This diary began as a comment in reply to Daily Kos member smallch’s diary from this morning-- No Democrats, You Can’t Just Replace Working Class Voters With Affluent Suburbanites... — and includes excerpts from a previous diary of mine that focused on Doug Jones’ victory last week.
Zombie narratives— no matter how many times they’re debunked, they just keep crawling back. In their diary, Daily Kos member smallch makes the following contentions:
Whether because of economic anxiety or racial resentment, Trumpism won strong working class support...
Hillary Clinton failed spectacularly when it came to the working class…
It’s difficult to arrive at sound political strategy when your basic premises are simply, and completely false. Each of these premises are simply, and completely false.
There is no ‘whether because’ about economic anxiety when it came to the vote for Trump, it was racial animosity, and misogyny, pure and simple:
The past year of research has made it very clear: Trump won because of racial resentment: Another study produces the same findings we’ve seen over and over again. (Dec. 15, 2017)
German Lopez
Contrary to what some have suggested, white millennial Trump voters were not in more economically precarious situations than non-Trump voters. Fully 86 percent of them reported being employed, a rate similar to non-Trump voters; and they were 14 percent less likely to be low income than white voters who did not support Trump. Employment and income were not significantly related to that sense of white vulnerability.
So what was? Racial resentment.
Even when controlling for partisanship, ideology, region and a host of other factors, white millennials fit Michael Tesler’s analysis, explored here. As he put it, economic anxiety isn’t driving racial resentment; rather, racial resentment is driving economic anxiety. We found, as he has in a larger population, that racial resentment is the biggest predictor of white vulnerability among white millennials. Economic variables like education, income and employment made a negligible difference…
To anyone who’s been following the research on this, the findings should come as little surprise. There have now been numerous studies that found support for Trump is closely linked to racial resentment, defined by Fowler, Medenica, and Cohen as “a moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance.”…
This is not a one-off finding. At this point, the evidence that Trump’s rise was driven by racism and racial resentment is fairly stacked.
One paper, published in January by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, found that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology…
Another study, conducted by researchers Brenda Major, Alison Blodorn, and Gregory Major Blascovich shortly before the election, found that if people who strongly identified as white were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in 2042, they became more likely to support Trump.
And a study, published in November by researchers Matthew Luttig, Christopher Federico, and Howard Lavine, found that Trump supporters were much more likely to change their views on housing policy based on race. In this study, respondents were randomly assigned “a subtle image of either a black or a white man.” Then, they were asked about views on housing policy.
The researchers found that Trump supporters were much more likely to be impacted by the image of a black man. After the exposure, they were not only less supportive of housing assistance programs, but they also expressed higher levels of anger that some people receive government assistance and were more likely to say that individuals who receive assistance are to blame for their situation...
The ‘Secretary Clinton lost the White Working Class’ zombie narrative has as much basis in fact as the ‘Trump won the White Working Class’ narrative, which is to say, none at all:
No, most working-class Americans did not vote for Donald Trump
Contrary to a popular belief, working-class voters did not make up the bulk of the Trump vote. Instead, the electorate that put Trump in the White House looks pretty much like the classic Republican coalition.
"With that data there is no reason to think that his base was majority or even close to majority working-class people,” said Noam Lupu, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, who analyzed the latest results of the American National Election Study, the leading academically-run national survey of voters in the US.
Instead what Lupu and a colleague found when they looked at who voted for Trump was pretty traditional Republican fare.
Approximately a third of the Trump electorate had household incomes below the US median income, roughly a third earned between $50,000 and $100,000 (around 43,825 - 87,650 euro), and one third earned more than $100,000…
"There is no such thing as a single type of Trump voter who voted for him for one single reason,” said Ekins. "Of the five groups, the one that fits the media account of the stereotypical Trump voter is what I call the American Preservationist."
Any class analysis that distinguishes the White Working Class as separate cohort, without recognizing that racial identity, not economic status, is the defining feature, collapses under its own logical contradictions:
There Is No Such Thing as “the White Working Class”
Katie Grimes
...if we believe that economic systems oppress people by sorting them into social classes, then how can an entity such as the white working class even exist? By distinguishing the white working class from their non-white counterparts, one admits that racial identity and power trumps class position, even though one intends the exact opposite.
