The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll has some good news for Donald Trump. His approval number is 41%, which is substantially higher than the 34% he’s getting from Gallup or the 32% he got from Monmouth and Pew Research in their most recent surveys. Trump can also find some comfort in the fact that the Republican Party enjoys a 2-point advantage on the generic congressional preference question among white voters (46% to 44%) and a 12-point advantage with whites without a college degree (50%to 38%). In other words, these voters would narrowly prefer that the Republicans retain control of Congress.
This is pretty much where the happy news ends, however. Despite a comparatively strong approval number in the low-40’s, Trump can’t be too pleased to learn that twice as many people strongly disapprove of his performance (48%) as a strongly approve of it (24%). On the congressional question, the GOP is in a deep hole overall.
Fifty percent of registered voters say they prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress, versus 39 percent who want Republicans in charge.
The last time Democrats both held a double-digit lead and hit 50 percent on this question in the NBC/WSJ poll was September 2008, right before the party won the White House and picked up a substantial number of House and Senate seats.
This past October, Democrats had a 7-point advantage on congressional preference, 48 percent to 41 percent.
In this most recent poll, Democrats hold a whopping 48-point lead in congressional preference among voters ages 18-34 (69 percent to 21 percent), a 20-point lead among female voters (54 percent to 34 percent) and a 12-point lead among independent voters (43 percent to 31 percent).
There’s one other piece of bad news for Trump and the Republicans. The Democrats are showing more interest in the midterms.
The NBC/WSJ poll also shows Democrats with the intensity advantage, with 59 percent of Democratic voters saying they have a high level of interest in next year’s elections (registering either a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale), versus 49 percent of Republican voters saying the same thing.
Additionally, 62 percent of voters who said they voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 have a high level of interest in next year’s midterms, compared with 50 percent of Trump voters.
So, now’s the time for me to use a caution.
Before you get too giddy remember many districts have been redrawn and most dont favor dems.. how many districts did Jones win in Alabama?
The answer to that question is “one.” If the Alabama special election for Senate that was held last Tuesday had been held instead to decide on the state’s congressional delegation, the GOP would have sent six members to Congress to the Democrats’ one member. This is the current distribution in the U.S. House of Representatives, so it would have resulted in zero pickups for the Dems despite their dramatic over-perfomance in a deep south state.
This is only partly explainable by the careful gerrymandering the Republicans did after the last census. It has much more to do with the distribution of the voters in Alabama. Democrats live in concentrated geographical spaces. This gives them a disadvantage even in neutrally drawn district maps, and it also makes them sitting ducks for partisan maps. If they want to come anywhere close to winning as many seats in our country’s legislatures as their raw numbers would justify, the Dems need to do better with white voters, including rural whites and whites who don’t have a college degree. If they don’t, they will see many repeats of Alabama where even massive tilts in their direction in the statewide vote will not yield a corresponding improvement in performance in the district-by-district results. As for gerrymandering, that only makes matters worse, but the way to prevent this is to win at least some control over the redistricting process. There’s no better way to do that than to win, at a minimum, a share of control of state legislatures. In many states, winning the gubernatorial election will give them veto power over partisan maps, so that’s a good backup plan.
And I know how irritated a lot of people get every time it is suggested that the Democrats need to appeal to white Trump voters but there’s no shortcut around the facts I’ve laid out above, and if we want to win seats like this, we need to be able to capitalize on the Republicans running a Right to Work PAC-endorsed candidate in a heavily unionized western Pennsylvania district. We can’t do that if we don’t try.
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly.
He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
63 Comments
Anonymous
on December 17, 2017 at 11:44 am
I’m agreeing with you (I think) in a thread down below, but here’s my question:
Stipulating that yes, we need to appeal to more rural whites and white w/o college degrees, does that necessarily mean that we should prioritize Trump voters? Or is there lower-hanging fruit in the orchard of white voters? Should we focus on appealing to rural white and W w/o CD Americans who are not currently voters? I understand that voters are the only ones who matter politically in a very real sense, but I’d be interested in hearing your thought re. ‘converting Trump voters’ versus ‘creating new white voters.’
Here in our area, we saw a pretty sizeable exodus of historically reliable Democratic votes from the ranks of union members, who jumped onto the Trump bandwagon in 2016. Now it’s hard to say how they might vote in 2018, but information I get from those I know who are close to the union membership tell me that they have not yet soured on Trump. So they might well be a force here in Ohio which tamps down any potential good news for Democrats statewide. herrod Brown still has good support among the unions, but when it comes to state-wide offices this situation could potentially be very problematic for us. Since the state legislature is at super-majority status in favor the GOP, we MUST have at least the governer’s office, and preferably also the AG. The sums of money that are being pumped into Ohio from GOP PAC’s is astonishing. As good as some news has been for Dems nationally, here in Ohio we are teetering on the razor’s edge of a continuation of GOP dominance across the entire spectrum. This is going to be a brutal and maddeningly frustrating slog in my state, and many people are already very tired from Trump exhaustion. I want to be hopeful, but Martin’s caveats are ringing very true in my ears. I don’t think the liberal pundit class has a very good grasp on how things are going here in the trenches. I find much of the commentary very unrealistic and grounded in a lot of “feel good” fantasies they are making up in their own minds. From the vantage point in my foxhole, we are still Sisyphus rolling the proverbial stone. There is so much hard work to do. I hope our state party gets a clue and doesn’t fool themselves into swallowing the koolaid of an inevitable Democratic wave. I don’t want to wake up the morning after election day to a national exercise in navel-gazing by the Democratic Party.
Anonymous
on December 17, 2017 at 12:49 pm
Do you think it’d be easier to win back those historically-reliable white-union Democratic voters, or to convince a new group of white voters to get to the polls?
Is Trump’s appeal to them mostly due to anti-PC backlash?
I’ve been reading about how in Seattle in 1886 out of work railroad labor unions rounded up the Chinese and put them on boats and trains to send them back to China because they were seen as a cheaper source of labor. It was essentially a riot and the state had to declare martial law.
Not many years after that those same people welcomed the first shipping vessel from Japan with open arms, because it represented new economic opportunities.
My reading is that overt racism is the first symptom of economic hardship for a lot of people. I don’t think it’s going to cure racism if the democrats can find a way to speak to white rural voters, but if they can find a message that offers them better lives, I hope that enough of them might bite and it will recede.
BTW, I was you, briefly, during the recent attack on the site. Scary, I know!
Anonymous
on December 17, 2017 at 1:25 pm
Quite happy to be replaced by you. (I was Racer X!)
I think our problem (one of them) is that we’ve gotta focus on “white,” to some extent. 70% of voters are white. If we don’t make a concerted effort to staunch our bleeding with the pales, we’re fucked.
. . . to staunch our bleeding with the pales” without appealing to them based on their paleness. (And if we’re not appealing to them based specifically on their paleness, i.e., with proposals targeted to differentially benefit the pale, then why are we talking about their paleness at all? We shouldn’t be!)
By designing messaging and policies that appeal to and benefit all members of whatever deme (gender, education, income, geography, etc.) they are in, while also just happening to be pale.
As I just pointed out elsewhere, that is in fact what the specific policy proposals (that I’ve seen floated, anyway) actually do. They don’t target any benefit(s) differentially to pales, specifically. So why frame them in those terms?
What’s hard about this? It absolutely flummoxes me that this isn’t just plainly obvious to everyone (sane and decent). But it seems clear at this point that it isn’t.
Anonymous
on December 17, 2017 at 2:21 pm
Gotcha. I read your comment after posting mine. What you’re saying is that while there are issues specific to members of the working class who are black, there are not any issues specific to members of the working class who are white? Or that even if there are white-specific issues, we should discuss them without mentioning race?
Discussing them as white issues feeds into whites thinking as a racial block which is counter productive electorally since they are a majority for decades if not longer.
Anonymous
on December 17, 2017 at 4:05 pm
Good point that overtly labelling them ‘white issues’ is counter-productive. But addressing them is still key.
Also, and I would have thought this was obvious, a very large plurality though maybe not a majority at the national level are white people that regularly vote Democratic. That’s pretty undeniable. So we should be framing the argument to be about white conservatives not all white Americans. That makes a difference in the kind of arguments made because it also brings up big regional differences.
Appalachian whites have little exposure to minorities and are often ignorant, poor and racist-conservative by tradition more than anything else. They may be susceptible to a progressively economic argument for strengthening the social safety net to vote D (or maybe not). OTOH, your suburban middle/upper-middle class GOP voters are going to be more persuaded by the awful tax cut law that cuts the SALT deduction and many others that will be really hurting these voters. I’d say those are the two sets of GOP voters that are vulnerable. The southern evangelicals are hopeless; the western individualists are not being hurt at all. So, there’s a small avenue for Democrats next year but the real bite to GOP voters from the Tax cut bill will hit in the 2020 elections.
