> > Lance Murdoch wrote:
> >
> > > I don't disbelieve this. What this is telling me is that the
> >Republicans are more a party of the white working class than the
> >Democrats - and the people are speaking with their votes and
> >with their polling opinions. The working class is going
> >Republicans, and the upper class professionals are becoming
> >Democrats.
>
> Ridiculous. Look at the actual exit polls over the years up to the
> 2000 elections ( the 2002 exit polls were botched so no solid data)
> at http://members.cox.net/fweil/ExitPolls7200.html
>
> The numbers don't break out by income crossed with race, but
> there aren't enough blacks to cancel the fact that those making
> less than $15,000 per year went 57% for Gore, while those making
> over $75,000 went 53% for Bush. At worst, the white working class
> is divided between the parties, while the white elite goes
> overwhelmingly for the GOP, given the fact that rich blacks and
> Jews vote Dem understate the general white elite GOP voting
> patterns.
Nathan, I think your estimate is wrong.
According to the DLC's Will Marshall (who's a creep, but probably not a total liar), in the 2000 vote, whites with incomes less than $75,000 went for Bush over Gore by 13 points.
Seth ---
Published on Saturday, December 16, 2000 in the Washington Post Fissures Widening Among Democrats After Gore's Loss DLC charges that the populist themes of Gore's campaign were a major factor in his loss
by Thomas B. Edsall
The war between the populist and centrist wings of the Democratic Party broke out into the open yesterday as they struggled to set the direction of the party.
The opening guns were fired by officials of the Democratic Leadership Council--a bastion of loyalists to Vice President Gore's running mate, Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, a centrist and possible candidate himself for the White House in 2004.
At a morning briefing, the DLC charged that the populist themes of Gore's campaign were a major factor in his loss to George W. Bush, scaring away just the voters he needed to achieve victory.
"Bush won the white working class [with household incomes below $75,000 a year] by 13 points," said Will Marshall, head of the the DLC's Progressive Policy Institute headquarters. "The message does not seem to have prevailed with the group it was supposed to be aimed at."
The DLC had been a key Gore backer this year, and the loss of the group's support could damage his prospects to run again in four years.
Major proponents of the populist message, including Gore's pollster Stanley Greenberg, counterattacked. This left-progressive wing, which is likely to back House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) in 2004, argued that the populist message worked fine but that Gore was undone by the conservative moral and cultural attacks on the Clinton administration that began in 1992 and continue to the present.
The Democratic fault lines that reemerged yesterday are an extension of an internal battle that began in the elections of 1968 and 1972, continued unabated with the unsuccessful candidacies of Walter F. Mondale and Michael S. Dukakis in 1984 and 1988, but were successfully muted by Bill Clinton through the 1990s.
The battles have been fought over racial issues, especially busing and affirmative action; over crime and welfare; and most recently over the identification of the key constituencies to win elections. The populist wing argues that white voters without college degrees hold the balance of power while the centrist wing contends that "wired workers" who use the Internet, and in many cases own stock, are the key voting bloc.
"It's no secret that I think the populism approach hurt us with critical swing voters, particularly wired voters and men in the new economy. We were hurt because we were viewed in this election as being too liberal and too much in favor of big government," said DLC head Al From.
Greenberg sharply disputed the DLC claims. "Gore's attacks on Bush and the thematic and issue contrasts successfully defined Bush as a candidate of the wealthy and most privileged, who would potentially endanger Social Security, oppose a woman's right to choose and whose Texas record left him with uncertain experience for the job."
While Greenberg acknowledged that this year "Democrats lost ground with noncollege white voters, particularly with noncollege white women," he argued, "the populist theme was very attractive to the white, noncollege electorate. But populism is not just a material concept, it has a strong values component."
The Gore populism theme of the "people" against "the powerful" worked effectively during the convention, winning the support of down-scale whites, but, Greenberg said, these gains were quickly eroded as Republicans focused on issues of trust and honesty, and Gore faced intense criticism for a series of misstatements and exaggerations.
"Gore began to lose that margin when trust and values issues were raised at end of September," Greenberg said. Noncollege educated whites began to "hold back because of the culture war to bring down Clinton that has been waged since 1992."
Ruy Teixeira, a leading advocate of the importance of appealing to white, working-class voters to build a Democratic majority, contended the problem was not that Gore used a populist message, but that he failed to fill it out beyond promising to protect such existing social insurance programs as Social Security and Medicare. Teixeira said that because Bush was able to stake out positions that quieted fears of GOP assaults on these programs, Gore needed to present programs, especially in education, showing how he would help working-class voters and their children in ways the GOP would not.
>From contended that Gore's populism was the equivalent of a retail store's
"loss leader," a way of building up temporary support among Democratic base
voters that carried the high cost of alienating moderates who dislike
polarizing messages based on class divisions.
Mark Penn, who polled for the DLC, said: "The populist message is by itself a limiting message. . . . It had a lot of negative resonance with precisely the voters Gore had to win to get above 50 percent on Election Day."
>From and Marshall argued that the nation's rising affluence and the
declining share of the work force employed in traditional manufacturing jobs
makes populism increasingly irrelevant. Almost none of the 22 million new
jobs created over the past eight years are in manufacturing, they said, and
the ratio of low-income voters (below $30,000) to upper-income voters (over
$75,000) has changed from 3 to 1 over these eight years to a slight edge for
upper-income jobs.