Stereotyping the White Working Class

As I’ve pointed out in previous blogs here, here, and here, Democratic politicians led by President Obama have consistently claimed that they are resolutely for a catch-all “middle class,” even as Democratic political strategists, operatives, and pundits publicly worry about losing too many votes among a “white working class” that has no place in the politicians’ messaging.

They worry because, within a simplified racial + class breakdown of the electorate, the white working class (typically defined as white folks without bachelor’s degrees) is both the largest group of voters (about 2 of 5 in 2008) and the one that votes the most lopsidedly Republican.

Democrats typically win people of color by huge margins (about 80/20, or by 60 percentage points in 2008), while losing the much larger group of whites by smaller margins (about 12 points in 2008).  Among white voters, Dems have recently been coming close to breaking even among whites with bachelor’s degrees (Obama lost by only 4 points in 2008 among this “white middle class”), while continuing to lose the “white working class” by much larger margins (18 points in 2008).  If the President does too much worse than that among working-class whites (say, getting only 35% of their votes vs. 40% in 2008), Mitt Romney will be our president.

This three-part breakdown of the American electorate is much too simple, of course, and it is disheartening for those of us who dream of (and have worked for) the kind of working-class solidarity that could change basic economic and political power relations in this country.  But simplified conceptual schemas are inevitable and necessary in organizing the overwhelming complexity of social reality, and this crude combo of race and class is better than the schemas that preceded it, which grossly overestimated the size and suburban character of the “educated middle class.”  It at least recognizes that there is a working class and that not all whites are middle class or affluent.  It is also practically wise for Democrats to be concerned about winning a larger slice of this part of the electorate.

But there’s the rub.  Democrats cannot do better among working-class whites if they envision them as a uniform group that thinks and feels the same way everywhere, as the political pros quite often do.  That is, an overwhelmingly middle-class and upper-class set of politicians, operatives, and pundits appear to have so little direct experience of working-class people of any color that they consistently fall into stereotyping that clouds their vision and often insults the voters they are trying to persuade. At a San Francisco fundraiser in 2008, President Obama articulated the stereotype with unusual clarity (and nuance if you listen to the whole speech) when he expressed some empathy for those who “cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment.”

There are white workers who cling to their guns or religion or their racism and nativism – I could give you some names and addresses!  But there are many others who do not.  It seems as if sophisticated, very well-educated people whose vocation involves electoral politics should recognize that within a demographic category including nearly 50 million voters, not everybody thinks and feels the same way.   Start with the 40% nationally who vote pretty consistently Democratic in presidential elections.  Why do they do that?  How are they different from those who vote consistently Republican or the group that goes back and forth?

These are the questions Andrew Levison recently addressed in an article posted on the Democratic Strategist blog, “The White Working Class is a Decisive Voting Group in 2012 – and Most of What You Read About Their Political Attitudes Will Be Completely Wrong.”  Using the 2011 Pew Political Typology survey that asked voters to choose between “liberal/progressive” and “conservative” policy statements, Levison found that about 26% of white working-class voters were “progressive true believers” and 27.5% were “conservative true believers.”  The largest group, at about 46%, however, is what Levison calls “ambivalent/open-minded.”  These may be congenital “moderates” or “low-information voters,” but Levison focuses on something he has directly observed among white workers – a willingness to acknowledge truth in both of two contradictory positions.  These are people, he says, “who do think quite seriously about issues, but do so in a fundamentally different way than do ideologically committed people.”  He calls them “on the one hand, but on the other hand” thinkers (emphasis added).

The answers in the Pew survey are interesting and insightful in themselves, but Levison’s willingness to wade into the complexity of white working-class political thinking and to come out with a clarifying (if necessarily simplifying) analysis is especially rewarding.  There is rarely a clear majority of those who “strongly agree” with either of the two statements presented by Pew, but there are some.  For example, 53% strongly agree that “Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and healthcare,” while another 53% strongly agree that “Business corporations make too much profit” and 70% that “Too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few large corporations.”  Levison finds that the largest group of working-class whites are “cultural traditionalists,” but that “The genuinely consistent white working class conservatives – the Fox News/Talk Radio” hard-line ideologues – represent only about one fourth of the white working class total.”

Stereotyping is always based on taking a part to be a whole.  It is often said that there is “an element of truth in stereotypes.”  There is not.  Rather there is a subgroup within the stereotyped group that fulfills the stereotype.  It may be large, even a majority, or it may be small, but it is always a mistake to think that any part is the same as the whole.  Once committed to a stereotype, observers tend to see only those parts that confirm the stereotype and to ignore evidence that doesn’t fit the expectation. That’s why Levison’s analysis is so valuable.  It confirms that a large part of the white working class fulfills the “culturally conservative/economically populist” stereotype popular among political pundits, while never losing sight of the part that is progressive both culturally and economically and the part that is consistently conservative on both fronts.

The one thing I would add to Levison’s analysis: these different political types are not equally distributed across the country, as any national survey and reasoning about it tend to suggest.  The size and character of the white working-class vote varies greatly from state to state.

Nobody cares, for example, that whites without bachelor’s degrees gave John McCain 6- and 10-point majorities in California and New York in 2008 – first, because they are a relatively small group in those states (27% and 29% respectively vs. 39% nationally), and second, because these states are safely Democratic based on strong majorities among large groups of voters of color and whites with bachelor’s degrees.   Maryland, Washington, D.C., and the part of Virginia where many national media workers live are similar.  My guess is that the national media tends to mistake these parts for the whole.  They don’t mistake Alabama’s average-sized white working class, which gave Obama only 9% of its vote in 2008, for the whole.  But they do tend to project their parts of the country onto many other parts where it does not fit.

