The New Yorker’s George Packer has a fantastic article in the current Politics issue about working class voters in Ohio. He discusses whether or not the Democrats can ever get these voters back. They, along with so many other Americans, have grown so skeptical of government that even now when the Republican platform of “less government” (which has really meant more government during the Bush era = torture, Guantanamo, Iraq, gay marriage) has failed, they are too disenchanted to give Obama a chance. Packer goes to find out why.
Mining electoral data from the General Social Survey, they found that the decline in white working-class support for Democrats occurred in one period—from the mid-seventies until the early nineties, with a brief lull in the early eighties—and has remained well below fifty per cent ever since. But they concluded that social issues like abortion, guns, religion, and even (outside the South) race had little to do with the shift. Instead, according to their data, it was based on a judgment that—during years in which industrial jobs went overseas, unions practically vanished, and working-class incomes stagnated—the Democratic Party was no longer much help to them. “Beginning in the mid-to-late 1970s, there was increasing reason for working-class whites to question whether the Democrats were still better than the Republicans at promoting their material well-being,” the study’s authors write. Working-class whites, their fortunes falling, began to embrace the anti-government, low-tax rhetoric of the conservative movement. During Clinton’s Presidency, the downward economic spiral of these Americans was arrested, but by then their identification with the Democrats had eroded. . Having earlier moved to the right for economic reasons, the Arizona study concluded, the working class stayed there because of the rising prominence of social issues—Thomas Frank’s argument. But the Democrats fundamentally lost the white working class because these voters no longer believed the Party’s central tenet—that government could restore a sense of economic security.
“I think the party-line Democrats are having a hard time with Obama,” Bobbie Dunham, a retired fourth-grade teacher, told me. When I asked if Obama’s health-care plan wouldn’t be a good thing for people in Glouster, she said, “I’ll believe it when I see it. If it’s actually happening, I’d say that’s good.” But she and the others had far more complaints about locals freeloading off public assistance than about the health-insurance industry and corporations. Dunham declared her intention to write in a vote for either Snoopy or T. Boone Pickens. “I’m not going to vote for a Republican—they’ve had their chance for the last eight years and they’ve screwed it up,” she said. “But I really just don’t trust Obama. He only says half-truths. He calls himself a Christian, but he only became one to run for office. He calls himself a black, but he’s two-thirds Arab.”
I asked where she had learned that.“On the Internet.”
Posted by dressedtogo 
Posted by dressedtogo 
Posted by dressedtogo 
Colorado for Obama
October 13, 2008I lived in Colorado for 5 years. I was there for the 2000 election, and watched the metropolitan part of the state (the Denver/Boulder corridor) come out for Gore and Nader. Boulder felt like the epi-center of the Green Party. Although I now fight my gut to blame Nader for this whole mess because of his 2000 candidacy, it was a tell-tale sign of how the state was changing. Little by little. The gubernatorial, senatorial and house races of 2004 continued to show that change is in the air. Now, according to Pollster, Obama is ahead of McCain in the polls- 50.9 to 44.6.
There has been a batch of great reporting on Colorado, but Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker piece, “The Code of the West” sums it up pretty nicely.
If Colorado goes blue, it’s a whole new ball game.