Unfortunately, the party establishment doesn't understand the truth, i.e., that the white working class views them as utterly disconnected from their lives and even phonier than the Republicans. This party isn't going to recapture the middle until it figures out that the centrist elites are every bit as elite as any liberal elitist ever was. Sure, the voters may be hostile to big business but they aren't so stupid as not to notice that there's no party willing to stand with them against big business. If you expect people who are already on the vulnerable end of the middle class to take a risk with their future you'd better be ready, willing and able to stand with them. Who does this party stand with anymore? If you are in over your head on your credit card debt, who yuh gonna call? Joe Biden?

You nailed it.

The lower middle class walked away from Democratic party when the party shafted them under Clinton when he pushed through NAFTA and WTO. After this they saw the Democrats were no friends of the working class and still aren't.

At least the GOP knows how to dangle a few social issues in front of them to get their vote. The Dems offer them nothing. Hell they barely even recognize the middle and lower middle class is being squeezed and hammered into the poor house.

If the Democrats want the working class vote, they can start by standing up for them. You don't get it by shafting them.

It has always surprised me that in all the hand-wringing over the decline of support for the Democrats among white working class voters, it has seldom been suggested that this might have something to do with how badly the party has been representing the interests of this group for the past 30 years.

Bernie Sanders, the Independent congressman who has blogged on this site, regularly does well with working class voters though he is extremely liberal on social issues. He gains their support because he fights like hell for their economic interests.

Ovid

Damn beer. Replace "sell Social Security", with either "sell Social Security crisis" or "undercut Social Security" and you will be getting a lot closer to Cato's strategy.

But then again this editorial correction allows me to repeat what may be my favorite tag line going forward:

"rat-bastard Republicans have been lying to you on Social Security for 23 years". Has a ring to it.

These are the people that , no matter how many time time you tell them different, know they are losing money and jobs to illegal immigrants.

Translation: these are the people that refuse to allow their prejudices to be influenced by mere facts. Good luck trying to win their votes, if you believe this.

"When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!" - Rev. Benjamin Hancock

Funny how they didn't abandon Clinton himself. Did they somehow not realize he was the one pushing it through?

Once, just once, I'd like to see polling data showing that anyone cared about NAFTA besides us professional political debaters.

To be sure, middle-income voters have a legitimate beef with Republican economic policies. Stephen Rose

. . . the typical American's . . . beefs with the system tend to be aspirational–that is, they’re not rising far enough fast enough and the difficulties of doing so are far greater than they’d like. Ruy Teixeira

I don't see that either writer has facts to back up these statements. And I don't think they're right.

White working class voters have accepted their position in the economy. They know where they're going economically (it isn't very far), and they're not psychologically foolish enough to hold to a frustrating fantasy of leaping upward. They're not aspirational; they're realistic.

How do they then increase the terms of their satisfaction?

By seeking tax relief (more money in the pay packet), because their wages going up isn't seen as likely. By enjoying leisure pursuits which don't cost much -- hunting and fishing, family celebrations, church activities, high school sports . . . .taking pride in "Mom and Dad" down-home life.

And the Republicans offer them tax cuts and honor their "life-style" choices.

Do we? Do we want to?

It isn't about money. It's about pride.

Schiller Park, Illinois, the day after the first Kerry Bush debate.

I am standing in front of a newspaper machines, waiting for the train. I casually ask the hulking, obviously working class fellow next to me:

"How do you think Bush did?"

"I don't care!", he replies, "I am voting for Bush anyways. Those goddam overpaid workers deserved to have their jobs outsourced."

I think class hatred seems to come in here someplace.

To talk about appeals to the white working class without talking about the way that race plays out in politics seems to me to be missing something very important.

Unlike Teixeira, I'm no expert, but my understanding is that the Democrats lost the loyalty of the white working class furing the backlash against civil rights in the late sixties and seventies. So long as the Democratic party is identified with the interests of people of color, they will consistently be vulnerable to racial appeals that alienate a sizeable portion of the white working class (see the entirety of the Eighties as an example).

One strategy that would appear to meet Teixeira's "white working class test" would therefore appear to be to give up on the quest for racial and economic justice in a rather public way. However, as a cure this would be worse than the disease. Anyway, while the white working class is a sizeable portion of the electorate now, it is shrinking -- which, more than job-based arguments I think is driving white working class hostility to immigration. Demographic trends alone would counsel against building a long-term strategy by relying heavily on a shrinking base.