I should have clarified that I’m leaving out the Millennials and some older white voters and white women (except evangelicals) in my opinion: those are trending strongly D.
Pt. 2 …and from the standpoint of a racial block, it DOES make sense to vote that way since minorities gaining power does diminish white power, and more minorities really does mean more “foreign” cultural influences.
. . . members of the working class who are white” (i.e., that are specific to their whiteness) are also specific to the racism/bigotry of some of them. Otherwise, they’re just specific to the, simply, working class.
Or at least I’m unaware of any plausible exceptions to that thesis.
So designing policies/proposals to “appeal to” or “help” them (i.e., the specifically white subset of the working class) means designing proposals to cater to/reinforce/validate that racism/bigotry.
Something we should have nothing whatsoever to do with.
Again, why is “white” even in there? (But see addendum this thread for my new speculative hypothesis on that.)
Anonymous
on December 17, 2017 at 4:14 pm
Well, yeah. One of the biggest ailments afflicting the white-as-opposed-to-black working class is its susceptibility to racist demagoguery. (Is the opioid crisis also disproportionately affecting whites?)
That’s why we need a specific strategy to appeal to white Trump voters; we need to counteract that racism (as Obama did), which is not an issue when trying to appeal to black voters.
I agree that policies and proposals are useless, but strategies are key. Not to validate that racism, but to overwhelm it.
Yes, the opioid crisis disproportionately affects whites, apparently because a lot of doctors are racist (often subconciously) and don’t want to prescribe them for minorities because the doctors think they are or will become junkies. So racism is saving literally thousands of minority lives per year. It’s very ironic.
The post does not irritate me – it depresses me because I see no effective way of countering the Republican message. Democrats lost these voters because Republicans made a racist appeal to them.They will make the same appeal going forward.
When Dems go after those seats, what do we say about race? How do we answer our opponents?
We focus on other issues that apply regardless of race: affordable health care, quality education (beginning with free pre-school), affordable college or post high school training, tax fairness (Bernie’s “pay their fair share message”), infrastructure and so forth.
focus on other issues that apply regardless of race
I am not sure if that is enough. Most of DJT’s promises were all lies, and many articles have pointed out that not only the goalposts have moved for these supporters, but there are NO goalposts at all.
So how does logic and actual policy pronouncements swing them back?
My hope is that DJT won by small minorities in the three crucial electoral college states (PA, MI, WI), and that there will be a swing back in 2020.
For 2018, deep red states like AL will probably still be in the R corner, but as VA showed, the polls and the pundits may be underestimating the potential outcomes. It is almost always that people misestimate self referential issues – like when asked how likely each responder is to excel in a particular task, they overestimate – similarly the prognostications will likely overestimate how dire the results will be for D.
As Rachel Maddow showed, there has been 30 point swings in several different geographically spread elections – VA, OK, IA.
The issue with district geography is not that Democrats are in smaller areas (cities) because those areas get more districts too. The issue for a while has been that Democrats tend to live in overwhelmingly Democratic areas while there have been relatively fewer Republicans in overwhelmingly Republican areas. The urban cores could be 90-10 Dem while rural areas might have been 65-35 Republican.
One of the effects of the Trumpian shift where Republicans gain in rural areas and lose in surburban areas (having little left to lose in urban areas) is that the natural gerrymander largely goes away. With rural districts now going 80-20 for Republicans, they’ve got about as many voters in heavily concentrated Republican areas as we do in heavily concentrated Democratic areas. The shift is actually very harmful to the 2010 gerrymanders because the Republicans gain in already strongly Republican rural districts but they lose in moderately Republican suburban districts. For House districts this is usually less of an issue since they are large enough to have a lot of both, but for statehouse districts it’s a big deal. This is, IMO, the main reason for the initially shockingly good results in Virginia.
From these shifts, you’ve basically got it backwards. For districted elections the rural districts are now usually a lost cause. We’re not winning them back for a couple of cycles at least. Improving our results could help some with Senate and House races, but for the statehouses it’s not going to matter. Almost any statehouse district with a lot of rural voters is going to be heavily Republican, to the point that we’ll have the statehouse before we flip it.
The fight for control of the states is now in the suburbs.
I agree with this in principle but there will be interesting exceptions. I’m a MD voter but we have a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of VA that we are rehabilitating. The county of the same name went 71% for the GOP in the most recent election. Actually, a slight decline. Rural areas like these that are rapidly changing demographically (older R’s dying off) and economically (wineries, cideries, tourism, renewable energy businesses) could see a sudden change in voting patterns. This region has a big environmental movement that surprised me. So, in some rural areas, we may see some sudden stochastic change in voting patterns as we head into the next decade.
Our representative “bad coffee” (Goodlatte) is “retiring” next year. Thinking he sees the writing on the wall.
Somewhat true in my rural area as well. We have a vibrant Democratic Party in our county and recently took municipal elections with 67-70% of the vote. We did it by energizing occasional voters who had “had enough”
This reminds me of the study done by Princeton Econ Nobel Laureate Prof. Angus Deaton. His updated study says:
Case and Deaton find that while midlife mortality rates continue to fall among all education classes in most of the rich world, middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less have experienced increasing midlife mortality since the late 1990s. This is due to both rises in the number of “deaths of despair”–death by drugs, alcohol and suicide–and to a slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age.
The numbers don’t work for the democrats. They need to keep their near 90% majority of AA votes and win more white votes. Failing that there is little way of winning a majority in congress or the states. The republicans can win with simply the white vote and nothing more. And Trump has a strong appeal to them, so it won’t get better in 2020. Plus he will try to peal away some disaffected POC votes.
IMO we need to fashion a strong progressive message and avoid being tagged the party of Wall Street. Ironic in a way, since Trump is the party of the plutocrats. Maybe we can hang that around his neck.
Or maybe lightening will strike and Mueller gets his man.
Can we please be more accurate when characterizing the “white” vote? Maybe it is 70% but to think that it is all going to the GOP is completely ignorant. I’m not an expert but I would estimate that, among likely voters, the percentage that are reliably GOP white is maybe 35-40%. So why do they keep winning? Well, in the Presidential election they didn’t; they lost by more than 3 million votes. In terms of Congressional elections, during the last several cycles, the Democrats have elected millions more than the GOP and still lost because of gerrymandering and voter suppression.
The GOP is in an all-out war to prevent Democratic votes by any and all means while frantically trying to install an authoritarian, oligarchic state and transform the USA into Russia. That’s the real problem.
Yes, the Democrats need a new message but the problem is the DLC centrism, which is GOP Lite. Democrats need a much more progressive message and to hell with trying to win over the WWC by appealing to their racism.
. . . i.e., the source of that irritation you know to expect. (Or at least you betray no sign of getting it.)
I’ll try again.
The objection (mine, anyway) is with framing the matter like this:
. . . the Democrats need to appeal to white Trump voters . . .
Inclusion of “white” in there inescapably implies proposals targeted to differentially benefit, specifically, whites based on their whiteness. Else the word “white” in that framing is utterly redundant and performs no meaningful function. It is inherently racist framing.
The only sort of proposal that would thus differentially “appeal to[, specifically,]white Trump voters” would be one that also somehow appeals to (or worse, validates) the racism/bigotry of a very significant subset of these voters. E.g., one that somehow validates their white resentment and scapegoating of The Other for their problems. Without that, there is no “appeal to [, specifically]white Trump voters” because there is nothing special on offer to them based on their whiteness (without which, again, having “white” in there at all is redundant and meaningless; and racist framing).
This is exactly the same problem as the analogous racist framing that Dems need to “appeal to” or “help” the “WWC”.
I get that you’re doing electoral political analysis about what it would take to put together a winning plurality/majority, and part of that is thinking about individual voters, e.g., ones who voted for Obama, then Trump, some of whom were white.
Yet (to your credit!), I’ve yet to see you (or anyone else here who’s adopted racist framing like that above) actually offer any proposal that would, in fact, somehow differentially “appeal to” or “help” the, specifically, white subset of either Trump voters or the (simply) working class (or, for that matter, the broader, not-richer-than-God American electorate).
I see no reason the same arguments can’t be made without the racist framing.
Seems to me that running candidates on “bread and butter issues” is a start in those districts that are difficult for Democratic party to flip. That should be doable without using racist dog whistles. No reason for us to lose our soul. Again, once more with feeling, I want to advocate for not using WWC is some monolithic entity. If we have WWC as a demographic category, what do we find when we look into the proverbial cross-tabs? How many are reliable voters? How many are secular versus evangelical? When reaching out to this demographic, we need to be thinking much more specifically. Just thinking from my own little circle – and I don’t want to overgeneralize – but my non-work friends are almost exclusively WWC (most of them I know through a local atheist/agnostic group). That circle tends to be fairly liberal or moderate, some are more conscientious about voting than not, a number hold technical certificates and are skilled laborers whereas others are unskilled laborers in the service sector, etc. I am in a historically red area of a state that flipped red this decade. But that bunch is very sour on Dolt 45. Make of it what you will, but a number of us have sort of out of the blue started showing up at local Democratic Party meetings and events since last fall’s debacle. Again, small sample, and may more reflect the quirks of this writer and the area I live in. But I really, really want us to think carefully, as you are, about what appealing to WWC really means.
