In the wake of these midterm elections, the topic of the white working class vote has come up fairly often around here. One suggestion that was come up is for Democrats to embrace economic populism, which will connect with white working class voters who otherwise vote on issues like guns or religion.
Full Disclosure- I come from a white working class background, born in New York City, moved to the suburbs during the white flight years and back to NYC in my adulthood. My family has voted Republican since Reagan, though they were FDR Democrats before that. I know why they do it. I've seen them toy with the idea of voting Democratic during the Bush year, before flipping right back to the right after Obama entered office.
I've never been able to really articulate the reason without it coming across as "white people are racist," because I think it's less simple than that, but then I read this piece at Slate by Jamelle Bouie
http://www.slate.com/...
Now it is entirely true that the Democratic Party has all but abandoned economic populism, especially in exurban and rural America.
But if you look at election results, many of these ares, specially in the South, had already turned against the Democratic Party long before free trade or the abandonment of populist principles.
Race was the reason.
After all, working-class whites didn’t leave the Democratic Party over insufficiently populist policy and rhetoric. The liberal economic reforms of 1960s—and Medicare in particular—paid benefits to white working-class families throughout the 1970s and ’80s, even as the group moved to a decisive break with the Democrats. No, the proximate cause of the break was the Democratic Party’s close identification with black Americans, who—after the riots of the late ’60s and ’70s—became identified with urban disorder and welfare.
At it's core, opposition to the Democratic Party from the white working class is about the party's perceived allegiance to Black America, or minorities in general. White working class voters do not see economic populism that helps minorities as the type that helps them too. It's a real "us versus them" mentality. What's good for "them" cannot be good for "us."
Bouie outlines it here, where he notes that economic populism pre-Civil Rights was for whites only.
Part of this was just racism. For most of the post-war era, whites were empowered by the federal government to separate themselves and their lives from black Americans. For the white middle class, federal aid built white suburbs and white schools, and for the white working-class, it built segregated housing projects and cities. The civil rights revolution brought blacks and black demands to their doorsteps, and for the white working class—which couldn’t just leave for the suburbs—it fueled a backlash.
But part of it was something broader. After all, there wasn’t a backlash to government programs writ large. Then, as now, working-class whites are ardent supporters of Social Security and Medicare. But to them, our retirement programs came with an implicit social contract: If you work and contribute to society, society will care for you into your old age. By contrast, you didn’t have to work to benefit from anti-poverty programs, in fact, you could riot and still receive government benefits. To these whites, the New Deal and its successor programs rewarded self-reliance and independence. The War on Poverty didn’t. And they hated it.
The perception that blacks and other minorities are lazy and not worthy of help is embedded in racism. But that has been passed down by generations of whites, and reinforced with over exaggerated stories about the black welfare queen. How many times have you seen a story passed around social media about a woman with a coach bag or an iPhone. Nevermind that it's possible, if not likely, that the bag or the phone were charity and not purchased with "welfare checks."
Here in New York City, the reaction to the populist campaigns for City Council and for the top jobs at City Hall were among the most progressive we've ever seen. the only demographic the Democrats lost last year was white working class in the outer boroughs. Their #1 issue wasn't the economy, or taxes, or education. It was crime. It was concern over the ending of stop & frisk. It was Al Sharpton.
And now if you go to places like Howard Beach, Queens or Bensonhurst, Brooklyn or Staten Island, white working class voters there will tell you the city has gone backwards. That crime is up (it's not), the poverty is up (it isn't really) and that the city is going back to the bad old days (it's really not). The city's tabloid newspapers help foster that belief. Remember that the New York Post put a photo of a squeege man in Queens on the cover to prove the "bad old days" were coming back.
Of course Mr. Squeege never left, and anyone who goes by Queens Plaza on a regular basis in the last 10 years knows that.
I think Boule is correct, that economic populism alone isn't going to win back working class whites. Sure they support the issues we fight for, but the race issue undermines it. Our message is corrupted when the right starts talking about drug testing welfare recipients or limiting food stamps, even for families with children. White working class folks want that, they won't listen to us on these issues without it.
I'm not at all arguing that Democrats shouldn't adopted more economic populist messages. If anything, it will keep strong voting blocs in minority communities as well as young voters who are far removed from the racial backlash. It is also the right thing to do.
But it's not a guarantee that it'll help, or that it'll even win us an election. We can't win a national election losing 60%-65% of the white vote.
and if you're not entirely convinced. I'll leave with this. The post-Obama campaigns of progressive populists Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren. Neither won the white vote in their states.