While it would certainly help Democrats to shore up their numbers with the white working class, it is important to realize that they -- in anything like their current form -- will never have the sway over them that the nearly-whites-only Republican Party has.

In other words, it may be likely that, although there is plenty of anti-big business sentiment out there among the white working class, they simply see the Democrats as being equally in bed with corporate special interests as Republicans and don't trust the Dems to really take them on.

You know, the old "Abramoff directed contributions to Democrats too" media filter and all . . .

So long as the Democratic party is identified with the interests of people of color, they will consistently be vulnerable to racial appeals that alienate a sizeable portion of the white working class.

Perhaps it's not so much the "interests of people of color" so much as other, related things.

For an example, here's a quote from former Democratic U.S. Rep. Gus Savage: "I don't talk to you white motherf- .… You bitch motherf- in the white press…. F- you, you motherf-ing asshole white devils." There's a long list of similar quotes from Democrats and other liberals here.

The issue is that many Democrats will rush to defend, apologize for, and "explain" racist statements like that. In fact, many will go as far as claiming that they aren't racist at all, because people of color can't be racist against whites.

Needless to say, many white people don't appreciate a party that welcomes and supports those who are racist against white people.

If the Dems want more white voters, perhaps they should cast out their racists, race hustlers, demographic triumphalists, and so on and on and on.

Nevertheless, you've got to deal with it somehow. And it's no longer possible to use the classic racist blame game, as lots of blacks now are upset about illegal immigrants supposedly taking working class jobs, too.

I would add a point 5:

It helps if people on "progressive" political websites do not call them stupid. Here's one recent example.

But I also see it all the time in things like evangelical bashing. The funny thing with that one in particular is that it hits at lots of black working class, too, and increasingly at Hispanic working class--the Catholic religion is losing them fast to evangelicalism.

None of this is any mystery to those in the party who constantly say that you need a Southerner running as president. Somehow, somewhere, the Northeast got the reputation as elitist and non-working class. Southerners supposedly understand Bubba or the King of The Hill guy.

Kerry fit the classic stereotype of all that, and many argued that we had gotten past that problem and that he wouldn't be hurt by it. Judging by how well he did and how the opposition won using very targeted tactics in special districts, I would tend to agree that the Eastern thing is overplayed. Still, the wind surfing thing was probably ill-advised, and once again, every time a writer or commenter who identifies as liberal/progressive talks in public on TV or radio or the net about how stupid the American people are, or how they lack taste, or similar, they shove away working class voters.

P.S. :King of The Hill Democrats" by Matt Bai recommended reading for all on this topic for those who haven't read it.

There's a new Harvard economists' study out related to all of this that argues religion has been key in how Republicans won over working class that was traditionally Democratic, how they built their winning coalition of rich and working class, which I read about in yesterday's New York Times Business Section. I haven't read the study yet but the article says that income 30 years ago to be a prediction of party affliation, but that the Dems lost many to Republicans on attidudes toward religion in the culture thing, and also that the CW that the red/blue polarization thing is getting worse is phony, something I also believe.

Go to the NYT link for the full article, as I have snippedd out the center. The bold hightlighting is mine:

May 4, 2006 Economic Scene: Red States, Blue States: New Labels for Long-Running Differences By HAL R. VARIAN

THE red state-blue state division has captured the pundits' imaginations, leading to much armchair theorizing about how political constituencies in the United States are evolving.

According to some, the country is splitting into two opposing camps, with political divisions becoming more polarized and more spatially segregated than they have been in the past.

A recent working paper, "Myths and Realities of American Political Geography," by two Harvard University economists, Edward L. Glaeser and Bryce A. Ward, challenges this conventional wisdom. The paper can be downloaded from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=874977.

The economists examined a number of contemporary and historical data sources on cultural, religious, economic and political attitudes and compared these responses across states.

They found that differences in political attitudes across states are nothing new: the Civil War and Roaring Twenties had much larger geographic variation in political views than we do today. Though dispersion in political attitudes has generally declined over the last 60 years, the last four years have brought a small uptick.

Though views have become somewhat less associated with geography in the 20th century, they still show strong differences. The fraction of the voters in a given area who vote Republican correlates well with the fraction who voted Republican in the last election.

