a return to that very badly. Moar of same was not an answer.
I wonder what percentage of Trump turnout can be explained as explicit party identification (generic republican votes). Polarization has pushed that number very high. It’s problematic for a whole host of reasons, not exclusively limited to the Republican party.
Saw a breakdown of that today, but don’t remember where. ~68% said they would vote for Trump as a third party candidate; 18% said they would not.
So there is that…
I think, and reading the comments today and Frank’s new diary reinforces my conviction, it is crucial to distinguish the economic issues that drove the T vote, from the racism rhetoric, which I see as a kind of carnival barker overlay. even the way it has previously been approaching – calling ppl deplorables and accusing them of racism while ignoring the economic issues that motivate them, just adds to polarization and inability of coastal elites to understand the problems. there’s a fringe of crazies and racists that are encouraged, but that’s not the central problem. your comment over at Dunwoody is good
I don’t know if we can avoid the increasing racialization of politics. I hope so. But I’m beginning to fear that George Orwell is right after all.
You can’t avoid it, because it is already here.
But I hear there is something very compelling in emailz!
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This: and winning the presidential election by turning out white voters who had not participated in 2012. is likely incorrect.
While the total number of votes are yet to be finalized, we know that it was less than 2012 and 2008 and will be near that of 2004 (when GWB won by a larger margin than Trump did).
Also, from CNN exit polls
First time voters: 10%
Clinton: 56%
Trump: 40%
As GWB received more votes in 2004 than McCain, Romney, and Trump managed to get, looks as if Rove found all the angry white voters that there are.
Indeed?
Did you see this? http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/trump-s-data-team-saw-a-different-america-and-they
-were-right
Trump had a data team? I mean a data team that could actually perform legitimate data collection and analysis. And if it existed that Trump listened to?
My take is that Trump used his gut. ie. “Where are the people that are most attracted to my style and most dislike Clinton’s style?” Maybe he used his “Apprentice” ratings as a guide. That wouldn’t have been a data set that smarty Dem data-analysts would have looked at and pondered (assuming they could get access to that data). And if they had, what could they have done with it? It’s not as if Hillary hasn’t been tailored and molded to any and all demographic groups to increase her support.
It sounds like his analysts did more than demographic modeling but could buy some specific marketing data from Facebook or similar social media that would answer to what their audience definition of a strong Trump supporter would be. They had to operationalize Trump’s gut instincts into demographic, psychographic, and more importantly geographic and then the voting locations.
One could astroturf a GOTV campaign with local contacts and social media with this setup. And it would not register as traditional GOTV. The Republican Party could do the traditional GOTV with this as background.
I’m doing a lot of reading between the lines.
Actually, what should be done is this: Shine a light on all the racism, all the code words, the “I am being PC, but….”, and call it out. All the Trump voters are coming out of the woodwork now, especially the closeted ones and saying “I am not a racist, because (have a gay friend, black sister-in-law, Latino girl friend”) , etc. Make people own their vote and own the consequences which they clearly have not thought through (especially on social issues).
There was clearly a “Bradley effect” going on with white women especially in polling – they know what Trump was, but they voted for him anyway to justify their taxes not being raised or mistakenly believing that Obamacare caused their health care premiums to rise.
All the people who voted for Trump tolerated his views and made them acceptable. The media normalized his views. That is what must be fought against – there are 49 million people in this country who did the right thing – they must now do the right thing and speak truth to power and not accept the way the South has accepted how they are and has been since the institution of the Republic (as you correctly cite). I certainly will do so and not shut up anymore.
This is what must be fought against.
And a hearty fuck you to anyone who thinks the way out of the wilderness is to rebuild the dixiecrat coalition.
So how do you plan to undo over half a century of liberal castigation and mockery of working class whites?
Trump has embraced what has been the liberal narrative for decades, that the GOP is the white people’s party and the Dems are the party of and for everybody else.
A deceptive racial narrative that has completely hidden the truth, that the Dems are and have been since at least the Progressive Era the party of the people.
While the GOP has been and remains the party of and for the rich.
