Running Against The White Working Class

The New York Times article, which incidentally appears on the opinion page, The Future of the Obama Coalition states that the Obama team is going to abandon the white working class in the upcoming campaign. The Democrats have been losing the white working class since the 1960's and according to democratic strategists Stanley Greenberg and Ruy Teixeira. They have not given up trying to win them back but in the 2012 they propose trying to forge a coalition among "voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic."

The Times doesn't mention it but many of these groups have been fairly well insulated against the recession by liberal welfare benefit and public sector union contracts. Much of the stimulus program was all about making sure they stayed employed while the white working class was fed a healthy diet of green and shovel ready job promises. They bore the brunt of the drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico, and EPA strip mining regulation. They lost jobs in the medical device industry as a result of the tax imposed by Obamacare. They lost jobs on the postponement of the Keystone pipeline and the NLRB shutdown of the Boeing facility in South Carolina. They are not happy and if they reject Obama as badly as they rejected Democratic congressional candidates in 2010 it game over. In 2010 the white working class voted Republican by a 30 point margin. To win the White House Obama must limit his loss among all white voters to about 17 percent.

Rush Limbaugh seemed to read this strategy as a bold, new, initiative. I view it as desperation. Greenberg and Teixeira break down the numbers by demographics, setting targets for each group. President Obama must keep his losses among white college graduates to the 4-point margin of 2008 (47-51). Why? Otherwise he will not be able to survive a repetition of 2010, when white working-class voters supported Republican House candidates by a record-setting margin of 63-33. So they must keep the white college educated within 4 percent and then depend on young people, Hispanics, unmarried women, and affluent suburbanites to turn out and vote in huge numbers.

All this is going to be awkward for congressmen and senators running for election. What message prevails in a blue collar district? The congressional candidate's or Obama's? Since electoral votes are award by states, not by demographic groups Obama won't be able to have a standard stump speech that plays well statewide and television ad are going to be bland so as not to offend any group. This plan is too clever by half.