Most importantly, in the Midwest battleground states – Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin – whites without bachelor’s degrees were the majority of voters in 2008.  Democrats cannot win in those states with Alabama-type margins going to the GOP, and they will struggle with California/New York-type margins (as they did in Missouri and Ohio in 2008, losing the first and winning the second by narrow margins).  Fortunately, working-class whites in Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin not only do not fulfill the racial + class stereotype, in 2008 they reversed it.  In all three states, President Obama won majorities among this group, as he did in 11 other states, including important “leaners” like Oregon and Washington.

I’m hoping Levison’s analysis, placed as it is in an important source of independent Democratic strategizing, may pull Democratic politicians and operatives away from their stereotypes of working-class whites.  Levison urges Dems to focus on the “on the one hand, but on the other hand” thinkers and to make their case fully and frankly, and I would add, in some detail.  This rather than bobbing and weaving so as not to offend a “typical conservative white worker” who is but part (though admittedly often a loud part) of a much larger and more complicated whole.

Jack Metzgar

Chicago Working-Class Studies

 

 

No Tea Party Here: Obama, Democrats, and the Working Class

The Center for Working-Class Studies released the results of its latest survey last week.  As I look at the results, two things jump out: first, the President is paying a price for doing the right things the wrong way, and second, the conservative pundits like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hanitty, who continually characterize the Tea Party movement as a revolt fueled by a working class fed up with Obama and the liberal elite, haven’t quite been telling the truth.

Neither finding is really surprising.  Both may have a profound effect on the nation for decades to come.

To understand why, let’s begin with Mr. Obama.  For more than a year liberals have expressed frustration and disappointment with his inability or unwillingness to take advantage of the political capital he accumulated while capturing the White House.  His refusal to fully engage in the health care debate until the 11^th hour, the decision to focus the economic stimulus package on Wall Street rather than Main Street, his apparent abandonment of the Employee Freedom of Choice Act, and a number of other perceived failures have undermined his support among the Democratic Party’s base, including those who participated in the CWCS survey.

Since the first survey was conducted in May of 2009 the president’s approval rating has fallen from 87% to 68% among all respondents and from 87% to 59% among those who identify themselves as belonging to the working class.  Although his overall approval rating remains high, Obama and Democratic leaders should be worried about another number: the precipitous drop in the percentage of those who strongly approve of his performance.  Among all respondents it fell from 52% to 15%, while among the working class it fell from 48% to 11% — a 37 point drop for both groups.

Just as troubling is the fact that the percentage who strongly disapprove of his work to this point is now equal to the number who strongly approve.  For those who identify as working class, the numbers are only slightly more split: 15% strongly disapprove and 11% strongly approve.

The reasons for this considerable softening in Obama’s approval ratings are easily discerned from the responses to other survey questions.  While more than 80% of respondents have consistently rated the U.S. economy as bad or very bad, until this survey they also said by large margins that the country was moving in the right direction.  Their optimism in the face of the crumbling economy was based in large part on their belief that the President could and would turn the nation around.

That belief has clearly eroded over the past year.  Today, the percentage who see the nation moving forward has dropped more than 40%; more respondents now say that things are moving the wrong direction. The sense of unease is greatest among the working class, who now say things are going in the wrong direction by a two-to-one margin: 48% to 24%.

Why has the base’s faith been shaken?  More than 55% of working-class respondents say Obama has done less than they expected since taking office.  Three-quarters of them believe the stimulus package has been only somewhat or not at all effective, 78% say Wall Street and big business have too much influence over the White House, and only slightly more than 52% believe he cares more about working families than big business.

All of this bodes ill for Democrats because softening support and fading enthusiasm will undoubtedly equate to lower turnout among the base in an election in which the party cannot afford to leave one vote on the table.

Interestingly, though, the working class’s disenchantment with the first year of the Obama presidency has not, as some conservative commentators and pundits would have us believe, driven them toward the “Tea Party” movement.  Although Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Anne Coulter, and others on the right continually state that Tea Partiers are “real,” or “average,” or “everyday,” or “working” Americans who are fed up with Obama and the federal government, the results of the CWCS reveal a completely different reality.

For example, 72% of working-class respondents hold an unfavorable or very unfavorable view of the movement that conservative commentators would have us believe they enthusiastically support.  Eighty-one percent disagree or strongly disagree with the movement’s stand on political and moral issues, and only nine percent characterized themselves as Tea Party supporters.

And lest those on the right attempt to counter these results by saying the respondents to the survey don’t know or understand what the movement is all about, 93% said they had read about and are familiar with what the Tea Party stands for.  The fact is that working-class Americans know what the movement stands for and they resoundingly reject it.

The accuracy of the CWCS results is underscored by data derived from a recent survey of Tea Party supporters conducted by The New York Times and CNN, which shows that movement supporters are married white males who are wealthier and better educated than members of the working class.

This is not to say that the groups don’t share some positions or a discontent with where the country is heading.  Members of both groups believe the economy and jobs are the most critical issues the U.S. faces, that the economy is bad, and that the nation is on the wrong track.