But the Dems for decades have used race to motivate crucial pieces of their popular coalition, and have allowed race and identity issues to dominate their discourse.
Trump and the GOP just turned it around on them.
Now how do we fix that?
How do we make political discourse mostly about class, again, and not race?
Bernie tried and he and his campaign were castigated during the primaries for being too white – which really meant he and his supporters weren’t making it about race enough to satisfy the kinds of people who have enable the GOP and Trump to say to white America, “Hey! You heard them! We’re your party!”
yes. but I’d say their problem with Sanders was that he was making it about class at all; they was to muddy up the economic discussion by accusing ppl of being racists
What’s going on in the parts of the South that have attracted migrants from the North, such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia?
quality of life is appealing, family ties also
Look at the voting results. These are the areas that are most likely to vote Democratic. But they are well confined and increasingly those migrants are from West Virginia, Kentucky, Southern Ohio, Indiana, Florida, and other Southern states. Not as many from New York and California and Illinois as twenty years ago; the industries that located in those transplant cities are more diverse in their geography as they have continued their plant location plans.
I deal with the northernification of Southern racism in a comment below. That’s the other thing that has gone on. Our forms of bigotry have been consolidated.
Migrating into the South is not a new thing. It’s been going on since the ’80s. My family was part of that migration. Come for the professional or semi-professional jobs or school programs, stay for the weather, the people, the perks and amenities of a laid-back semi-urban community. A number of people come here from more urban environments that have harsh weather. Once people get here and land in the right place for them, they often don’t want to leave. It can be a colorful, stimulating mix, or a swath of stultifying small-mindedness, sometimes coexisting side by side.
But that’s more common in the bigger towns (those blue spots on the map surrounded by red). Smaller towns are often less welcoming of outsiders, even distrustful. Sometimes it’s “weird” to want to know people unlike yourself, and natives can spot a difference a mile away. It’s a tribal thing, but then, that’s not just a Southern thing; I see that in Indiana and Ohio, too. Sometimes the newcomers gradually create their own enclaves, see: Cary, NC (jokingly called the beige Contained Area of Relocated Yankees). See the back-to-the land renewable energy communities of Floyd, VA or Chatham County, NC. There are lots of places to settle in and live the life you want to build. Maybe people who move to NYC feel the same way.
That’s my 4 cents from NC.
The Democratic Party needs to go full Democrat and repudiate the Clintons/DLC’ers once and for all. I thought we’d done this in 2004, and with Obama in 2008. And that’s why Hillary’s nomination dismayed me so much.
How much more evidence do we need that their approach is DOA? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Booman, I was reviewing some old posts last night and there are two in particular I want to link:
1. Here’s you, July 22, 2014:
“Obviously, it is still very early in the process, but it’s hard to imagine a politician being in a stronger position than Clinton currently enjoys. It’s very intimidating. I could launch a very full-throated progressive crusade against a restoration of the Clinton dynasty based on the record of Bill Clinton’s presidency and Hillary Clinton’s term in the Senate. But who would listen and what good would it do?”
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2014/7/22/104457/262
1.A. My comment to the above:
http://www.boomantribune.com/comments/2014/7/22/104457/262/4?mode=alone;showrate=1#4
And this was before any of us had any idea of Sanders running.
2. Then here’s you, September 2, 2014: “I can do all the analysis I want. I can take this country, hold it up, flip it upside down, turn it around, squint at it a little bit, put it under a microscope…but, yesterday, I just took a quiet moment and tried to actually envision Hillary Clinton being sworn in as our next president. And it just didn’t seem plausible to me. It didn’t seem right. It turned out that I just couldn’t picture it actually happening. …. I still have some kind of instinctual feeling that something is going to happen that changes the trajectory that we appear to be on. My brain says Hillary Clinton will be our next president, but my spidey-sense tells me that this is never going to happen.”
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2014/9/2/212453/4612
These were from before you got the word from on high that Hillary was the anointed one. Well — turns out, your spidey-sense was right. And we had a lot of people here whose spidey-sense was telling them the same thing.
