Features » May 14, 2008

Winning the White Working Class (cont’d)

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) walks with construction workers at Evansville University in Evansville, Ind., on May 5.

The National Election Study survey from 2004 shows strong voter sympathy for “working-class people” and for greater equality, even though many voters have no idea how rapidly the disparity in incomes and wealth has grown over the past two decades. The rise of conservative ideology has fed that misperception, since conservatives who pay more attention to the news are much less likely to acknowledge inequality than less-“informed” conservatives, according to research Bartels cites from political scientist John Zaller.

Bartels concludes that, despite many progressive values, Americans have a shortsighted view of their own economic interests, which has diproportionately helped Republicans win presidential elections. Although average Americans fare better economically under Democratic administrations, they often vote on the basis of election-year economic cues that mislead about broader trends. And even though Americans favor many redistributive policies, they also support tax cuts — which typically skew toward the rich.

Using different definitions, political scientists Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz argue in “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class,” a Brookings Institution paper, that the white working class has abandoned the Democratic Party. But never fear, a new upper-middle class is expanding and is more favorable to Democrats, while the white working class is disappearing.

They rely on a more complex but shifting definition that includes occupation, income and education, but their definition still has serious problems. For example, the authors define people out of the working class simply by virtue of their earning more as the country became more affluent or by virtue of having a college degree. More money or education may make a difference in people’s outlook without necessarily moving them out of the working class (which Tom Lewandowski defines as “anyone who has to sell time for money”). More accurately, the working class has become broadly varied by income, ethnicity, education, occupation and consumption patterns — and with fewer institutions, like unions, to create a cohesive class identity.

By combining voter survey information occupation, education, income and self-identification, Teixeira and Abramowitz suggest that voter identification with the Democratic Party has dropped much more rapidly among lower socioeconomic status voters than among middle- or upper-status voters, even though lower-status voters are still much more Democratic. And even at the same income level, they write, voters with a college education are more likely than voters without a college degree to have voted for Al Gore or John Kerry.

They conclude that Republicans haven’t won over these lower-class whites with cultural issues like abortion. Rather, conservative working-class whites have abandoned Democrats as the parties became more ideologically polarized (and as African Americans challenged old racial politics). But even though their picture of the white working class seems less favorable to Democrats than Bartels’, Teixeira and Abramowitz conclude that the same issues that favored Democrats in 2006 will continue to help them reduce the GOP advantage among white working-class voters.

Similarly, according to Democratic strategists Stan Greenberg and James Carville, Democrats can prevail with a message of “middle-class populism,” focusing on attacking corporate interests, addressing rising health and gasoline costs, speaking about the outsourcing of jobs, advocating middle-class tax cuts, and breaking the congressional gridlock. Teixeira and Abramowitz would fine-tune that message to emphasize not just the squeeze on workers but also their hope for opportunity. Such “aspirational populism,” they argue, could also appeal to what they describe as the growing upper-middle class.

But it is also true that all levels of the working class and middle class are either treading water — or outright drowning — as the top 1 percent’s wave of economic fortunes rises — and as the influence of corporations, financial markets and the very rich has grown dramatically.

If Obama ever gives the speech that Tom Lewandowski wants, he will have to acknowledge the experiences of a broadly defined working class. He will need to take on the extreme inequalities of wealth, income and power that undermine the potential for shared prosperity, security and opportunity. And he will have to make clear how he would lead a government committed to giving all working people concrete, believable reasons for the hope he has been promising.

“It seems like nobody makes a change, no matter who you elect,” retired Fort Wayne autoworker Larry Johnston says. “We elected Democrats, and they didn’t change anything. But we need a change, and I don’t think McCain will make a change.”

After weighing Clinton, who he thought exaggerates her experience, and Obama, Johnston — like his wife and 99-year-old mother — decided to vote for Obama.

Can Obama ultimately win over disillusioned working-class whites? Yes, he can … maybe.

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• Reader Comments

  Our current economic situation has developed over a period of decades and administrations. None of the candidates is adequately addressing our situation and may or may not truly be aware of just how dire it is.

  Neither is this a “White Working Class” issue. White, Black, Blue Collar or White Collar — we are gradually being shunted into the Uncounted and Unrepresented former Middle Class American.

  We may have Bill O’Reilly “sticking up for us” and Lou Dobbs fighting “The War on the Middle Class,” but both political parties are listening to Wall Street not Main Street — all else is just noise.