Stark differences arise, however, when the groups are asked to identify the causes of the problems and their most likely solutions.  While a vast majority of Tea Partiers believe the country is moving in the wrong direction, they, unlike members of the working class, believe the economy is getting better.  Their discomfort with America’s future is based on their distrust of Washington.  Ninety-six percent say the federal government rarely does the right thing, 75% say Obama does not share their values, 56% say the administration’s policies favor the poor, and 73% would favor cuts to Medicare and Social Security in order to reduce the size of government.

Most significantly, 76% of Tea Party supporters believe the government should reduce the deficit rather than spend money to create jobs.  More than 77% of the working class believes just the opposite—they want the government to fuel the economy regardless of the effect on the deficit.

With these findings in mind, Mr. Obama and the Democrats need not fear that substantial portions of the party’s base will join the Tea Party.  The ideological gulf between the two groups is far too wide.  What they should fear, as the latest survey clearly shows, is that,  in the immortal words of Pogo, the Dems have met the enemy and “He is us.”  Doing whatever is necessary to improve the economy between now and November in order to reenergize the party’s base should be the primary concern of the administration and Congressional Democrats.  Failure to accomplish that mission rather than opposition from an inconsequential movement like the Tea Partiers, will spell doom for the Democrats.

Leo Jennings

Deja Vu All Over Again

In mid-October of 1992 I was working as the Director of Communications and Public Policy for Local 880 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.  It was an exciting time.  A young, virtually unknown governor named Bill Clinton had used charisma, big ideas, and a sweeping vision of hope and change to capture the Democratic presidential nomination.  Now, with three weeks until the general election, he was poised to win the presidency and end the Reagan-Bush regime.

One evening following a meeting to discuss the get-out-the-vote plan that would enable Clinton to win Ohio and the presidency, a couple of union organizers and I were standing at the bar of the now-demolished Boatyard Restaurant on the north side of Youngstown.  Our mood was celebratory.  Great things were about to happen.  The world was about to change.

Suddenly, an extremely well dressed stranger made his way toward us through the crowd.  His look was intense.  He was pointing at my chest.  I was apprehensive.  He could have been the owner of a non-union grocery store, and many of them were fuming about the “Hold the Line” informational picketing program I had helped the UFCW develop.  He stopped inches from my face.

“I want that,” he said pointing at my Clinton-Gore button. “Can I have it?”

“You want this?  But you’re a Republican, aren’t you, I mean you look like one,” I said.

“Absolutely, lifelong.  But I have a Chamber of Commerce meeting tomorrow and I want to walk in wearing a Clinton button.  I’m a small businessman who is voting for Clinton because he’s going to fix the health care mess and that will save my company,” he said.  “And I want everyone at the Chamber meeting to know it.”

I gave him the button.  He beamed.  “This is an exciting time,” he said, shaking my hand. “We’re going to solve a real problem and make this a better country.  For the first time in my life I can’t wait to vote.”

I knew then that Bill Clinton would win the election based in large part on his promise to reform America’s deeply flawed health care delivery system.  A system bedeviled by exploding costs that threatened the viability of corporations like Chrysler and GM and that left 41 million people uninsured.

This encounter verified what the polls were saying: that health care reform was the third most important issue among likely voters and that, according to a survey conducted by Kaiser Family Foundation, Clinton held a 55% to 27% lead on the issue, a margin that would grow to 42% by election day, even though his reform plan was a sparse outline at best.  People simply believed he would get the job done.

So did those of us in the labor movement.  The health care reform proposed by FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and yes, even Richard Nixon was about to become a reality because the people of the nation wanted it and Clinton was committed to implementing it before the end of his first year in office.

Now, flash forward to 2008.  Every Democratic candidate for the White House, including one named Clinton, vows to remedy the ills that afflict America’s health care system: exploding costs that will soon contribute to the  bankruptcy of  major corporations like Chrysler and GM and  a cadre of 51 million people who have no access to care.

It becomes the third most significant issue to voters, trailing closely behind concerns about the economy and the nation’s ill-fated adventure in Iraq.  The Party’s nominee, a young, charismatic, big thinking but virtually unknown senator from Illinois campaigns aggressively and effectively on the issue, although his reform plan is a sparse outline at best.

As in 1992, that minor shortcoming doesn’t seem to matter.  Voters simply believed he would get the job done.  So they made him president, and the health care reform proposed by FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Richard Nixon, and yes, Bill Clinton was about to become a reality because the people of the nation wanted it and Obama was committed to implementing it before the end of his first year in office.

Which brings us to where we stand today: once again on the precipice of disappointment.

That is because despite the President’s commitment to reform, including the development of the government-backed health care insurance option that is essential to holding down costs and providing universal access, we’ve already lost the first skirmish in the battle.  And that means we may not even have the war.

The skirmish broke out when the Congressional Budget Office released cost estimates for establishing the public plan and extending coverage to some, but not all Americans who don’t have it now.  The trillion dollar price tag choked pro-reform advocates in Congress and the White House and emboldened the coalition of opponents that has killed every attempt to regenerate our health care system over the last eight decades.

By week’s end Congressional Democrats were already in reverse, concerned, pundits said, that the president was “overreaching.” Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and the other intellectual Lilliputians who are the voice of the GOP were rejoicing, and the folks at the AMA, Pharma, and America’s Health Insurance Plans were smugly smiling—they’d seen this movie before and they really liked the ending.

Whether they will still be grinning a few months from now largely depends on whether those of us who supported Obama in 2008 are willing to jump into the fray in 2009 and help him write a new ending to the health care reform saga.  If we engage, educate, organize, and fight we may be able to win.  If we do not, well, sometime in the next 20 years, a story will be written about yet another charismatic candidate who won the presidency by promising to fix America’s broken health care system.