Based on the nature of this year’s election results, who voted and why, I believe more than ever that Bernie Sanders would have pulverized Trump. Clearly it was the Democratic machine, pretty much controlled by the Clinton machine, and the primaries especially in the northeast, that prevented that.
I can understand why the Clintons and their gang didn’t see this coming. But for me the most fascinating historical riddle is where Obama fits into this sad story. Did he really not see it coming? If not, why not? Or did he, and just felt he couldn’t do anything about it?
Longtime lurker coming out to commiserate. I think a very important part of the post mordem analysis is the weakness of the Clinton brand, especially Hillary. So many voters who stayed home, voted 3rd party, or voted Trump specifically did so as a vote against Hillary, and not for Trump or the 3rd Party candidate. I didn’t want to accept that there was a strong anti-Hillary sentiment out there and when I finally accepted what I always knew, it was too late.
I think Hillary’s good soldiering in 2008 and as SOS is the reason for President Obama’s agreeing to coronate her. The Democratic Party leadership grew up with the Clintons and that created the blind loyalty that led them to set her up this go ’round. I think we’re done with them now.
After accepting that we had a weak candidate, I think the fix for the Party is to agree to the platform wholeheartedly and then run on it every cycle, talk it up in every interview, and make alliances with grassroots groups to have them advocate locally for implementation of the ideals. This last element is where President Obama will be helpful.
The last thing I’ll mention, and I haven’t seen it mentioned much yet is that the Democrats have to watch out for Trump’s play for black support. He will propose some targeted program, which will be token, but the gesture will be celebrated by MSM and he will not be called divisive or a pandered by Republicans in the same way President Obama would be. And that, folks, will be a game changer. That would then give the Republicans an increase in the black vote in a way that would then solidify the rust belt which they’ve now figured out how to get in presidential elections. To counter that I would encourage Democrats to get deep into the back community and begin organizing and doing some work on the ground locally.
Thanks for your thoughts.
“I think the fix for the Party… ” All of this, yes. Especially “make alliances with grassroots groups.” But also a lot more. I listened to the DFA phone conference tonight, with Keith Ellison, Pramila Jayapal, and Robert Reich.
It’s not just “the platform” as something written down. It’s real leadership like the kind we’ve seen from Sanders and Warren, and many others like the people just named.
An important point they made is that the present leadership of the Democratic Party, no matter how well intentioned, cannot play this role. They just don’t know how to, and some of them probably don’t even want to. For years they have made the party into a giant fund-raising machine, relying on “scientific” (ahem) polls and other hi-tech strategies. And their sophisticated “ground game”, as we have just seen, doesn’t work if few people are motivated to vote for the candidate.
Instead, they were talking about a type of community-building, literally, not campaigning once every four years (and screwing up every by-election!), but continually building relationships and daily back and forth direct communication, so that people will be motivated, because they will understand what the issues are, how they effect their lives, will be able to join with others and make effective responses to EVERYTHING. And conversely, the party will hear their problems one on one, and understand them. And getting people involved, getting ordinary people to participate and to run for office. They emphasized that in the coming difficult time, this is not only a good idea, it’s ESSENTIAL if we want to keep moving forward. I think it was Pramila who quoted an old saying among union organizers, “The worse the boss, the easier it is to organize.”
2. As for the black community, I do not think many of them will be too quick to trust Trump, especially considering the people he’s got on board with him. And contrary to what the Clinton campaign was putting out, Sanders had a very healthy following among PoC, especially those under 40. No, they did not see the Sanders movement as a “white” phenomenon, it’s for everybody. So this grass-roots organizing effort is well under way and will continue. It literally has to.
At the time of my OP, I hadn’t noticed this very consequential comment by Booman about Sanders on the July 22, 2014 thread:
http://www.boomantribune.com/comments/2014/7/22/104457/262/67?mode=alone;showrate=1#67
This was more than nine months before Sanders had even announced his candidacy (April 30, 2015).
