[lbo-talk] [Fwd: Frank vs. Bartels update]

SA s11131978 at gmail.com
Fri Dec 5 13:48:39 PST 2008


Doug Henwood wrote:


>
> On Dec 5, 2008, at 4:20 PM, SA wrote:
>
>> For exactly that reason. The rhetoric just doesn't seem credible.
>> "We're going to raise your wages and give you free health care." "Oh
>> yeah?"
>
> But Edwards said all the right things - he didn't overpromise, either.
> It was just a solid, pro-labor, social democratic program. He was
> Southern, too. And not a funny-looking wuss like Kucinich, though
> there was the haircut problem. And he flopped. And why can't Nader get
> any votes outside the marginal members of the PMC?
>

It's more elemental than that. If people come to believe that politicians cannot do anything that would ever have any meaningful effect on their economic lives, they won't vote on that basis. In the 1950's and 1960's, the WWC were quite conscious that they were living better than they ever had and a lot of them attributed it to Democrats in concrete ways. Nowadays a lot of those people feel like politics is just a TV show that happens far away. Look what happens to the WWC when they belong to unions, which make a case to their members every election year that how they vote matters to their economic situation:


> SA wrote:
>> http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4035/
>>
>>
>>> Election-night polling by Peter Hart for the AFL-CIO showed that 67
>>> percent of union members voted for Obama while only 30 percent chose
>>> McCain. (Compare that to the 51 to 47 percent advantage Obama had
>>> over McCain in exit polls of non-union voters.) The union advantage
>>> was slightly higher in battleground states.
>>>
>>> Most dramatically, union membership made a big difference in how
>>> well Obama performed. Union members over 65 voted by a 46-point
>>> margin for Obama, while all voters over 65 voted for McCain by an
>>> 8-point margin. Obama won by 23 points among white non-college
>>> graduates who belong to a union, even as he lost by 18 points among
>>> all white non-college voters.
>>>
>>> Obama lost heavily among gun owners and white weekly
>>> churchgoers—except if they were union members. Then they voted for
>>> Obama, though by slim margins.



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