Leo Jennings

Who Really Runs the Place

Memories may be fading, but I’m sure most of you have some vague recollection of last year’s presidential election.

Come on, you remember.  Lots of bad TV commercials.  Debates that weren’t.  New and vibrant versus old and tired.  America turned blue.  The first African-American president.  Attractive wife.  Cute kids. Election night speech in front of Greek columns.  Hope.  The “dream” come true.

Hell, there was even a parade in January.

Yeah, that election.

I’m willing to wager that like me, most of you voted for Barack Obama.  We did so because we craved change; a shift of power from the war mongering, detainee torturing, job exporting, business-butt-kissing Republicans to a champion of the working class.

I’ll also wager you thought that’s what we got when Barack Obama raised his right hand and took the oath of office.  That’s why we shared a sense of excitement and exhilaration.  Things would be different now that Washington was controlled by a young, strong progressive president with a mandate in his pocket and a Democratic Congress at his beck and call.

Health care reform.  A solution to the foreclosure crisis.  Assualt weapons banned.  Cheaper student loans.  It was all coming and coming rapidly.

Uh, not so fast.

As recent events—or lack thereof—have demonstrated, you can elect all the new presidents you want, but that doesn’t mean things are going to change.  Because, it seems the people — that’s you and me — don’t run Washington. All those government buildings?  Not ours.  The millions of federal employees whose salaries we pay?  They don’t work for us.

How do I know?  Dick Durbin said so yesterday on the floor of the Senate.  Venting his frustration when 11 Democrats joined Republicans to kill legislation giving federal bankruptcy judges the power to renegotiate the terms of predatory mortgages and thus help middle-class families keep their homes, the Illinois senator did something strange and wondrous: he told the unvarnished truth:

“And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

They own it.  They do.  Need more proof?  OK, let’s talk about Sallie Mae, the quasi-federal agency that guarantees student loans made by private banks.  That Obama guy, the one we elected, he wants to do away with Sallie Mae because doing so will free up $94 billion that can then be given directly to students in the form of Pell Grants.

Great idea.  Who could possibly oppose it?  One guess.  Did you say banks?  You win.  And who did the banks hire to lobby on their behalf?  Tony Podesta, a major Democratic fundraiser whose brother John served as Bill Clinton’s last chief of staff and head of the Obama transition team.

According the New York Times, Mr. Podesta already has plenty of Democratic allies in Congress, including legislators who represent districts where Sallie Mae has offices.  As a result a simple, smart idea — giving student loan money directly to needy students instead of filtering it through banks that make billions for pushing paper around — may be dead.

It turns out, however, that the banks aren’t the sole owners of the house of government.  I guess it’s kind of a time share thing.  One of the co-owners, and I’m sure this won’t come as a huge shock, is the health insurance industry.  Access to high quality, affordable health care was one of the primary issues in last year’s campaign.  John McCain had a goofy scheme that would have taxed employee benefits and protected the huge profits of insurers.  Barack Obama didn’t really have a plan, but we trusted that when push came to shove he’d back real reform that would hold down costs and provide coverage for the more than 45 million Americans who don’t have it.

One way to do that, and one concept he did embrace, was the formation of a government operated health care plan that would compete with the for-profit insurance industry.  While not quite the single payer system progressives yearn for, it was a start.

So, when the president convened a health care summit to tackle the issue who dominated the conversation?  Karen Ignani, the front person for the AFL-CIO during the 1993 health care reform effort—until she turned traitor and went to work for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the trade group that represents the nation’s for profit health insurance companies.

It appears that AHIP isn’t thrilled about the prospect of competing with the government.  Not good for insurers’ bottom lines, you see.  So they proposed other ways of reducing costs that experts, including the Congressional Budget Office, have repeatedly said won’t work.  That doesn’t matter to Ms. Ignani and the companies she shills for.  They, and other groups that sell insurance including AARP, aren’t interested in reform, they’re only interested in running out the clock, just as they did in 1993.

Did our champion, our working-class hero, stand up, smite Ms. Ignani, and tell her that universal coverage, not preserving insurance industry profits, was the goal of his administration?  Well, no.  And he wouldn’t let anyone else do it, either.  Congressman John Conyers and Dr. Oliver Fein, two long-time advocates of the single payer solution who were reluctantly admitted to the meeting after first being denied invitations, were expressly forbidden to speak.

The President has been similarly unwilling to tangle with another group of longtime Washington squires: the NRA.  Despite the fact that once-banned assault weapons were recently used to kill four cops in San Francisco, three in Pittsburgh, and are the weapons of choice of both domestic psychopaths and Mexican drug lords, the administration has signaled that it’s not willing to throw its weight behind an effort to once again prohibit guns that have only one purpose: killing human beings as quickly and efficiently as possible.

While some progressives are growing restive with Mr. Obama’s timidity, I’m willing to give him a break.  After all, he just moved in and wants to show he’ll be a good tenant.  And he’s busy doing other things, like fixing the economy by doling out hundreds of billions to the bankers who screwed it up in the first place.  But sooner or later he’s going to realize that while bankers, insurers, big oil, gun nuts, and the pharmaceutical industry may own the building, working families issued his four year lease.  If he wants an extension in 2012 he’ll need to invite us over for a chat—no matter how uncomfortable it makes the landlords.