The political Southification of non-Southern states is moving apace exactly as the “free market” religion of neoliberalism devastates more and more jobs. Every one of those red states with a Republican governor and legislature who just got re-elected after incredibly poor performance has be Southified already. And what the Democratic establishment has done pretty much in all of those states is to write them off after a while. Financial decisions based on immediate polling alone do that. Having no long-term strategy does that. Having no coherent strategy among the Democratic Congressional delegations for states does that. And having corrupt politicians does that. Illinois has had its turn with Rauner. Cuomo’s successor in New York might just be a Trumpublican; it might even be Cuomo himself. That’s how the process worked in the South.
The other thing to note is that racism in the non-Southern states was a pattern of geographical segregation with actively patrolled boundaries. In the South until it was outlawed, segregation was institutional separation of churches, schools, restrooms, and so on and economic segregation of residences and business by geography. That class segregation by geography is the origin of the term “exclusive” neighborhood. Just list who the proud residents of these neighborhoods were excluding.
Over the past 50 years, Southern racism has produced forms of discrimination much like those in non-Southern states. In the 1980s, with the relative affluence of the Clinton economy, in the “New South” or the Sun Belt, there began to be relaxing of segregated neighborhoods for primarily the college-educated and transplants from outside the South. It is much like the high-tone multi-cultural gentrification that went on in a lot of prospering cities outside the South. When the Bush economic policies and the massive deregulation that the Gingrich revolution Congress and the DLC Clinton administration collaborated on in the last days of his administration blew up in 2007 under the hamhanded adjustment of interest rates of an out-of-touch Federal Reserve, it differentially hit people who were last hired and had just purchased houses under the innnovative mortgate system of the big banks. While those included more minorities because of implicit redlining in the pushing of sub-prime mortgages, they also affected recently well-off whites in trades and lower-rung white-collar jobs. And some other demographics themselves. The Republicans succeeded in blaming that recession on Obama and with the help of Joe Lieberman and some other prominent members of Congress ensured that Obama lowballed the stimulus for the Great Recession and in out years succeed in killing the long-term infrastructure projects that would have provided jobs to the very red states they were representing. If you are deploying high-speed rail, where is most of your construction, for example?
One cannot overstate how Obama’s search for bipartisan solutions and the weak cohesion of the Democratic caucus played into the Republican stategy of obstruction. Nor can you understate how the search of public-private, “free enterprise”, or non-government solutions (the neoliberal nostrums) dogged even established government program appropriations that could have sped relief to local areas. Nor can you understate how state obstruction and nullification made the economic situation of the citizens of those states much worse compared to the blue state where there wasn’t that obstruction.
Obama’s presence as a symbol brought on this backlash, and ironically the white culture side of Obama’s heritage led him into traps that were obvious to most African-Americans. Obama cannot get off the hook on this. Nor can the Democratic establishment in Congress and the national and state institutions that form the Democratic infrastructure. They nationalized the conditions that trapped the “progressive” Democratic establishments in Southern states. That turned Atlanta from the “city too busy to hate” to “the city too busy to care”. That allowed the New South city of Charlotte to be the stepping stone for both Sue Myrick as mayor and Pat McCrory as mayor and resulted in open season by the police on black citizens. That allowed Art Pope and the Koch brothers to take over the NC legislature with the same tactics they pioneered in Wisconsin but without the month-long demonstrations at the State Legislative Building with thousands of citizens.
The Civil Rights movement ultimately succeeded because Robert Kennedy persuaded President John Kennedy to have the Justice Department enforce the then existing civil rights laws (mostly shoved through by Republicans). And because Lyndon Johnson risked the existence of his party by shoving through two tougher civil rights bills and Democratic appointees to the courts in the South ordered immediate desegregation and blocked several ways Southern states were evading their orders.
What turned the balance was the courts in non-Southern states’ failure to enforce the same standards for cities where white-flight defensive suburbs were legal dodges for desegregated schools. The case that decided this dealt with Missouri. Ferguson then was on of those white-flight suburbs that the real estate market has now abandoned to the black middle class and those who benefit from federal housing assistance programs.