Furthermore, America is not becoming more polarized. Of course, Republicans have a more positive view of the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, and vice versa, but attitudes have hardly changed since 1978. It is fair to point out, though, that attitudes seem to have become somewhat more partisan in the last few years.

The most remarkable phenomenon is the rise of religion in politics. Thirty years ago, income was a better prediction of party affiliation than church attendance, but this is no longer true. Religion also played a big role in politics a century ago, so we may well be returning to the historical norm.

Cultural and religious attitudes play a big role in voting behavior. For example, the fraction of the population who agreed with the statement "AIDS is God's punishment for immoral sexual behavior" was highly correlated with whether the state was red or blue, according to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center. The differences in religious attitudes between Vermont and Mississippi are huge....

[SNIP]

....But the biggest effect seems to be the correlation between religion and Republicanism. Among white voters who attend religious services at least once a week, 71 percent voted Republican in the last election, according to the Pew survey.

Republicans have traditionally appealed to those with higher incomes. The genius of Republicans, beginning with Ronald Reagan and continuing with Karl Rove, was to bring the religious vote into their party, forming a winning coalition of Main Street businessmen, the very wealthy and evangelical Christians. Strange bedfellows, to be sure, but they win elections.

Mr. Glaeser and Mr. Ward offer some speculation about why religion is such an attractive theme for politicians. According to their theory, direct appeals to voters on issues like abortion are tricky, because strong positions inspire groups on both sides of the issue, who then cancel each other out in votes. The trick is to send "coded messages" to different groups of voters. Strong opponents of abortion, for example, may react positively to certain religious allusions that appear innocuous to mainstream voters.

The Economist magazine characterizes American politics as a contest between the incompetence of Republicans and the incoherence of the Democrats. But there is a reason for the Democrats' incoherence: they are feverishly trying to assemble their own collection of strange bedfellows, and no one quite knows what it is.

p.s. I really do think you have it so backwards. One of Clinton's main winning tacticals was to pursue this group. Remember the "Sister Souljah moment?" Don't you think that was all about Reagan? How about stuff like school uniforms? The DLC itself was not formed to win back the support of the big corporations, it was an organization in which practical state governers, among others, were trying to win back the white voters lost to Reagan, by courting SMALL business and the white working class who saw the Dems as liberal buttinsky regulators and big social spenders. Clinton was from Arkansas, remember? Arkansas? Bubba Land?

Still, he lost a lot of them to Ross Perot in the first election. He kept trying to win them over with things like hiring Dick Morris. That worked, he maintained 2/3 approval rating mostly all through his second term, and that was because he won back everyone but the avowed conservatives. Mho, one of the most popular things he did with this crowd was ride herd on Congress to balance the budget. One thing that they despise is a big spending Congress (not to say that they don't see it realistically, the reality, as being pork and Pentagon, for them when Congress spends big it is foreign aid, artsy fartsy programs, welfare and social programs...) This is not a group that gets enraged about sinning with blow jobs, many being country music fans and all, but don't dis their God lovin' evangelical mommas with anti-religious attitudes, that's one important thing Mr. Clinton never did, both Gore and Clinton "born again."

And I left out a very important catalyst in the whole mix, the culture wars, what we arrogant dirty hippie free-lovin' protesting and bomb throwing college students did to scare them in the 60's and 70's, the threat to civilization as they knew it, the disrespect of all institutions, by children of the elite yet, which the right wing media machine in its infancy picked up on and ran with to great success. (See Buchanan's speechwriting for Spiro Agnew.) Follow that up with a decade of race riots and astronomical crime rates with which Democrats responded by saying we just need to have more peace love and understanding, make-work jobs and handouts, and you lost 'em. (Note here: Clinton's "police on the streets" initiative.)

Others have hinted at the shift in political power since LBJ above, but I think they haven't emphasized the point enough.

What happened was that the Dixiecrats shifted from the Dems to the Republicans after LBJ. This is enough to explain the entire loss of power. The old South now votes Republican where before it was just as racist and conservative, but voted for the nominal Democratic Dixiecrats.

This unholy alliance prevented much progressive policy from being enacted for decades. When the civil rights movement energized the northern liberal sector of the party, the southern block bolted. This cannot be fixed. If the Dems are to regain power (which does not mean we will see a progressive agenda) they will need to command a bigger lead in their traditional regions.