Leo Jennings

Two Cheers for the Decline of White Working-Class Voters

Ruy Teixeira, the progressive political scientist who has most consistently pushed the argument that a Democratic majority would not be possible unless Dems paid more attention to white working-class voters and won a larger portion of their vote, has changed his mind.  Co-author in 2000 of The Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, Teixeira has been tracking the intersections of race, class, and gender in electoral politics with increasing persistence and rigor, looking for combinations that would provide the basis for a new New Deal.  His latest effort, New Progressive America, argues that demographic, geographic, and attitudinal changes in the past 20 years make a new long-lasting progressive era not only possible, but highly likely.

Teixeira’s new study walks us through a dizzying array of census and exit poll data, considering the rise of “millennials” (those born between 1978 and 2000), the proliferation of “fast-growing dynamic metropolitan areas,” and the long march of women into the work force and the professions.  But key to his rosy progressive scenario is a creeping progressivism among middle-class whites, a rapid increase in minorities as a proportion of the electorate, and the “rapid decline” of the white working class as a percentage of both the population and the electorate.  As the percentage of voters who are working class and white declines, America is becoming more progressive.  Here’s why.

The single most important part of the Republican Party’s political base today is the white working class.  There are all sorts of controversies and quibbles about how to define both class and race. And dividing the entire electorate (125 million voters) into any four categories is going to grossly simplify reality by abstracting from a maze of other important variables.  (See the national CNN Exit Polls, from which the table below is derived.) But if we use the possession or absence of a bachelor’s degree as the divider between middle class and working class, here’s the basic racial and class breakdown of McCain voters in 2008:

Race & Class	% of all voters	% who voted for John McCain
White Working Class	39	58
White Middle Class	35	51
Nonwhite Middle Class	9	22
Nonwhite Working Class	16	16

As these statistics show, amidst all the talk about America now being a “post-racial society,” there is a huge gap in the way whites and minorities vote, and this gap is largest within the multiracial American working class.

The white working class is the largest racial-class grouping, and it is the only one that gave John McCain a substantial majority.  If white workers had merely split their vote, as the white middle class did in 2008, the Republican Party would no longer be competitive.  It could no longer be a force for opposing increases in the minimum wage, universal national health insurance with a Medicare-like public option, the Employee Free Choice Act that would make it easier for workers to form a union, a Making Work Pay tax credit, the creation of “green” manufacturing and construction jobs to fight global warming – and numerous other actions and proposals by President Obama that are intended to benefit the American working class of all hues, including white voters who support the Republican party.  For a progressive Democrat, it seems like the majority of white workers just don’t see their own class interests clearly.

Indeed, this data suggests that progressives like me were wrong when we argued that the Democrats could attract more votes from working-class whites if they presented a strong pro-worker economic agenda.  While Obama’s platform may not have been as strongly pro-worker as progressives can imagine, it was dramatically more pro-worker than the McCain-GOP approach, and it didn’t win the support of working-class whites.   A better explanation might be that the Obama-Democrat economic program was not featured strongly and clearly enough to penetrate a media fog obsessed with political tactics and insecure about reporting real policy differences.  As I pointed out during the election, important aspects of Obama’s campaign platform were “maddeningly vague,” and political reporters did little or nothing to press for details that might have been relevant to workers.  Still, how clear do politicians have to be in contrasting a “tax cut for 95 percent of all Americans” with “Drill, baby, drill”?

Why the white working class in its majority is still so enamored of the Republican Party is a complicated question. I don’t think it’s simply a matter of race.  As Sherry Linkon has pointed out, the easy attribution of greater racism among white workers than among white professionals, lacking evidence as it does, probably tells us more about middle-class class bias than about the white working class.  Instead, this may be an issue of geography: 57% of white workers in Massachusetts voted for Obama, but only 9% voted for him in Alabama.  Finally, as a whole, large majorities of white workers have been voting for the GOP in presidential elections for most of the past 50 years, beginning in 1952. (See Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy, page 70, and Teixeira and Abramowitz, The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class.)

Still, workers of all hues have good reasons to be more than a little skeptical of promises from Democratic politicians.  Maybe things will change if Democrats deliver on their pro-worker program.  Let’s hope so, because, as Teixeira still insists, despite declining numbers, the white working class will remain a very large slice of the electorate.  And, a unified and  mobilized multiracial working class is still our one best hope for making a world that, in the words of the black man who is now our president, actually does “honor and reward work, not just wealth.”

Jack Metzgar

The White Working-Class Vote in 2008

Progressive Democrats, nudged over the past eight years by progressive social scientists like Ruy Teixeira and Larry Bartels, are frustrated that white working-class voters don’t support Democratic presidential candidates.  Special attention was paid to this part of the white vote this year by politicians and political organizers as well as by the media.  The economy was the top issue, where Democrats are thought to have an advantage, and the sweeping unpopularity of George W. Bush made 2008 a Democratic year par excellence.  On the other hand, the Democrats nominated an African-American for President, and many college-educated Democrats fear white racism is worse among the working class than among the white middle class.

How did the white working-class vote this time around?  And what does it mean?

The exit polls at CNN Election Center provide lots of facts and figures that can inform discussion about these questions, but no definitive answers.  First, there are two competing definitions of the “working class” – one based on education and one based on household income.  By both definitions, the white working class again gave the Republican candidate, John McCain this time, a majority of their vote at the national level.  But state-level exit polls provide a more complicated picture of working-class whites who are diverse by region as well as in other ways.