These suburbs are now cauldrons for beginning to work together to deal with racism and urban problems. Where the establishment supports that trend, some amazing things happen like in Durham and Asheville NC or some other Southern cities where white voters did turn out for Clinton. Those cities have successfully annexed those formerly defensive unicorporated areas. It is the incorporated areas that hold on to the dream of segregation forever. And most of you know where they are in your own urban area. And who deals with defense with the polite segregation of gated communities and who deals with it with aggressive police and discriminatory practices.
Those folks who might normally be apathetic turned out because of the increased attention to racial discrimination from protest groups. The same response put Louise Day Hicks and a bunch of Catholics into the streets of South Boston and let Kevin Philips know that the Republicans had a way of peeling off the ethnic Catholics from the New Deal coalition with the same dogwhistles they were using for Southern Dixiecrats and Wallace’s voters. This election is the culmination of that process that Kevin Philips’s genius set in motion, no matter how appalled he might be with it now.
The problem here are Democratic strategists. They have failed at a 48-year-long battle for justice. Despite the Nixon adminstration, in the 1970s, the bigots of southwest Georgia were reeling. One of their own, Jimmy Carter, has come close to delegitimizing racism forever even in their counties. The desegregated schools were working. New factories, now that segregation was gone, were going up and creating new jobs. Better roads were lowering the cost of doing business in other towns. The peanut crop paid well enough because of price supports. And the Democratic strategists did not see the Religious Right forming a coup in the Southern Baptist Convention nor the alliance with politicized segregationists (Falwell), entrepreneurial religious broadcasters (Robertson) and Roman Catholic parochial school interests around school desegregation (not advertised) and abortion (highly advertised). And the Democratic strategists did not see the economic devastation of the Midwest, High Plains, and Mountain West that was the Trump wave coming. Likely because they were too distracted figuring out how to raise money to finance the campaign quickly. And those donors built in some biases in how the campaign could move.
What Democratic strategists failed at was evicting the first signs of not Southernization but “a permanent Republican majority” by taking states (Wisconsin, Michigan) for granted as reliably Democratic, union, blue states not realizing that the blue state/red state meme was a tactic in the GOP search for permanence. Failing to strongly contest every legislative seat allow Republican majorities significant enough to gerrymander districts between censuses. Democratic strategists failed because of the political and economic blinders they had on and because they soon absorbed the culture of the DC village.
The Northernized version of Southern racial politics has made itself entrenched in even more states this year. Pennsylvania is new on the target list; you might be able to figure out how to avoid this dynamic there to the extent you can avoid the institutional solidification of the trend. But it is not isolated to what you affectionately call Pennsyltucky or Pennsylbama now. Time to look at the map to see how much and which suburbs both had turnout and voted Trump. And which urban precincts. But Michigan, Wisconsin, and of course Indiana have gone south as of this election.
What you call Southification is the search for a peramanent Republican majority under the theme of “Assimilate, dammit!” to immigrants as well as xenophobia. This occurred to me as I went to the nearest mall near RTP. Among the well-dressed Nordstom customers and tourist shoppers from as far away as West Virginia and the local white and black North Carolinians were about 1/3 of the target immigrant groups of Trumps campaign. Subcontinent Indians and Pakistanis, Hispanics of all economic classes, emigre Africans brought over as nurse’s aides for elder communities and nursing homes, conservative Muslims, likely some less conservative Muslims as well. And enough speaking to each other in their native language to worry a folks who are fixated on “terrorists”. The diversity in my neighborhood is probably greater, but not as in-your-face as going to the mall in the “evil city” (a persistent US perception). You didn’t see this amount of diversity here even 20 years ago. The Muslims, subcontinent Asian, and Chinese engineers and programmers that IBM brought in have established themselves and brought over entrepreneurial relatives who have started all sorts of businesses from convenience stores to high-tech businesses. Nobody is locating anything in rural North Carolina because they are unwilling to pay the cost of training skilled employees locally in spite of tailored technical college training programs custom fitted to their company. You should be able to notice the sources of resentment there. You even see some of it reflected in comments here.