. . . inescapably) another descriptor defining a deme, along with gender, education, income, urban/suburban/rural, etc.
The problem is including it in proposals for Dem messaging, policies, legislative agenda, political tactics/strategy, etc.
These should all be race-blind! (The exception is policies to redress impacts of historical and ongoing racial discrimination/oppression, e.g., affirmative action, Black Lives Matter.)
Frankly I don’t get that people don’t get this. It seems so obvious.
I’m with you on this matter. As I noted earlier, there’s no reason for us to lose our soul as a party in order to win over voters. We are (or at least should be) better than that.
I agree 100%. Drop the “white” because it is redundant and racist and just focus on the working class period. And polls have shown that when issues are presented to voters sans the racial and partisan filters, a solid majority of voters prefer democratic solutions to these issues.
To do this though, democrats have to drop this fealty to their own wealthy donors, that prevented them from full throated, unequivocal support for some of these policies. They had to be dragged, kicking and screaming to party support for the $15 minimum wage, (some form of) universal health care. Elizabeth Warren had been held at arms length because they wanted to maintain escape hatches for the banks. And how to explain even Obama previously talking about “fixing” social security with chained CPI? No reason to wonder why voters hearing “fighting for you” are skeptical with this kind of history, especially anyone who had their home-owning ass handed to them under TARP?
A lot of these people are the very voters we’re talking about winning back, and guess what? They ain’t all “white.”
. . . back” (i.e., make no effort to hold Bush admin War Criminals accountable) were Obama’s signature failures (though there were others).
With the TARP failure the more mysterious of the two. I can comprehend (even as I reject it, for obvious reasons including the normalization of criminality that the Trumpists are now running wild with) the “bind up the nation’s wounds” argument for “look forward, not back”.
But how to explain the TARP failure? Pot of money for bailing out underwater homeowners — though a pittance relative to the pot to bail out the banksters — appropriated and just sitting there . . . and you use only a small fraction of it for that purpose. WTF?
Think it was you who mentioned this TARP failure in a recent post, saying it left many homeowners “no better off”. Didn’t get around to responding there, so I will here.
It was much worse than that: it didn’t just leave many “no better off”, it left them much worse off. It scammed them into flushing months/years(?) more mortgage payments down the black hole of the homes the banksters then proceeded to foreclose on anyway! IOW, it lured those homeowners (acting in good faith — cuz how could they possibly believe Obama’d screw them this way?) to commit the proverbial folly of throwing good money after bad. (This was good for the banks, though! So there’s that.)
Note that my overall verdict on the Obama admin is positive. In fact it’s hard for me to see how, at that point in our history and politics, we could have done much (or any!) better.
Still, those two sins remain unforgivable (and the TARP failure inexplicable) imo.
Just spitballing here, but I do wonder how much of the TARP foot-dragging and failure might be attributable to sabotage from within by Bush-era holdovers and/or subornation of the bureaucracy by the banksters they were supposed to be holding accountable? Add to that the inevitable sloth of bureaucracy itself and a regulatory scheme and apparatus less than optimally designed — hell, jerry-rigged and cumbersome — and that could account for some portion of the debacle. Not to mention the contempt that haves, including those staffing the agencies, often feel for the have-nots (“It’s their own damn fault they got themselves into this mess; why help them avoid the consequences?”) leading to less than energetic efforts to make the program work.
This is certainly no brief for exoneration, but having observed our government in (in)action for lo, these many decades, I feel one must wonder how widely to spread the blame.
. . . part of the explanation for what I’ve already confessed remains utterly inexplicable to me:
The Obama admin was given the means to help out underwater homeowners (at a time when this would have been immensely helpful to the overall U.S. — and indeed, world — economy, too, not just to those homeowners).
Instead, they used it almost entirely to help the banksters, i.e., by stringing underwater homeowners along until the banksters’ portfolios stabilized via selling off already-foreclosed properties into a then-gradually-recovering housing market instead of into a market still depressed by an even greater glut of foreclosures (i.e., including the ones that would have entered the market sooner without TARP).
(Note: since I accepted the conclusions just stated, I’ve remained on the lookout for anything credibly suggesting “no, you got that wrong” or “you missed this important piece” or anything along those lines that could lead me to reconsider. So far, nuthin’, nul, zip, nada.)
Hard not to be cynical knowing that, though ymmv re: who most deserves to be target of that cynicism.
It occurs to me to wonder how many folks who lost their jobs in mortgage-generating (reel those suckers in!) hooked onto positions in the mortgage-workout industry, and how that biased their attitudes towards homeowners in trouble.
This framing is not racist. It is framing by race. And in my opinion, race frames every issue in America. Ignoring the fact that Trump voters are white and that a significant number of Trump voters went with their identity in 2016 is sticking your head in the sand.
Your approach – ignoring race – was okay, perhaps even the best strategy, when Republicans were using dog whistles and winks amid a standard left versus right campaign. But that is not the case any more.
Trump is the one who is framing elections by race. His appeal is explicitly made to whites. Steve Bannon thinks that if we call that out we lose. There are zero votes defending Muslims in Trump country. If we ignore this we lose. Democrats are being forced into this fight.
It is very easy to sound dystopian alarms about the United States these days but this really does concern me. Americans are quickly moving toward the era when they have to explicitly choose between having a white nation or a democratic nation.
I wish I was confident. So far – it seems to me – white Americans are choosing white. We cannot ignore this.
I have read it and I understand what you are saying. I am saying that Democrats do not get to frame anything in a racially neutral way because Republicans are making an explicitly racial pitch. Ignore that and you lose with this demographic. Fight that and you lose with that demographic.
Racially neutral proposals – on any remotely complex issue – won’t be heard among the noise.
The economic proposals made by most Democrats are racially and sexually neutral on their face. There is nothing racially/sexually explicit about advocating for the financial security of ALL Americans by securing the right of ALL Americans to collective bargaining and fair labor laws, healthy social welfare programs, equal access to a quality education, family planning and other health services, and other hallmarks of a just and fair economy.
Unfortunately, the conservative movement’s propaganda, and their current decision to toss their chips into the pure racist/sexist appeals of Trumpism has made each of these explicitly divisive, making what would normally be overwhelmingly popular programs into ones opposed by majorities or pluralities of Americans.
And there are many other issues which are explicitly divisive by race and sexual identification, in which anything other than full-throated defenses of those with less power is the only morally acceptable path forward.
Unfortunately, the moral necessity that we take that path has been used by Republican Party propagandists to poison the well. The poison that too many Americans choose to drink makes all Democratic Party economic proposals and all Democrats defenders of the “moral deficients”: the lazy and violent blacks and browns, the mentally ill and child-molesting homosexuals, the disgusting and dangerous women who exhibit sexual and social autonomy, etc.
Speak to the financial insecurities of the white working class? We can’t get our economic proposals heard by a disappointingly large number of them if they associate liberals/progressives/Democrats with our defenses of the “moral deficients”. Too many white Americans don’t want these people to gain financial security; they want to see them suffer for their sins.
The good news (at the end of all this bad news) is twofold:
We have shown in the past, and are showing now, that we can win elections in some areas even when we lose the white vote by 30 or more percentage points, and
Those who worry about the Trump coalition’s willingness to stick with the President and his disgusting lawbreaking and oligarchic fealty are reading too much into disturbing reports which track the unrepentant views of individual Trump voters and are reading too little into the fact that Trump has lost a small but crucial portion of his base. If the only evidence we had of this was his cratering approval ratings that would be insufficient. No, the most crucial evidence of this is that a plurality of the Alabama electorate which just chose Doug Jones also told pollsters that they disapproved of Trump’s performance.
Has anything ever merited a bigger (or drawn-out-longer) Duuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!?
Does it really not occur to you that this is a less-than-sound argument for mimicking this behavior?
If your objection hinges on the distinction you raised between “racist” and “racial” (which I in fact considered as an alternative but rejected as too weak) framing, then fine, call it “racial framing” . . . and reject that!
To do this is not to “ignore” that “Republicans are making an explicitly racial pitch”. (One blindingly obvious alternative to “ignoring” that is calling it out and condemning it.)
But at bottom is the almost charmingly naive notion that there are whites out there (whether Trump voters or working class) who could be won over from the Dark Side if only we appealed to them with the right appeal based on their whiteness.