  Obama has listed the problems and Clinton and McCain have echoed a few, but their website solutions are not even close to offering a workable strategy. They have no way of empathizing — What do horsemen know of tired feet?

  First manufacturing economy jobs and now service economy jobs are going to the lowest global worker. some are exported to where the labor is cheapest others are being filled by cheaper imported workers.

  NAFTA was just the beginning of the end for our middle class.

  Posted by whattheheck on May 14, 2008 at 4:01 PM

  Whoever the next President is he will have to inflict a lot of pain on Americans of every income class because the bush administrations are guilty of gross neglect of all its governmental responsibilities.  Its time for America to pay up in order to get up to speed with the rest of the world.  Its should be obvious to all now that 9/11 and the wars were/are diversions, while bush picked our pockets.  Plus, while we looked the other way the world left us behind, Americans are like tourist lost in a unfamiliar world, vulnerable and broke.  Bitter, confused?  Yeah.  But scared more than anything else.

  Posted by theloneous on May 14, 2008 at 4:23 PM

  Hi Theloneous,

  We’ll get the pain due to the ballouts and protection of the mortgage crooks by the Fed, the Treasury Dept. and Congress. The huge increases are being passed on to us as the dollar is made to fall and the price of everything goes up.

  I paid $3.95 a gallon for gas, but since I’m not working I’m not going anywhere. The people who are getting it stuck to them are those who must commute farther in order to get work and the cab drivers who can’t raise their prices, but must buy gas or earn nothing.

  Food costs are going higher and in some countries are in short supply. We can thank every administration since the mid 1970s.  According to Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Sec. of Labor, a 35-year-old man now earns 12% less than one the same age in 1975 due to the falling value of the dollar.

  My 42-year-old son does the same job I did back then and is even worse off than average. I made the same annual pay in 1975 that he makes now and fed a family of four. He is single and can hardly make it due to inflation, increased income taxes, Social Security tax and health care costs. His 1996 car needed work yesterday and it cost nearly $1400 — water pump brakes and ordinary maintenance.

  Whoever the president is cannot fix things without the congress getting off the butts and doing something about our major problems in this country.

  Posted by whattheheck on May 14, 2008 at 8:25 PM

  Hi whattheheck,

  The next President, if he’s able to resolve any of the numerous ailments afflicting this country, will be demonized by the very people he’s helping.  In real life there is no “spoon full of sugar to help the medicine go down”, and congress needs to get behind well thought out long term solutions instead of the band-aid approach, the former being the awful, bad tasting medicine that’s needed.

  You said, “My 42-year-old son does the same job I did back then and is even worse off than average. I made the same annual pay in 1975 that he makes now and fed a family of four.”  I know I marvel now at how my dad supported a wife and six kids on a letter carriers salary, it would be damn near impossible for him to do that these days.

  Posted by theloneous on May 15, 2008 at 4:47 PM

  I think one reason your dad and I were able to do it was there was less spinning of the government financial numbers. The dollar was worth a lot more then. I was self-employed and was paying my income taxes and Social Security (Self-employment Tax) quarterly. Now they pretend things are just fine — except for food and energy costs. I wonder how many of those in government have ever tried doing without either one.

  Until the last few years that I worked I had to pay both the employee share of the Social Security tax and about half of the employer share. Later I only paid half of the total, but every year it took a huge jump. So even in those years when politicians bragged about a “tax cut” I could see immediately I was ALWAYS paying more than the year before. The pretend cuts were their way of trying to put sugar on the bad news
  . Even if some people believed things were not getting worse we have now come to the point where almost everyone knows we are being lied to and we may eventually be able to force congress and the White House to take responsibility for our country. (We can hope so at least.)

  My kids are the first generation in my family who are worse off than the previous one. My dad’s family were coal miners and he had to quit school to care for the family when my grandfather had a stroke and couldn’t work the last six years of his life.

  My parents waited to get married until my dad’s younger brothers and sisters (a family of 9) were old enough to care for themselves, so I was their only kid and had it pretty good after the WW2 started and there was plenty of work.
  . My kids had it better still and one is a college graduate, but I feel sorry for people with young children today. Even those with an education are having a tougher time and I see no end in sight yet.

  Posted by whattheheck on May 15, 2008 at 5:40 PM

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