In 2014, the Democratic brand died as a New Deal promise of peace and prosperity; reality just catching up to the brand. In 2016, the Democratic establishment was exposed as corrupt actors manipulating the party organizations for the benefit of the DC consultant class and the employment in the Village. Similar and worse glimpses into state Democratic Parties have shut them out permanently as have dumb tactical moves that turned off loyal Democrats.
I think we are at the point that a national party infrastructure has outlived its usefulness and is a financial drain on the candidates for office. It is glaringly obvious with both parties. The Democrats in loss have an opportunity to dramatically change. The Republicans in victory will try to appropriate their infrastructure to their new circumstances. The division within the House will make Republican infrastructure issues clear soon enough. But the top-down astroturf model of Republican campaigning can insulate them for a while.
The Democratic narrowcasting marketing model has failed miserable. I saw most Democratic ads on Democratic blogs. I saw most Republican ads on the craft, mystery, and DIY YouTube shows my wife likes to watch. Even some of the YouTubes of Clinton’s speeches came with an ad pushing a Republican message–generally that Deborah Ross wanted to release violent criminals to the streets (as NC ACLU executive director, she advocated for due process). I’m not sure that Democrats understand exactly how social media works. And that scrambles any attempt at marketing. Moreover, marketing is not politics, it is pushing sales from one direction. Focus groups do not adequately make up for that or we would not have seen this deep loss.
The traditional media is woefully out of touch. Independent web journalists have warned us of this possibility. The most detailed and articulate (sorry AG) to dig in the what was going on has been Sarah Kendzior, a free-lancer from St. Louis who also covered the Ferguson #blacklivesmatter movement. She did a 10 hour tour of Missouri on election day. I am waiting for her report. She is thoroughly schooled in the politics of Uzbekistan and should be providing early warning of authoritarian moves on Trump’s part, of which the voice of moderation in his acceptance speech is the first.
What we need is a united an powerful opposition movement and party to the Trumpublican regime that will try to make reality so fast that we cannot keep up even with analysis. That party must accommodate a wide range of left views without constant bickering and have a minimal common agenda of what to achieve, including an undoing of Trump’s Congress in 2018. Most difficult of all it still must reflect the diversity of the US if it is to unite an opposition based in the 99% who are left out of decision-making.
Given the map, I haven’t a clue right now how this is done or how to avoid the stamping out of even minor moves in this direction in the Trumpified geographies. My guess that we must make the map more granular, even down to the precinct or voting location level to understand how to build a strategy. Too bad that the Democratic Party likely has the infrastructure to do this but does not have to analytical skill to figure out how to use it to win.
Likely an effort to rebuild from the grassroots will require rebuilding a network of active people from scratch and building working partnerships at the very local level.
I would see Kansas, Louisiana, South Dakota, Wyoming, and New Hampshire as test cases. All of these have had strong opposition parties at some point in their history. The Demmocratic Party also has had very interesting histories. They are low-population states with large power for each of their voters. Thomas Frank has already tried to deal with Kansas. In retrospect, he was too superficial to look at the entire state. What happens when you look at the county levels of these states? Leip’s Atlas should have that data soon. From there the precinct level. What keeps these states in the Republican column from an organizational standpoint. Where are other party organizations locally (even the libertarians)? What are the party activities locally that enable the GOP to have presence between elections? Which are the politicized congregations that amplify the Republican message. How many potential members of an opposition party in the location are there, based on election returns? Are these likely to be minorities or are there a significant number of whites of any class in opposition?
The only way to break gerrymandering is to change the sentiment at the very grassroots. That is difficult in insular suspicious rural areas. But the Republicans have succeeded in reversing New Deal sentiments in a lot of these rural areas. From outside.