Using the income definition, all white voters with annual household incomes of less than $50,000 are said to be “the white working class.”  This white working class was 25% of all voters in 2008, and only 47% of them voted for Barack Obama.  Looking at these same voters state-by-state, however, shows a wide variation – from 68% for Obama in Massachusetts to 11% for Obama in Alabama.  I didn’t look at all the states, but of those I did, Obama won the white working-class in 8 of the 12 battleground states outside the South.  In Ohio, for example, one of three voters were white working class (by this definition), and they voted 51% for Obama.  States where working-class whites gave Obama 60% or more of their votes include Illinois, New York, Washington, and Wisconsin.

The education definition defines all white voters who do not have at least a bachelor’s degree as “white working class.”  This is a larger group, 39% of all voters in 2008, and only 40% of them voted for Obama across the nation.  In five of the battleground states, however, this white working class voted for Obama over McCain – Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin.  Obama also won majorities among working-class whites in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Washington. Conversely, Obama got only 9% of white working-class votes in Alabama and 11% in Mississippi.  In Ohio exactly one-half of the electorate was working class and white, and that half gave our president-elect only 44% of their votes.

What all this might mean requires much more discussion.  But even with this cursory look, two things should be clear:  First, there is not one white working class, but many, and it is well to remember that national numbers of any sort are aggregates of much more diverse and complex realities in many different places.  Second, race is still a predominant factor in dividing the American working class.  For the exit polls, the “nonwhite working class” consists of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and “Others” as self-defined by those polled.  There are, of course, substantial differences within these “nonwhite” groups, but they voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in 2008 – 83% using the education definition and 86% using the income definition.

Most whites who voted for John McCain are probably not racist, or even substantially motivated by racial prejudice.  But I think it is fair to say that the nonwhite working class is substantially better at perceiving and acting on their class interests than the white working class is in many parts of our very large, diverse, and complicated nation.

Jack Metzgar

Class vs. Sexuality: The Proposition 8 Vote

Last week, John Russo provided an important look at voting patterns amongst Ohio’s working class and rightly concluded that “the older, predominately white, industrial working class continues to be a major influence on voting patterns but is increasingly being offset by a new working class composed of younger, more diverse, and better educated voters,” and that “Race may matter less than it did in the past, but the combination of race and class still matters.”

With John’s insights about the intersections of race and class in mind, we looked at some of the demographics behind that Other vote, much in the national news, that took  place on election day-California’s Proposition 8, the measure that not only denies Gay and Lesbian residents the right to marry, but actually rescinds these same rights granted by an earlier court decision.

The measure was approved by 52 percent of voters and has sparked not only visible protests across the nation but animosity between the Gay community and the Black and Hispanic communities, which endorsed the ban. Exit polls indicated that 70 percent of black voters supported Proposition 8, while 53 percent of Latinos and 49 percent of whites and Asian Americans voted for the measure.

Of course, pinning the passage of the ban on any one group is both destructive and inaccurate. African Americans comprised only about 10 percent of the total vote in California. The reductive analyses of the vote as a black/white issue neglect the role of class and education in the passage of Proposition 8, a relationship that can be mapped by looking at the Los Angeles Times voter demographics feature.

A quick scroll over the map reveals the possible role that class and, quite possibly the current economic conditions, might have played in the vote. For example, a whopping 71.5 percent of voters in Colusa County voted in favor of Proposition 8. In that same county median income is reported as less than $45,000 and the region saw more than 20 foreclosures per 1,000 homes-the county’s population is more than 25 percent Hispanic.

County employment data reports that 24 percent of residents are employed in the agricultural sector and the county unemployment rate is forecast at 12.2 percent-almost 58 percent of the vote went to McCain. In Lake County, 58.3 percent voted for Obama and 52.6 percent voted yes on Proposition 8. County median income there is also less than $45,000, its population is more than 75 percent white, with less than 10 percent holding a bachelor’s degree.

Although these data may tell only part of the story, they do seem to suggest a relationship between economic conditions and voting patterns on social issues, and quite possibly a disturbing trend. David Brooks notes, for instance, that the worsening recession might deepen social rifts along the lines of race, class, and gender:

… recessions are about more than material deprivation. They’re also about fear and diminished expectations. The cultural consequences of recessions are rarely uplifting.

The economic slowdown of the 1880s and 1890s produced a surge of agrarianpopulism and nativism, with particular hostility directed toward Catholics, Jews and blacks. The Great Depression was not only a time of F.D.R.’s optimism and escapist movies, it was also a time of apocalyptic forebodings and collectivist movements that crushed individual rights.

For Brooks, the lessons of history suggest that the current and pending economic downturns might produce dissatisfaction and alienation that could translate into anti-progressive political actions and outcomes aimed at various groups. And while the recession will likely not produce the same ire aimed at the same targets as previous downturns, new groups, might become targets; such as Gays and Lesbians, and, judging from the sentiments on Capitol Hill and local media this week, unions.

So while mainstream and Gay and Lesbian media outlets focus attention on the racial dimension (arguably the more sensational story) of the passage of Proposition 8, the economic and class dimensions of the vote suggest a more complex stratification of interests, attitudes and beliefs.

Reporting about this stratification will be important for journalists in coming weeks and months. This type of reporting will allow audiences to understand complex issues in more than just polarizing ways. It’s not a simple black versus white story.

Tim Francisco & Alyssa Lenhoff

The Youngstown Election Report: Notes on Unions and White Working-Class Voters

Now that the election is over, pundits of all kinds have begun to pour over the election results in order to determine how Barack Obama won the election. Important here is the question of how and by how much did a black candidate win Ohio and Mahoning County.