Who are these people?
Even more to the point: get specific. Outline the proposal (some/any specific policy proposal) intended to appeal to them based, specifically, on their whiteness that would not also be morally reprehensible.
As I’ve said already, I’ve yet to see any such proposal floated. I can’t imagine what it would even look like.
Fine, your pitch to these voters begins by calling out and condemning the views held by this voter on, say, immigration as misguided and racist. How do you think that will work out?
Steve Bannon is delighted. Neither your opponent or the media will pay a bit of attention to your proposal to lure voters from the dark side. Not when Republicans want to argue about whether wanting to secure the borders and keep the country safe is racist or not.
It is a trap. It is a waste of Democratic resources to fight a losing battle for these votes.
Anonymous
on December 18, 2017 at 10:59 am
You keep asking someone to outline a policy intended to attract specifically white voters, but to me, at least, that misses the point by a mile. (I don’t believe policy drives votes in any substantial way anymore.) The question is, can anyone outline a (nonracist) strategy intended to attract specifically white voters.
The notion that there aren’t any whites out there who could be won over from the Dark Side if only we appealed to them while specifically (if not loudly) taking into account their whiteness, baffles me. Obama did that, twice. And I believe he would’ve easily done it again.
A full-throttle commitment to seizure of the commanding heights of the economy in the name of the workers and those white working-class voters are turning out in droves to vote D.
They might stop in their rush to the polling booths to kick a gay or two, or grope a pretty girl, or n-bomb a swarthy who’s ahead of them in line, but we can live with that, I think.
As much as I do not like this constant over focus on the white working class, as if they are the only voters that matters, it comes down to a question of numbers. The democrats are going to need to find a way to appeal to at least some of these voters.
I think we can forget about the traditional republican voter subset of the white working class. Republicanism is a cultural thing for them. We can also forget about the bigots. The republican/conservative movement towards open racism appeals to them, and the zero-sum thinking that drives racism says these voters will never seek to coalesce with non-whites.
Where the dems should focus is on the former Obama voter subset, and the “swing” or “independent” voter subset. And answer the question, why did they vote for Trump in 2016?
There was clearly an anti-establishment/status quo sentiment in 2016. To many voters, Trump being a reality star said anti-establishment/status quo (even though the reality was that was as fraudulent as it gets) as much as Obama being a black man said “change” to them in 2008. And for all her experience, qualifications and virtues, nothing said status quo and establishment more than Hillary Clinton.
The problem, IMO, is the democrats have been running as the status quo, the “normal” party, the “adult establishment,” when the voters said clearly in 2016 that they have lost faith in status quo or establishment. I voted for Clinton because she was clearly the most qualified and would have been a good President, vs Trump who was a disaster any sentient being could have seen coming. But nothing said establishment and status quo more than Clinton did. Her low approval rating certainly didn’t help. And truth be told, the democrats “centrism” is a scheme as well, since it allows a justification for their incremental approach, and shyness towards fully embracing things like $15/hr minimum wage, some form of universal health care, full throated support for expanding social security, and other such ideas, because that allows them to maintain the support of wealthy donors as well.
Voters were frustrated that politicians weren’t doing anything for them. The voters were for many policies that Clinton and the democrats, initially saw as anathema to the preferred centrist, incremental approach, but grudgingly came around to support. Their perceived sincerity was undercut by appearances of being in bed with Wall Street and the wealthy. The republicans “elitist” charge, as silly as it was, resonated.
The democrats need to do three things: first, continue with the GOTV operations and commit the resources with a goal towards increasing turnout even more. Secondly, abandon the incremental centrism and embrace their base by stepping out on bold policy positions that polls show the public support when presented to them stripped of the counter messaging BS. And develop policy positions and messaging around them that speak to the needs of the majority, e.g. the poor, working and middle classes. And stop being shy about supporting unions. Lastly, build out fundraising methods to improve small donor donations so as to not have to rely on big donors, to unchain the next generation of leaders to speak freely to the needs of the voters.
Finally, you could sum up the democrats dilemma with the simple question: do you want to win (and by virtue all of us to win), or do you want to just get paid, and keep the revolving door open?
Finally, you could sum up the democrats dilemma with the simple question: do you want to win (and by virtue all of us to win), or do you want to just get paid, and keep the revolving door open?
Most Democrats in DC are looking for that sweet lobbying gig after their career is over. They don’t want to be Russ Feingold(who taught courses in college after his 2010 defeat).
And that’s the problem. I understand one having self interest in their career. But when your career is serving the public there has to be limits to that. And when the system itself facilitates and over indulgence in self serving by virtue of allowing acceptance of contributions which, even with current laws function as bribery, little wonder the needs of the voters are always a distant second. The idealism in politics just isn’t there in those who are in position to make a difference.
Its not that I hold democrats to a higher standard, just that this basically comes down to the issues inherent in serving two masters.
. . . that one reason “white” gets inserted where it doesn’t belong in these contexts may simply be that the data exist to allow it.
I.e., that “race” is one of the questions pollsters (including election exit pollsters) ask, which then allow breaking down the results into “cross-tabs” that include race, which then prove useful to someone attempting the sort of electoral political analysis and strategizing that you do.
And that’s fine for analyzing what did happen.
My persistent point has been that it (i.e., focus on “white”) should be anathema to all decent folks once the transition from figuring out what did happen to proposing what to do about it has occurred. (With the already-noted exception of specific redress of past and ongoing racial discrimination*) proposals going forward should be race-blind.
* and yeah, I get that the white resentment crowd has themselves convinced that they in fact are victims of exactly that; but that’s obviously delusional stuff and nonsense
The Catch-22 in US politics is that smashing discriminatory institutions requires white participation in smashing those institutions, which requires appealing to a certain type of white voter who can act as a political ally in that cause.
That means that they must understand what’s in it for them if Black Lives Matter, if there is a conventional way for folks to get from undocumented status to citizenship, that there is an end to sexual harassment, and so-called “identity” issue after identity issue.
If more people are going to vote, they must understand the consequences.
That means some careful framing of the value argument for voting Democratic. And some understanding by Democratic candidates of the Catch-22 in how they make those arguments.
It also means that people of color and women who are running for office must make different arguments than Democratic candidates have for the past 40 years.
And some of those arguments must point out the demonstrable failure and radical corruption of the conservative project.
That means that Democrats must shed their defensive resort to conservative arguments and nostrums.
Northam is getting and will get the absolute pounding he deserves from the coalition that brought him to the Governor’s office. He must be made to move his position. This is unacceptable, even if it’s just a rhetorical play.
That’s just the thing. It’s absolutely stupid as a rhetorical play. His spiel is the pablum you spout at a bill signing, if anything, not before you even take office. But then this is the guy that voted for C- Augustus twice.
He’s a fucking DOCTOR and ran as one. What is he talking about? Why is this even necessary? The VA GOP is gasping at this point; they know the momentum is on the other side and even outrageous Neanderthals like Goodlatte say they support CHIP. Northam needs to be taken to the woodshed.
All the recommendations seem to be a matter of deserting one loyal Democratic base constituency or another in search of white voters who tend, as things stand to view Democrats as worse than pedophiles.
I think there is some nuance in that recommendation that people are not getting around to stating. That telegraphing of positions allows easy doses of cold water to be thrown on how to build a majority vote. And existing divisions among Democrats and progressives to be exploited either for Republicans or for a dead status quo.
Sorry Boo Man, the rural voters of Ohio hate “those people” so much that they are going to vote Trumpian for as long as they can. I live in a rural area in Northern Ohio. The only hope I see is that their children might be persuaded to vote and thereby negate their preferences. Black and brown voters must be compelled to vote more. Young people must vote. There is no other way forward unless you are willing to wait several years for these bigots to die off. Of course, by then, other bigots might grow up to take their place.
“Democrats live in concentrated geographical spaces. This gives them a disadvantage even in neutrally drawn district maps”
Everybody says this, but it needn’t be true. Remember the maps we see every prez election, the ones that show vote by county and show the whole country red except for blue dots at cities? Then someone shows a map scaled by population, a population cartogtam. It shows the country blue with heavy red veins. Get the states to use population cartogtams for redistricting. In such a map you can’t even see that Ds are concentrated.
Concentration of Dem voters is not really a problem. It’s all gerrymandering.
I strongly recommend his unusually-well-researched Daily Kosarticle, about small town, right wing Ohio journalist Gary Abernathy (and, specifically, the author’s successful attempts to rise to Abernathy’s challenge and engage in a friendly, rigorous discussion/debate about contemporary politics).
Basically, Abernathy (who wrote one of the mere four major-newspaper endorsements of Trump last November) freely admits that the current Republican position is not based on any kind of “economic anxiety” but is rooted entirely in cultural issues.