It’s time to recognize that racism is not longer typically a Southern problem with a Southern form, but a basic American problem that has always been there but expressed in forms that allowed non-Southerners to feel moral while ignoring their racist institutions and Southerners in response to this hypocrisy defending directly their racist institutions as heritage. Well a large part of the country has caught an epidemic of heritage, even including waving the Confederate flag or, in some German-settled areas, donning their neo-Nazi regalia. (Historical footnote, Dylann Roof of Lexington County SC is from a section that was laid out as the township of Saxe-Gotha to accommodate settlers from that region of Germany. It is likely the source of some of the neo-Nazis who showed up at the South Carolina state house. I would be interested in reports about neo-Nazi resurgence in parts of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and other states. It did happen during the 1930s with the rise of Hitler that Nazi-like organizations appeared in German-settled areas. Or are they like Christian spritualist William Dudley Perry, who organized the Silvershirts from Galahad College in Asheville NC during the 1930s.
There are varying and interlinking ways to play racial politics.
Excellant post!
You make a lot of valid points but as this thread is pretty stale at the point I’ll limit my response to one of the specific ones:
From my point of view in Milwaukee — which one would expect to be the epicenter of neo-Nazi resurgence in Wisconsin if your hypothesis were correct — I can say I know of only 2 attempts by neo-Nazis (actually these were full-dress uniformed Nazis) to organize here. Both ended badly for the Nazis.
The first was an attempt by the Skokie Nazis in 1977 to organize against school desegregation, in a predominantly Polish-Czech neighborhood on the South Side. That turned out to be a bad strategic choice on the Nazis’ part. The second attempt was roughly 2012-2013 (different generation of Nazis), in a way predominantly white but ethnically mixed working-class suburb. The Nazis had to arrive and leave under heavy police escort or they would have been beaten severely by a much larger crowd of counter-demonstrators.
So far, the Nazis have developed zero traction here. They will probably try again under Trump.
Look at the US Senate seats being contested in 2018.
Here are the races for the Senate in 2018:
Republican States 2016
Jeff Flake (R) – AZ
Bill Nelson (D) – FL
Joe Donnelly (D) – IN
Debbie Stabenow (D) – MI
Roger Wicker (R) – MS
Claire McCaskill (D) – MO
Jon Tester (D) – MT
Deb Fischer (R) – NE
Heidi Heitkamp (D) – ND
Sherrod Brown (D) – OH
Bob Casey (D) – PA
Bob Corker (R) – TN
Ted Cruz (R) – TX
Orrin Hatch (R) – UT
Tammy Baldwin (D) -WI
Joe Manchin (D) – WV
John Barrasso (R) – WY
Democratic States 2016
Dianne Feinstein (D) – CA
Chris Murphy (D) – CT
Tom Carper (D) – DE
Mazie Hirono (D) – HI
Ben Cardin (D) – MD
Elizabeth Warren (D) – MA
Amy Klobuchare (D) – MN
Angus King (I) – ME
Martin Heinrich (D) – NE
Bob Menendez (D) – NJ
Dean Heller (D) – NV
Kirsten Gillibrand (D) – NY
Sheldon Whitehouse (D) – RI
Tim Kaine (D) – VA
Bernie Sanders (I) – VT
Maria Cantwell (D) – WA
I think I got the 2016 party win attribution right.
All of the Democrats in Republican states are vulnerable. Those who tried to act like Republicans are more vulnerable than the ones who didn’t.
But in light of the close margins in AZ and TX, are Flake and Cruz vulnerable?
I think we need to discuss agricultural issues and get a grasp on what agribusiness, independent farmers, organic farmers, and local-market farmers see in terms of policy issues. Democrats tend to isolate themselves from the technical aspects of farm policy.
Gah! Agriculture brings out the worst in Dems, even those not considered corporate-owned. Sherrod Brown voted against clear GMO labeling, fgs. Heidi in ND can’t depend on the tribes next time, I’ll bet.
You better be able to talk agriculture if you expect to win rural areas. Period. And you better be credible with enough actual farmers (as opposed to agribusiness) if you want to build a resilient agricultural base to survive climate change.
I’d call it Dixiefication or Southernization instead of Southification, but that’s a matter of style in choosing a more elegant name for an ugly phenomenon. By any name, the process is quite real.
Phillip Bump, Washington Post: The Decimation of the Democratic Party
As AG would say, WTFU.
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