In a post-election editorial, Youngstown commentator Bertram DeSouza suggests that local Democrats shouldn’t get too excited about the Obama victory. After all, Obama carried only 19 of Ohio’s 88 counties and failed to get as many votes in Ohio as John Kerry did in 2004. In Mahoning and Trumbull counties, Obama received 61.7% and 59.6% respectively, far below the percentages gained by local Democratic candidates.  As elsewhere, Obama won Ohio by increasing voting totals among blacks, young voters, Hispanics, and college-educated voters throughout the state.

Some have argued that unions were responsible for the Obama victory. The AFL-CIO had a two-prong strategy. First, each union would be largely responsible for getting union households to vote for Obama. Second, the AFL-CIO built a new organization, Working America, that was responsible for turning out nonunion white working-class voters for Obama. Over 200 paid organizers were hired by the AFL-CIO as part of the Working America project to work in Ohio. Together with 175 SEIU organizers in African-American communities and community organizers from ACORN,  MoveOn, and the Public Interest Research Group  in suburban communities, Working America played a central role in organizing nonunion households in Ohio.

Nationally, the AFL-CIO strategy focused on “union heavy swing states like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.” Exit polls by AFL-CIO pollster Peter Hart suggest that Obama won among white male AFL-CIO members by 18 points, even as he lost among white male voters overall by 16 points.  Support from white male union members contributed to Obama’s victories in industrial states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Thus unions provided a “firewall” that prevented a McCain victory.

But the Ohio results among union voters were disappointing. CNN exit polls show that in Ohio only 58% of union members and 56% of union household voters went for Obama. This is much lower than in other Midwest battleground states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Missouri, and even lower than the national average which includes many states with meager union density.

Nation or States	Union Households		Union Members
	% of voters	% for Dem	% of voters	% for Dem
National	21%	59%	12%	60%
Michigan	34	67	18	71
Missouri	28	59	14	63
Ohio	28	56	15	58
Pennsylvania	27	62	15	68

SOURCE: CNN Election Center

Further, and more disturbing, in the Youngstown area union members staffing phone banks reported resistance,  especially among UAW and building trade union members, who often mentioned that they would not vote for Obama because of race.  Of course, this information is anecdotal, but it is consistent with traditional white working-class voting patterns. In 2004, only 40%  of whites in Ohio with no college education (working class) voted for John Kerry.

While internal union activities were less effective in Ohio than in comparable states, the AFL-CIO s’ involvement in Working America here was arguably much more successful in influencing voters in nonunion households. In Ohio, 51% of nonunion households voted for Obama — a seven-point increase from the 44% that voted for Kerry in 2004.

So what can we conclude?   My guess is that the older, predominately white, industrial working class continues to be a major influence on voting patterns but is increasingly being offset by a new working class composed of younger, more diverse, and better educated voters.  For example, black voters in Ohio grew by 3% since 2004 and supported Obama by a 95 point margin compared to John Kerry’s 68 point margin. Likewise, while they still vote Democratic, the unionized white industrial working class is declining in both numbers and political clout. Lastly, because Ohio has an older, less educated population with fewer black and Hispanic voters than other states, race continues to influence voting patterns here.  Race may matter less than it did in the past, but the combination of race and class still matters.

John Russo

Class and the Election: A British Perspectice

I’m a Brit sitting in the middle of an amphitheatre in Warren,Ohio waiting for Joe Biden to do his bit at an election rally. It is a beautiful, hot fall day, the sun is shining, and the site is filling up with people of all ages, colours, and classes. There are kids from local schools given the morning off to take part in a little piece of history. In the front and scatted through the crowd are labour people, made obvious by their bright uniform tee-shirts, some yellow, some purple. The air is filled with chatter and various upbeat pop songs. I am waiting for the Springsteen song which I’ve heard in the ten second election coverage clips I have seen on TV back home.

After a time the speeches start, each one building up expectations for the main event. Each reflects in different ways on the same themes, on work and what has happened to it, war and the desire to end it, the need for unions, and, and this is what strikes me most — class. All of the speakers, without exception, are talking about class. I am pleased to hear it, surprised even at the regularity of its appearance. However, this is America, I have to remind myself. They do things differently here, and this is just as true with the issue of class. Because for all of this talk of class, that pesky pronoun ‘middle’ always gets in the way. It has to be inserted, so that what the speakers say can be acceptable to both those present as well as those who may view snippets of the speeches later. Sitting through one speech after another I wait for the working class to get their place in the sun. At one stage I heard about ‘hard working families’ or ‘working poor,’ but I waited in vain for the ‘working class.’ All of the speakers acknowledged the labour people in front of the stage. All of them note the need for a strong union movement, but its role seems to buttress the middle class by ensuring that enough good jobs were created, ones with health care and pensions. In a classic reversal of Marxist ideas, where the bourgeoisie became their own gravediggers, it struck me that working people were now abolishing themselves in order to create and sustain a viable middle class.