Specifically, “political correctness” is the broad brush by which all liberal/Democratic positions are attacked — and, the “correctness” nearly always turns out to be racially based; when it’s not, it’s about permissiveness, elitism, and decadence, which are tied together with race into the same “anti-American” corrosion that these rural/small-town patriots are dead-set against.
This is, obviously, a profoundly difficult nut to crack, particularly since nobody involved will admit to — or can even see — the racial bigotry involved. (I have never yet met a Republican or a Trump supporter who will agree that the party’s position or Trump’s candidacy or positions have anything to do with race.)
I don’t know how to fix this, but I think BooMan’s correct that this is about getting white voters, explicitly, to wake up. It has to be done shrewdly and delicately, since they have to be weaned off their addiction to racist pablum without any accusations of “racism” ever being uttered, or they’ll stop listening. Obama was the real racist (since he was so “divisive”) and the most advantaged people in the country are Blacks; that’s how they see it, and good luck changing their minds. But it’s got to be done.
I cannot find the article at the moment, but within the last few days I read something that indicated racial resentment, not economic distress, was at the core of Trump’s support. Which, is essentially what Abernathy is saying, according to your report.
If so, and I believe it to be true, these people DID NOT vote for Obama and switch to Trump. What Trump did was energize occasional white voters who were resentful and angry. And Hillary didn’t bring out occasional Democratic voters, especially Hispanic and black, which Obama did.
About the only message I see that avoids race but could appeal to these voters is essentially the core of Bernie Sanders’ stump speech: income inequality, affordable health care and college, tax the rich, etc. He brought out thousands to hear that message, many of whom were not Democrats. That message should still fly given the widespread distaste for the abominable tax law on the verge of being passed by the Republican Congress.
He also showed you can run a viable national campaign without mega bucks donors. The Democrats need to quit bowing down to the same kind of donors that have totally captured the Republican Party.
I’m agreeing with you (I think) in a thread down below, but here’s my question:
Stipulating that yes, we need to appeal to more rural whites and white w/o college degrees, does that necessarily mean that we should prioritize Trump voters? Or is there lower-hanging fruit in the orchard of white voters? Should we focus on appealing to rural white and W w/o CD Americans who are not currently voters? I understand that voters are the only ones who matter politically in a very real sense, but I’d be interested in hearing your thought re. ‘converting Trump voters’ versus ‘creating new white voters.’
Here in our area, we saw a pretty sizeable exodus of historically reliable Democratic votes from the ranks of union members, who jumped onto the Trump bandwagon in 2016. Now it’s hard to say how they might vote in 2018, but information I get from those I know who are close to the union membership tell me that they have not yet soured on Trump. So they might well be a force here in Ohio which tamps down any potential good news for Democrats statewide. herrod Brown still has good support among the unions, but when it comes to state-wide offices this situation could potentially be very problematic for us. Since the state legislature is at super-majority status in favor the GOP, we MUST have at least the governer’s office, and preferably also the AG. The sums of money that are being pumped into Ohio from GOP PAC’s is astonishing. As good as some news has been for Dems nationally, here in Ohio we are teetering on the razor’s edge of a continuation of GOP dominance across the entire spectrum. This is going to be a brutal and maddeningly frustrating slog in my state, and many people are already very tired from Trump exhaustion. I want to be hopeful, but Martin’s caveats are ringing very true in my ears. I don’t think the liberal pundit class has a very good grasp on how things are going here in the trenches. I find much of the commentary very unrealistic and grounded in a lot of “feel good” fantasies they are making up in their own minds. From the vantage point in my foxhole, we are still Sisyphus rolling the proverbial stone. There is so much hard work to do. I hope our state party gets a clue and doesn’t fool themselves into swallowing the koolaid of an inevitable Democratic wave. I don’t want to wake up the morning after election day to a national exercise in navel-gazing by the Democratic Party.
Do you think it’d be easier to win back those historically-reliable white-union Democratic voters, or to convince a new group of white voters to get to the polls?
Is Trump’s appeal to them mostly due to anti-PC backlash?
I’ve been reading about how in Seattle in 1886 out of work railroad labor unions rounded up the Chinese and put them on boats and trains to send them back to China because they were seen as a cheaper source of labor. It was essentially a riot and the state had to declare martial law.
Not many years after that those same people welcomed the first shipping vessel from Japan with open arms, because it represented new economic opportunities.
My reading is that overt racism is the first symptom of economic hardship for a lot of people. I don’t think it’s going to cure racism if the democrats can find a way to speak to white rural voters, but if they can find a message that offers them better lives, I hope that enough of them might bite and it will recede.
What a concept, eh?
BTW, I was you, briefly, during the recent attack on the site. Scary, I know!
Quite happy to be replaced by you. (I was Racer X!)
I think our problem (one of them) is that we’ve gotta focus on “white,” to some extent. 70% of voters are white. If we don’t make a concerted effort to staunch our bleeding with the pales, we’re fucked.
Well. More of this downstairs: http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2017/12/15/16820/863
. . . to staunch our bleeding with the pales” without appealing to them based on their paleness. (And if we’re not appealing to them based specifically on their paleness, i.e., with proposals targeted to differentially benefit the pale, then why are we talking about their paleness at all? We shouldn’t be!)
By designing messaging and policies that appeal to and benefit all members of whatever deme (gender, education, income, geography, etc.) they are in, while also just happening to be pale.
As I just pointed out elsewhere, that is in fact what the specific policy proposals (that I’ve seen floated, anyway) actually do. They don’t target any benefit(s) differentially to pales, specifically. So why frame them in those terms?
What’s hard about this? It absolutely flummoxes me that this isn’t just plainly obvious to everyone (sane and decent). But it seems clear at this point that it isn’t.
Gotcha. I read your comment after posting mine. What you’re saying is that while there are issues specific to members of the working class who are black, there are not any issues specific to members of the working class who are white? Or that even if there are white-specific issues, we should discuss them without mentioning race?
Discussing them as white issues feeds into whites thinking as a racial block which is counter productive electorally since they are a majority for decades if not longer.
Good point that overtly labelling them ‘white issues’ is counter-productive. But addressing them is still key.
Also, and I would have thought this was obvious, a very large plurality though maybe not a majority at the national level are white people that regularly vote Democratic. That’s pretty undeniable. So we should be framing the argument to be about white conservatives not all white Americans. That makes a difference in the kind of arguments made because it also brings up big regional differences.
Appalachian whites have little exposure to minorities and are often ignorant, poor and racist-conservative by tradition more than anything else. They may be susceptible to a progressively economic argument for strengthening the social safety net to vote D (or maybe not). OTOH, your suburban middle/upper-middle class GOP voters are going to be more persuaded by the awful tax cut law that cuts the SALT deduction and many others that will be really hurting these voters. I’d say those are the two sets of GOP voters that are vulnerable. The southern evangelicals are hopeless; the western individualists are not being hurt at all. So, there’s a small avenue for Democrats next year but the real bite to GOP voters from the Tax cut bill will hit in the 2020 elections.
I should have clarified that I’m leaving out the Millennials and some older white voters and white women (except evangelicals) in my opinion: those are trending strongly D.
Pt. 2 …and from the standpoint of a racial block, it DOES make sense to vote that way since minorities gaining power does diminish white power, and more minorities really does mean more “foreign” cultural influences.
. . . members of the working class who are white” (i.e., that are specific to their whiteness) are also specific to the racism/bigotry of some of them. Otherwise, they’re just specific to the, simply, working class.
Or at least I’m unaware of any plausible exceptions to that thesis.
So designing policies/proposals to “appeal to” or “help” them (i.e., the specifically white subset of the working class) means designing proposals to cater to/reinforce/validate that racism/bigotry.
Something we should have nothing whatsoever to do with.
Again, why is “white” even in there? (But see addendum this thread for my new speculative hypothesis on that.)
Well, yeah. One of the biggest ailments afflicting the white-as-opposed-to-black working class is its susceptibility to racist demagoguery. (Is the opioid crisis also disproportionately affecting whites?)
That’s why we need a specific strategy to appeal to white Trump voters; we need to counteract that racism (as Obama did), which is not an issue when trying to appeal to black voters.
I agree that policies and proposals are useless, but strategies are key. Not to validate that racism, but to overwhelm it.
Yes, the opioid crisis disproportionately affects whites, apparently because a lot of doctors are racist (often subconciously) and don’t want to prescribe them for minorities because the doctors think they are or will become junkies. So racism is saving literally thousands of minority lives per year. It’s very ironic.
The post does not irritate me – it depresses me because I see no effective way of countering the Republican message. Democrats lost these voters because Republicans made a racist appeal to them.They will make the same appeal going forward.
When Dems go after those seats, what do we say about race? How do we answer our opponents?