The class reductionist approach undermines itself in another way. Typically, those sympathetic to this view would respond to my critique by describing the purportedly high rates of racism among “working class whites” as a scheme concocted by upper class capitalists to prevent poor whites from realizing that their economic interest lies in solidarity with non-white people. One eradicates racism therefore not so much by denouncing racism but by explaining to working class whites why voting Republican or supporting the economic status quo would be bad for their pocketbook. For this reason, class reductionists believe that Democrats lose the working class white vote because they do not know how to talk to them; they are patronizing, removed, and smug.
However, while this approach positions itself as the ally of the neglected and race-shamed white working class, it ironically perceives poor whites as too stupid to know what’s good for them. It differs on this score only in relying upon a different set of “elite” saviors to come to their rescue.
And what drove the vote of White female voters who voted for Trump was whiteness, and male domination:
People might scoff at the idea that women vote based on what husbands and fathers tell them to do. And tens of millions of dollars in political messaging has been spent based on the assumption that women will vote collectively on equal pay, abortion, and other salient issues regarding women’s autonomy.
But social science backs up Clinton’s anecdotal hunch. “We think she was right in her analysis about women getting pressure from men in their lives, specifically [straight] white women,” said Kelsy Kretschmer, an assistant professor at Oregon State University and a co-author of a recent study examining women’s voting patterns.
“We know white men are more conservative, so when you’re married to a white man you get a lot more pressure to vote consistent with that ideology.”
******
Also, no reasonable observer would view Doug Jones’ election in Alabama as a call to pursue ’affluent white suburbanites who would usually vote Republican’, the NYT article smallch cites notwithstanding. This is a straw man argument, pure and simple.
If there was one lesson from Jones’ win— and it was the only lesson anyone here should take away— it is that African-Americans, especially African-American women, are the the true Democratic base, they are the group that wins us elections, and they are of course, the most economically disadvantaged group in the country— the real working class.
We need to broaden the range of political analysis we rely on, if we are serious about electing Democrats, and moving the country in a progressive direction. Here’s a selection from a diary I wrote after the Alabama special election:
Anne Branigin, at The Root, profiles Perman Hardy, one of the legion of African-American women who made Doug Jones’ election possible:
Meet the Former Sharecropper Who Helped Push Alabama’s Historic Black Voter Turnout.
In a long-overdue (and, frankly, yet to be seen) declaration, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez recently acknowledged the importance of black women to newly elected Alabama Sen. Doug Jones’ victory.
“Let me be clear: We won in Alabama and Virginia because black women led us to victory,” Perez said. “Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and we can’t take that for granted. Period.”...
Where should the DNC be devoting time, people and money? To Perman Hardy, and ten thousand other African-American women like her. If Tom Perez can’t figure that out, he has no business heading the DNC…
Jess Fournier at Feministing , giving us a sample of the voices of decidedly clear thinking, and reasonably angry, not — White males, demolishes any and all arguments that Democrats need to concern themselves with finding those white voters who are always just beyond our reach…
Demetria Irwin at The Grio lays out the lessons every progressive should take from the Alabama senatorial victory…
Despite all the terrible legislation that was specifically created to prevent you from voting, you still went out to vote AND you voted like you should in the Alabama election for the vacant U.S. Senate seat. As any intelligent, rational adult would do, you resoundingly voted for the person who was not the gun-toting guy with an apparent affinity for under aged teenage girls and who would like to get rid of Constitutional amendments after 10 (effectively undoing abolition of slavery, the woman’s right to vote and black folks’ right to vote among other important milestones)…
Despite your righteous efforts and — yes this does add a critical vote in Congress — this Democratic “win” is not a time of celebration. It is 2017 and a man who wants to undo the abolition of slavery BARELY lost a seat in the U.S. Senate…
Make no mistake, these are targeted, systematic efforts to disenfranchise African-American voters— because the GOP knows if the black vote is maximized, Democrats win. Simple as that.
This is happening around the country, of course. So the next time someone tells the Democratic party has a ‘problem with its message not appealing to enough white voters’, remind them that the white voters who are receptive to our message already hear it, and have no compunction about voting with us. The problem is voter suppression and constructive disenfranchisement. The good people of Alabama showed us what we need to do to overcome them.