This is all obvious for Americans. You know by heart the semantic gymnastics that politicians have to go through to not remind those who are living on what are objectively low incomes in the industrial world that they might be part of a working class. And while it is true that the political vernacular in the UK rarely uses the term ‘working class,’ many people still think of themselves in those classical classed terms. When interviewed many British people will not offer up a classed identity, but when prompted many, say 30-40%, will regularly see themselves as working class and unashamedly so. This figure has changed surprisingly little since social scientists asked people about class matters in the 1960s when Britain still had a very large manufacturing base of traditional industries and the communities that served them. Often times now people avoid class in their vernacular – they use proxies such as ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary.’ For many the term ‘middle class’ still comes with the kind of negative linguistic baggage that I am guessing the term ‘working class’ does for people in America. This is one reason why the governing Labour party in the UK has been given such a fillip by the recent events in the global economy. This is, I think, because people read these events in class terms. The corporate greed exposed by the sub-prime crisis and the credit crunch is what you expect from ‘them.’ For the great mass of ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ people, these events are yet another illustration of the City reverting to type, and some take vicarious pleasure in stories of bankers losing their jobs, or at least failing to earn enough to heat the swimming pool.

The next day, I watched the presidential debate on primetime TV, which seemed to be largely about Joe the Plumber. Joe seemed to be doing a lot of work in McCain’s narrative: at once standing for an ordinary working American, while at the same time encapsulating middle class entrepreneurship. In the UK, an appeal to feel sorry for someone earning over $250,000 (£130,000) would elicit little sympathy. While there are many who earn considerably more than the average income of around £30,000, by the time you reach the giddy heights of a quarter of a million dollars many fewer people can identify or even aspire to that figure. Did McCain, in using Joe as an ordinary figure actually damage his campaign by highlighting the gulf between his own understanding of class and those of the working class majority? Perhaps John McCain’s legacy might be to shift popular views of class in the USA.

Tim Strangleman, guest blogger
Strangleman is a Sociologist at the University of Kent and co-author of a new textbook, Work and Society: Sociological Approaches, Themes and Methods

Movement Building and Political Organizing

The Democratic ground game in the 2008 election is unlike anything we’ve seen since 1948 – or, given the role of the internet, maybe ever. A week before the election, the focus is now exclusively on traditional Get Out The Vote (GOTV) activities. But the larger, longer-lasting impact is that organizing skills and attitudes are now back on the American scene, with the potential to transform more than just one election and to build a broader working-class movement for social and economic justice.

Though Barack Obama’s approach to political organizing deserves the lion’s share of kudos for the scale of the effort in 2008, labor and community organizing has been building capacity for more than a decade – schooling people in the organizer’s craft, developing rank-and-file leaders, and spreading experience of the power of organized collective action.

The labor movement “turned the page” in 1996 when the New Voice leadership of the AFL-CIO made a major rhetorical and financial shift to developing a new generation of union organizers who are cross-trained in organizing labor-community coalitions as part of organizing new members. Unions increased their efforts (and budgets) to organize new members, with disappointing results thus far, but they also staked out a political program independent of the Democratic Party even as they organized more effectively within the party to advance their issues. Unions have spent a lot of money on a variety of new approaches to political organizing, but the main drift has been away from endorsing and funding candidates to year-round political education and activism on legislative issues that affect union members and their neighbors.

This year the labor movement concentrated on member-to-member political education with an emphasis on one-on-one contacts at work, at home, and on the phone. And as exemplified by a late summer speech by AFL-CIO Vice-president Rich Trumpka, they are directly addressing racial ignorance, fear and outright racism among their own members. This is now supplemented by a new organization, Working America, that has enlisted nearly 3 million nonunion workers to become politically active in both electoral and movement activities. Begun in 2004, Working America is now active in fourteen states, from Colorado to Virginia. The group’s activist blogs provide a taste of what they’re doing.

Community organizations are focused on electoral politics as never before, but not simply for its own sake. As exemplified by the best-known national network of such groups, ACORN, registering and turning out voters are just part of a larger process of organizing and mobilizing for local campaigns on living wages, affordable housing, environmental justice, and a wide variety of local issues. What’s new here is the breakdown of the traditional wall between political and “nonpartisan” community organizing.

Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is widely (and justifiably) praised for building organizational infrastructure everywhere. This involves funding DNC staff in all 50 states, instituting more rigorous (and more Washington-directed) candidate-selection processes for Congressional and gubernatorial races, and much else. But as Bob Moser has been reporting in The Nation for the past two years, the DNC’s 50-state strategy also means linking community, labor, and faith activists with emerging Democratic politicians and activists who are progressive by the standards of their locality. Though the DNC’s primary purpose may not be to build grassroots organizing capacity, its renewed presence reinforces and encourages the grassroots organizers who are already there.

Finally, Barack Obama has brought a community organizing approach to politics that purports to be building not just to win an election, but also to hold elected representatives accountable as they govern – at all levels, including his.

Camp Obama has trained hundreds of organizers, who have in turn trained thousands of rank-and-file leaders in various localities. Like many of Obama’s field staff, Joy Cushman, head of the Obama Organizing Fellows program, comes to politics from an apprenticeship not in GOTV operations, but in community organizing. According to Cushman, the Obama field effort is focused on finding and developing authentic community leaders not just as volunteers for canvassing and phone-banking, but to lead the effort in their areas and to integrate election organizing with their existing activism. The goal is to nurture a network of leaders who will continue working for progressive political efforts at the local and state as well as the national levels. For more about this, see Zack Exley’s “The New Organizers.”

What happens after next week’s election is anybody’s guess. But today’s working-class organizers do not expect to wait passively and see. Electing sympathetic politicians is part of building a social movement, but not the most important part. Organizing and mobilizing at the grassroots is. And now there are a whole lot more people doing that.

Jack Metzgar