[lbo-talk] Why the Dems lost the White Working Class

[SA]

Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Oct 21, 2008, at 7:17 AM, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>> Mining electoral
>>   data from the General Social Survey, they found that the decline in
>>   white working-class support for Democrats occurred in one period--from
>>   the mid-seventies until the early nineties, with a brief lull in the
>>   early eighties--and has remained well below fifty per cent ever since.
>
> <http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/kansas.pdf>
>
> What’s the Matter with
> What’s the Matter with Kansas?
>
> Larry M. Bartels

Bartels' methodology is deeply questionable. His definition of the 
"white working class" is whites in the bottom third of the income 
distribution, which comes to a bit more than one fourth of whites.

When people talk about the decline of "working-class" support for 
Democrats, they usually don't think of the working class as some 
exceptionally hard-bitten minority of poor people, they're thinking of 
that broad majority of whites who don't have advanced education or 
highly-paid professional jobs or own businesses or have large sums of 
cash in the bank. David Brooks' factoid (critiqued by Bartels) -- that 
in 2004 Bush won whites without a college degree by 23 points -- seems 
to be a better metric than Bartels'.

While it's interesting that voting patterns have diverged so sharply 
between working-class whites in the middle of the distribution and those 
at the very bottom, it's more interesting that those in the middle have 
shifted so heavily against the Dems.

SA