We focus on other issues that apply regardless of race: affordable health care, quality education (beginning with free pre-school), affordable college or post high school training, tax fairness (Bernie’s “pay their fair share message”), infrastructure and so forth.
I am not sure if that is enough. Most of DJT’s promises were all lies, and many articles have pointed out that not only the goalposts have moved for these supporters, but there are NO goalposts at all.
So how does logic and actual policy pronouncements swing them back?
My hope is that DJT won by small minorities in the three crucial electoral college states (PA, MI, WI), and that there will be a swing back in 2020.
For 2018, deep red states like AL will probably still be in the R corner, but as VA showed, the polls and the pundits may be underestimating the potential outcomes. It is almost always that people misestimate self referential issues – like when asked how likely each responder is to excel in a particular task, they overestimate – similarly the prognostications will likely overestimate how dire the results will be for D.
As Rachel Maddow showed, there has been 30 point swings in several different geographically spread elections – VA, OK, IA.
I am assuming that some are persuadable. If we think not, then we should ignore them and focus on registration and getting out the vote.
The issue with district geography is not that Democrats are in smaller areas (cities) because those areas get more districts too. The issue for a while has been that Democrats tend to live in overwhelmingly Democratic areas while there have been relatively fewer Republicans in overwhelmingly Republican areas. The urban cores could be 90-10 Dem while rural areas might have been 65-35 Republican.
One of the effects of the Trumpian shift where Republicans gain in rural areas and lose in surburban areas (having little left to lose in urban areas) is that the natural gerrymander largely goes away. With rural districts now going 80-20 for Republicans, they’ve got about as many voters in heavily concentrated Republican areas as we do in heavily concentrated Democratic areas. The shift is actually very harmful to the 2010 gerrymanders because the Republicans gain in already strongly Republican rural districts but they lose in moderately Republican suburban districts. For House districts this is usually less of an issue since they are large enough to have a lot of both, but for statehouse districts it’s a big deal. This is, IMO, the main reason for the initially shockingly good results in Virginia.
From these shifts, you’ve basically got it backwards. For districted elections the rural districts are now usually a lost cause. We’re not winning them back for a couple of cycles at least. Improving our results could help some with Senate and House races, but for the statehouses it’s not going to matter. Almost any statehouse district with a lot of rural voters is going to be heavily Republican, to the point that we’ll have the statehouse before we flip it.
The fight for control of the states is now in the suburbs.
I agree with this in principle but there will be interesting exceptions. I’m a MD voter but we have a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of VA that we are rehabilitating. The county of the same name went 71% for the GOP in the most recent election. Actually, a slight decline. Rural areas like these that are rapidly changing demographically (older R’s dying off) and economically (wineries, cideries, tourism, renewable energy businesses) could see a sudden change in voting patterns. This region has a big environmental movement that surprised me. So, in some rural areas, we may see some sudden stochastic change in voting patterns as we head into the next decade.
Our representative “bad coffee” (Goodlatte) is “retiring” next year. Thinking he sees the writing on the wall.
. . . “home on the range”, here.
Badlatte is horrible.
May you find a decent replacement.
Somewhat true in my rural area as well. We have a vibrant Democratic Party in our county and recently took municipal elections with 67-70% of the vote. We did it by energizing occasional voters who had “had enough”
This reminds me of the study done by Princeton Econ Nobel Laureate Prof. Angus Deaton. His updated study says:
The numbers don’t work for the democrats. They need to keep their near 90% majority of AA votes and win more white votes. Failing that there is little way of winning a majority in congress or the states. The republicans can win with simply the white vote and nothing more. And Trump has a strong appeal to them, so it won’t get better in 2020. Plus he will try to peal away some disaffected POC votes.
IMO we need to fashion a strong progressive message and avoid being tagged the party of Wall Street. Ironic in a way, since Trump is the party of the plutocrats. Maybe we can hang that around his neck.
Or maybe lightening will strike and Mueller gets his man.
Can we please be more accurate when characterizing the “white” vote? Maybe it is 70% but to think that it is all going to the GOP is completely ignorant. I’m not an expert but I would estimate that, among likely voters, the percentage that are reliably GOP white is maybe 35-40%. So why do they keep winning? Well, in the Presidential election they didn’t; they lost by more than 3 million votes. In terms of Congressional elections, during the last several cycles, the Democrats have elected millions more than the GOP and still lost because of gerrymandering and voter suppression.
The GOP is in an all-out war to prevent Democratic votes by any and all means while frantically trying to install an authoritarian, oligarchic state and transform the USA into Russia. That’s the real problem.
Yes, the Democrats need a new message but the problem is the DLC centrism, which is GOP Lite. Democrats need a much more progressive message and to hell with trying to win over the WWC by appealing to their racism.
. . . i.e., the source of that irritation you know to expect. (Or at least you betray no sign of getting it.)
I’ll try again.
The objection (mine, anyway) is with framing the matter like this:
Inclusion of “white” in there inescapably implies proposals targeted to differentially benefit, specifically, whites based on their whiteness. Else the word “white” in that framing is utterly redundant and performs no meaningful function. It is inherently racist framing.
The only sort of proposal that would thus differentially “appeal to[, specifically,] white Trump voters” would be one that also somehow appeals to (or worse, validates) the racism/bigotry of a very significant subset of these voters. E.g., one that somehow validates their white resentment and scapegoating of The Other for their problems. Without that, there is no “appeal to [, specifically] white Trump voters” because there is nothing special on offer to them based on their whiteness (without which, again, having “white” in there at all is redundant and meaningless; and racist framing).
This is exactly the same problem as the analogous racist framing that Dems need to “appeal to” or “help” the “WWC”.
I get that you’re doing electoral political analysis about what it would take to put together a winning plurality/majority, and part of that is thinking about individual voters, e.g., ones who voted for Obama, then Trump, some of whom were white.
Yet (to your credit!), I’ve yet to see you (or anyone else here who’s adopted racist framing like that above) actually offer any proposal that would, in fact, somehow differentially “appeal to” or “help” the, specifically, white subset of either Trump voters or the (simply) working class (or, for that matter, the broader, not-richer-than-God American electorate).
I see no reason the same arguments can’t be made without the racist framing.
So drop the racist framing, already!
Seems to me that running candidates on “bread and butter issues” is a start in those districts that are difficult for Democratic party to flip. That should be doable without using racist dog whistles. No reason for us to lose our soul. Again, once more with feeling, I want to advocate for not using WWC is some monolithic entity. If we have WWC as a demographic category, what do we find when we look into the proverbial cross-tabs? How many are reliable voters? How many are secular versus evangelical? When reaching out to this demographic, we need to be thinking much more specifically. Just thinking from my own little circle – and I don’t want to overgeneralize – but my non-work friends are almost exclusively WWC (most of them I know through a local atheist/agnostic group). That circle tends to be fairly liberal or moderate, some are more conscientious about voting than not, a number hold technical certificates and are skilled laborers whereas others are unskilled laborers in the service sector, etc. I am in a historically red area of a state that flipped red this decade. But that bunch is very sour on Dolt 45. Make of it what you will, but a number of us have sort of out of the blue started showing up at local Democratic Party meetings and events since last fall’s debacle. Again, small sample, and may more reflect the quirks of this writer and the area I live in. But I really, really want us to think carefully, as you are, about what appealing to WWC really means.
. . . inescapably) another descriptor defining a deme, along with gender, education, income, urban/suburban/rural, etc.
The problem is including it in proposals for Dem messaging, policies, legislative agenda, political tactics/strategy, etc.
These should all be race-blind! (The exception is policies to redress impacts of historical and ongoing racial discrimination/oppression, e.g., affirmative action, Black Lives Matter.)
Frankly I don’t get that people don’t get this. It seems so obvious.
I’m with you on this matter. As I noted earlier, there’s no reason for us to lose our soul as a party in order to win over voters. We are (or at least should be) better than that.
I agree 100%. Drop the “white” because it is redundant and racist and just focus on the working class period. And polls have shown that when issues are presented to voters sans the racial and partisan filters, a solid majority of voters prefer democratic solutions to these issues.
To do this though, democrats have to drop this fealty to their own wealthy donors, that prevented them from full throated, unequivocal support for some of these policies. They had to be dragged, kicking and screaming to party support for the $15 minimum wage, (some form of) universal health care. Elizabeth Warren had been held at arms length because they wanted to maintain escape hatches for the banks. And how to explain even Obama previously talking about “fixing” social security with chained CPI? No reason to wonder why voters hearing “fighting for you” are skeptical with this kind of history, especially anyone who had their home-owning ass handed to them under TARP?
A lot of these people are the very voters we’re talking about winning back, and guess what? They ain’t all “white.”
. . . back” (i.e., make no effort to hold Bush admin War Criminals accountable) were Obama’s signature failures (though there were others).
With the TARP failure the more mysterious of the two. I can comprehend (even as I reject it, for obvious reasons including the normalization of criminality that the Trumpists are now running wild with) the “bind up the nation’s wounds” argument for “look forward, not back”.
But how to explain the TARP failure? Pot of money for bailing out underwater homeowners — though a pittance relative to the pot to bail out the banksters — appropriated and just sitting there . . . and you use only a small fraction of it for that purpose. WTF?
Think it was you who mentioned this TARP failure in a recent post, saying it left many homeowners “no better off”. Didn’t get around to responding there, so I will here.
It was much worse than that: it didn’t just leave many “no better off”, it left them much worse off. It scammed them into flushing months/years(?) more mortgage payments down the black hole of the homes the banksters then proceeded to foreclose on anyway! IOW, it lured those homeowners (acting in good faith — cuz how could they possibly believe Obama’d screw them this way?) to commit the proverbial folly of throwing good money after bad. (This was good for the banks, though! So there’s that.)
Note that my overall verdict on the Obama admin is positive. In fact it’s hard for me to see how, at that point in our history and politics, we could have done much (or any!) better.
Still, those two sins remain unforgivable (and the TARP failure inexplicable) imo.
Just spitballing here, but I do wonder how much of the TARP foot-dragging and failure might be attributable to sabotage from within by Bush-era holdovers and/or subornation of the bureaucracy by the banksters they were supposed to be holding accountable? Add to that the inevitable sloth of bureaucracy itself and a regulatory scheme and apparatus less than optimally designed — hell, jerry-rigged and cumbersome — and that could account for some portion of the debacle. Not to mention the contempt that haves, including those staffing the agencies, often feel for the have-nots (“It’s their own damn fault they got themselves into this mess; why help them avoid the consequences?”) leading to less than energetic efforts to make the program work.
This is certainly no brief for exoneration, but having observed our government in (in)action for lo, these many decades, I feel one must wonder how widely to spread the blame.
. . . part of the explanation for what I’ve already confessed remains utterly inexplicable to me:
The Obama admin was given the means to help out underwater homeowners (at a time when this would have been immensely helpful to the overall U.S. — and indeed, world — economy, too, not just to those homeowners).
Instead, they used it almost entirely to help the banksters, i.e., by stringing underwater homeowners along until the banksters’ portfolios stabilized via selling off already-foreclosed properties into a then-gradually-recovering housing market instead of into a market still depressed by an even greater glut of foreclosures (i.e., including the ones that would have entered the market sooner without TARP).
(Note: since I accepted the conclusions just stated, I’ve remained on the lookout for anything credibly suggesting “no, you got that wrong” or “you missed this important piece” or anything along those lines that could lead me to reconsider. So far, nuthin’, nul, zip, nada.)
Hard not to be cynical knowing that, though ymmv re: who most deserves to be target of that cynicism.
It occurs to me to wonder how many folks who lost their jobs in mortgage-generating (reel those suckers in!) hooked onto positions in the mortgage-workout industry, and how that biased their attitudes towards homeowners in trouble.
. . . inflicted again on Puerto Rican homeowners post-Maria, per atrios.
This framing is not racist. It is framing by race. And in my opinion, race frames every issue in America. Ignoring the fact that Trump voters are white and that a significant number of Trump voters went with their identity in 2016 is sticking your head in the sand.
Your approach – ignoring race – was okay, perhaps even the best strategy, when Republicans were using dog whistles and winks amid a standard left versus right campaign. But that is not the case any more.
Trump is the one who is framing elections by race. His appeal is explicitly made to whites. Steve Bannon thinks that if we call that out we lose. There are zero votes defending Muslims in Trump country. If we ignore this we lose. Democrats are being forced into this fight.
It is very easy to sound dystopian alarms about the United States these days but this really does concern me. Americans are quickly moving toward the era when they have to explicitly choose between having a white nation or a democratic nation.
I wish I was confident. So far – it seems to me – white Americans are choosing white. We cannot ignore this.
. . . of what I’ve written in this thread.
If after doing that you still disagree, then we can talk.
I have read it and I understand what you are saying. I am saying that Democrats do not get to frame anything in a racially neutral way because Republicans are making an explicitly racial pitch. Ignore that and you lose with this demographic. Fight that and you lose with that demographic.
Racially neutral proposals – on any remotely complex issue – won’t be heard among the noise.
The economic proposals made by most Democrats are racially and sexually neutral on their face. There is nothing racially/sexually explicit about advocating for the financial security of ALL Americans by securing the right of ALL Americans to collective bargaining and fair labor laws, healthy social welfare programs, equal access to a quality education, family planning and other health services, and other hallmarks of a just and fair economy.
Unfortunately, the conservative movement’s propaganda, and their current decision to toss their chips into the pure racist/sexist appeals of Trumpism has made each of these explicitly divisive, making what would normally be overwhelmingly popular programs into ones opposed by majorities or pluralities of Americans.
And there are many other issues which are explicitly divisive by race and sexual identification, in which anything other than full-throated defenses of those with less power is the only morally acceptable path forward.
Unfortunately, the moral necessity that we take that path has been used by Republican Party propagandists to poison the well. The poison that too many Americans choose to drink makes all Democratic Party economic proposals and all Democrats defenders of the “moral deficients”: the lazy and violent blacks and browns, the mentally ill and child-molesting homosexuals, the disgusting and dangerous women who exhibit sexual and social autonomy, etc.
Speak to the financial insecurities of the white working class? We can’t get our economic proposals heard by a disappointingly large number of them if they associate liberals/progressives/Democrats with our defenses of the “moral deficients”. Too many white Americans don’t want these people to gain financial security; they want to see them suffer for their sins.
The good news (at the end of all this bad news) is twofold:
. . . racial pitch.”
Has anything ever merited a bigger (or drawn-out-longer) Duuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!?
Does it really not occur to you that this is a less-than-sound argument for mimicking this behavior?
If your objection hinges on the distinction you raised between “racist” and “racial” (which I in fact considered as an alternative but rejected as too weak) framing, then fine, call it “racial framing” . . . and reject that!
To do this is not to “ignore” that “Republicans are making an explicitly racial pitch”. (One blindingly obvious alternative to “ignoring” that is calling it out and condemning it.)
But at bottom is the almost charmingly naive notion that there are whites out there (whether Trump voters or working class) who could be won over from the Dark Side if only we appealed to them with the right appeal based on their whiteness.
Who are these people?
Even more to the point: get specific. Outline the proposal (some/any specific policy proposal) intended to appeal to them based, specifically, on their whiteness that would not also be morally reprehensible.
As I’ve said already, I’ve yet to see any such proposal floated. I can’t imagine what it would even look like.
Fine, your pitch to these voters begins by calling out and condemning the views held by this voter on, say, immigration as misguided and racist. How do you think that will work out?
Steve Bannon is delighted. Neither your opponent or the media will pay a bit of attention to your proposal to lure voters from the dark side. Not when Republicans want to argue about whether wanting to secure the borders and keep the country safe is racist or not.
It is a trap. It is a waste of Democratic resources to fight a losing battle for these votes.
You keep asking someone to outline a policy intended to attract specifically white voters, but to me, at least, that misses the point by a mile. (I don’t believe policy drives votes in any substantial way anymore.) The question is, can anyone outline a (nonracist) strategy intended to attract specifically white voters.
The notion that there aren’t any whites out there who could be won over from the Dark Side if only we appealed to them while specifically (if not loudly) taking into account their whiteness, baffles me. Obama did that, twice. And I believe he would’ve easily done it again.
A full-throttle commitment to seizure of the commanding heights of the economy in the name of the workers and those white working-class voters are turning out in droves to vote D.
They might stop in their rush to the polling booths to kick a gay or two, or grope a pretty girl, or n-bomb a swarthy who’s ahead of them in line, but we can live with that, I think.
Since seizing the commanding heights is often a prerequisite to making real progress about race I think you are on to something.
As much as I do not like this constant over focus on the white working class, as if they are the only voters that matters, it comes down to a question of numbers. The democrats are going to need to find a way to appeal to at least some of these voters.
I think we can forget about the traditional republican voter subset of the white working class. Republicanism is a cultural thing for them. We can also forget about the bigots. The republican/conservative movement towards open racism appeals to them, and the zero-sum thinking that drives racism says these voters will never seek to coalesce with non-whites.
Where the dems should focus is on the former Obama voter subset, and the “swing” or “independent” voter subset. And answer the question, why did they vote for Trump in 2016?
There was clearly an anti-establishment/status quo sentiment in 2016. To many voters, Trump being a reality star said anti-establishment/status quo (even though the reality was that was as fraudulent as it gets) as much as Obama being a black man said “change” to them in 2008. And for all her experience, qualifications and virtues, nothing said status quo and establishment more than Hillary Clinton.
The problem, IMO, is the democrats have been running as the status quo, the “normal” party, the “adult establishment,” when the voters said clearly in 2016 that they have lost faith in status quo or establishment. I voted for Clinton because she was clearly the most qualified and would have been a good President, vs Trump who was a disaster any sentient being could have seen coming. But nothing said establishment and status quo more than Clinton did. Her low approval rating certainly didn’t help. And truth be told, the democrats “centrism” is a scheme as well, since it allows a justification for their incremental approach, and shyness towards fully embracing things like $15/hr minimum wage, some form of universal health care, full throated support for expanding social security, and other such ideas, because that allows them to maintain the support of wealthy donors as well.
Voters were frustrated that politicians weren’t doing anything for them. The voters were for many policies that Clinton and the democrats, initially saw as anathema to the preferred centrist, incremental approach, but grudgingly came around to support. Their perceived sincerity was undercut by appearances of being in bed with Wall Street and the wealthy. The republicans “elitist” charge, as silly as it was, resonated.
The democrats need to do three things: first, continue with the GOTV operations and commit the resources with a goal towards increasing turnout even more. Secondly, abandon the incremental centrism and embrace their base by stepping out on bold policy positions that polls show the public support when presented to them stripped of the counter messaging BS. And develop policy positions and messaging around them that speak to the needs of the majority, e.g. the poor, working and middle classes. And stop being shy about supporting unions. Lastly, build out fundraising methods to improve small donor donations so as to not have to rely on big donors, to unchain the next generation of leaders to speak freely to the needs of the voters.
Finally, you could sum up the democrats dilemma with the simple question: do you want to win (and by virtue all of us to win), or do you want to just get paid, and keep the revolving door open?
Finally, you could sum up the democrats dilemma with the simple question: do you want to win (and by virtue all of us to win), or do you want to just get paid, and keep the revolving door open?
Most Democrats in DC are looking for that sweet lobbying gig after their career is over. They don’t want to be Russ Feingold(who taught courses in college after his 2010 defeat).
And that’s the problem. I understand one having self interest in their career. But when your career is serving the public there has to be limits to that. And when the system itself facilitates and over indulgence in self serving by virtue of allowing acceptance of contributions which, even with current laws function as bribery, little wonder the needs of the voters are always a distant second. The idealism in politics just isn’t there in those who are in position to make a difference.
Its not that I hold democrats to a higher standard, just that this basically comes down to the issues inherent in serving two masters.
. . . that one reason “white” gets inserted where it doesn’t belong in these contexts may simply be that the data exist to allow it.
I.e., that “race” is one of the questions pollsters (including election exit pollsters) ask, which then allow breaking down the results into “cross-tabs” that include race, which then prove useful to someone attempting the sort of electoral political analysis and strategizing that you do.
And that’s fine for analyzing what did happen.
My persistent point has been that it (i.e., focus on “white”) should be anathema to all decent folks once the transition from figuring out what did happen to proposing what to do about it has occurred. (With the already-noted exception of specific redress of past and ongoing racial discrimination*) proposals going forward should be race-blind.
* and yeah, I get that the white resentment crowd has themselves convinced that they in fact are victims of exactly that; but that’s obviously delusional stuff and nonsense
The Catch-22 in US politics is that smashing discriminatory institutions requires white participation in smashing those institutions, which requires appealing to a certain type of white voter who can act as a political ally in that cause.
That means that they must understand what’s in it for them if Black Lives Matter, if there is a conventional way for folks to get from undocumented status to citizenship, that there is an end to sexual harassment, and so-called “identity” issue after identity issue.
If more people are going to vote, they must understand the consequences.
That means some careful framing of the value argument for voting Democratic. And some understanding by Democratic candidates of the Catch-22 in how they make those arguments.
It also means that people of color and women who are running for office must make different arguments than Democratic candidates have for the past 40 years.
And some of those arguments must point out the demonstrable failure and radical corruption of the conservative project.
That means that Democrats must shed their defensive resort to conservative arguments and nostrums.
That means that Democrats must shed their defensive resort to conservative arguments and nostrums.
Look what hot water Northam got himself into today. See:
http://twitter.com/Taniel/status/942395318695579648
compared with this:
http://twitter.com/Taniel/status/942464101640556545
And it’s not that Brewer gave a shit about her poor constituents. It’s that she listened to the hospitals and clinics, who wanted that money.
Northam is getting and will get the absolute pounding he deserves from the coalition that brought him to the Governor’s office. He must be made to move his position. This is unacceptable, even if it’s just a rhetorical play.
That’s just the thing. It’s absolutely stupid as a rhetorical play. His spiel is the pablum you spout at a bill signing, if anything, not before you even take office. But then this is the guy that voted for C- Augustus twice.
He’s a fucking DOCTOR and ran as one. What is he talking about? Why is this even necessary? The VA GOP is gasping at this point; they know the momentum is on the other side and even outrageous Neanderthals like Goodlatte say they support CHIP. Northam needs to be taken to the woodshed.
Jones won 30% of white voters last I saw, which seems like something to build off of.
Which white Trump voters?
How should Democrats appeal to them?
All the recommendations seem to be a matter of deserting one loyal Democratic base constituency or another in search of white voters who tend, as things stand to view Democrats as worse than pedophiles.
I think there is some nuance in that recommendation that people are not getting around to stating. That telegraphing of positions allows easy doses of cold water to be thrown on how to build a majority vote. And existing divisions among Democrats and progressives to be exploited either for Republicans or for a dead status quo.
Sorry Boo Man, the rural voters of Ohio hate “those people” so much that they are going to vote Trumpian for as long as they can. I live in a rural area in Northern Ohio. The only hope I see is that their children might be persuaded to vote and thereby negate their preferences. Black and brown voters must be compelled to vote more. Young people must vote. There is no other way forward unless you are willing to wait several years for these bigots to die off. Of course, by then, other bigots might grow up to take their place.
“Democrats live in concentrated geographical spaces. This gives them a disadvantage even in neutrally drawn district maps”
Everybody says this, but it needn’t be true. Remember the maps we see every prez election, the ones that show vote by county and show the whole country red except for blue dots at cities? Then someone shows a map scaled by population, a population cartogtam. It shows the country blue with heavy red veins. Get the states to use population cartogtams for redistricting. In such a map you can’t even see that Ds are concentrated.
Concentration of Dem voters is not really a problem. It’s all gerrymandering.
You might care to check out the votes in parts of NYC, e.g., Harlem, where the Dem vote is upwards of 90% – that is a concentration problem.
Yeah. I believe that I understand what you are saying.
I strongly recommend his unusually-well-researched Daily Kos article, about small town, right wing Ohio journalist Gary Abernathy (and, specifically, the author’s successful attempts to rise to Abernathy’s challenge and engage in a friendly, rigorous discussion/debate about contemporary politics).
Basically, Abernathy (who wrote one of the mere four major-newspaper endorsements of Trump last November) freely admits that the current Republican position is not based on any kind of “economic anxiety” but is rooted entirely in cultural issues.
Specifically, “political correctness” is the broad brush by which all liberal/Democratic positions are attacked — and, the “correctness” nearly always turns out to be racially based; when it’s not, it’s about permissiveness, elitism, and decadence, which are tied together with race into the same “anti-American” corrosion that these rural/small-town patriots are dead-set against.
This is, obviously, a profoundly difficult nut to crack, particularly since nobody involved will admit to — or can even see — the racial bigotry involved. (I have never yet met a Republican or a Trump supporter who will agree that the party’s position or Trump’s candidacy or positions have anything to do with race.)
I don’t know how to fix this, but I think BooMan’s correct that this is about getting white voters, explicitly, to wake up. It has to be done shrewdly and delicately, since they have to be weaned off their addiction to racist pablum without any accusations of “racism” ever being uttered, or they’ll stop listening. Obama was the real racist (since he was so “divisive”) and the most advantaged people in the country are Blacks; that’s how they see it, and good luck changing their minds. But it’s got to be done.
I cannot find the article at the moment, but within the last few days I read something that indicated racial resentment, not economic distress, was at the core of Trump’s support. Which, is essentially what Abernathy is saying, according to your report.
If so, and I believe it to be true, these people DID NOT vote for Obama and switch to Trump. What Trump did was energize occasional white voters who were resentful and angry. And Hillary didn’t bring out occasional Democratic voters, especially Hispanic and black, which Obama did.
About the only message I see that avoids race but could appeal to these voters is essentially the core of Bernie Sanders’ stump speech: income inequality, affordable health care and college, tax the rich, etc. He brought out thousands to hear that message, many of whom were not Democrats. That message should still fly given the widespread distaste for the abominable tax law on the verge of being passed by the Republican Congress.
He also showed you can run a viable national campaign without mega bucks donors. The Democrats need to quit bowing down to the same kind of donors that have totally captured the Republican Party.