A progressive, populist movement will need to start from the bottom and, so far, there is not much sign of this happening.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

Isn't this Rep. Savage who became a FORMER Rep. because he lost in the primary election to a black opponent who was sane and non-racist? We are talking about a Black congressman defeated in the primaries by a black opponent, and as we know, it takes some doing for a congressman to be remoded in this fashion.

It seems that this Savage is an aberration that WAS cast out.

A strange thing is that according to these data Kerry lost 6% among 52% of the voters, which makes it a loss of 3% overall, and his overall loss was 4%.

It would be nice to know exactly what happened. One issue was a spate of initiatives defending "marriage" agaist homosexual hordes (that started to overrun unlikely places like highschool bathrooms in SE Oklahoma). A major issue, probably, was the national security scare for which there was no rational counter-strategy: a crew of manly Republicans could be trusted to bomb, detain, torture and in general do "whatever necessary", and Democrats could not. Whites were more prone to this thinking than non-whites (who could imagine themself being on the receiving end) and less educated more than more educated.

I think that many people feel a kind of hangover from this hysteria, and this partly explains why Bush became so unpopular. Hopefully, this dog ain't gonna hunt again.

What is really weird is the "centrist" who are against "liberal elitist" and then support bancruptcy reform, CAFTA, wobble on Social Security, and in general support a lot of pro-corporate garbage which may be good for fundraising but is not good for the message. Landrieu and Nelson come to mind as examples. If anything, their constituents would need more economical populism than others. One could think that their approach is to support economic interests of the middle and lower middle class as little as possible, given that their GOP opponents will look worse anyway.

What a load of crap this is. 

Dissent Protects Democracy

How about the 3 million workers who saw their well paying jobs go bye bye. And every year more join them.

Do you have any idea of the hatred that Clinton created when he rammed through NAFTA and WTO? A lot, millions of people saw their careers and livilihoods wiped out in a matter of a few years.

Furthermore, until a few years ago the Democratic party didn't even acknowledge this massive hemmorage of well paying jobs. Even now outside of pundits like Lou Dobbs or a pol like Sherrod Brown or John Edwards you won't find many Dems concerned about it.

And when reading the posts here and at other blogs one gets the distinct impression that many Democrats are very comfortable the economic status quo.

As for Reagan's popularity. One he was very charismatic snake oil salesman and could make Americans feel good about being Americans. Also he was riding the coatails of a backlash against Democratic social policies across the country. Go read Michael Lerners(editor of Tikkun) "Left Hand of God" for more on this and how the Dems screwed up.

Carter was a good and moral President. His loss was due to things beyond his control, like a GOP that mastered the art of slime and gutter politics.

My opinion: Nobody votes for their economic interests anymore. (Except rich people.)

The Depression had an enormous impact. Everyone agreed, the Republicans got us into it, and the Democrats got us out of it. It was scary. To the extent that economics was important, poor and lower middle class people voted Democrat.

That's ancient history now. Forgotten. Most people might agree with the economic policies of one party or the other, but think it doesn't much matter. Not much. The economy will take care of itself.

Today people vote other interests. I basically agree with arta, above. The identification of the Democrats with minorities and elite culture and counter-culture and internationalism all drove away the white working class. The identification of the Republicans with religion and family values and the military and patriotism attracted the white working class.

Ed Kilgore's crew in the DLC is for sending them and their kids to fight in Iraq. Get back to me when the DLC supports universal access to health care and higher education -- without requiring a purple heart as a ticket for admission.

Many of their family members ARE military because they don't have a ticket to the Ivy League and no ticket to the state U without 2 or 3 tours in Iraq. Sure maybe many men buy the macho military b.s. but how many over 35 with kids to educate? And women still want their children safe and want their children to have a future. Educate their kids. Keep their kids healthy. Those are the issues that swung Minnesota in the blue column in 2004. If Democrats spent more time focusing on their strengths instead of apologizing for the Republican's revisionist history of their weaknesses they might even be able to tune in to why Americans overwhelmingly want a different direction.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Applying this test to David's recommended approach, I think he comes up short.  Recent public opinion data indicate that voters in general and this group of voters in particular are already quite hostile to big business, believe corporations are taking unfair advantage of the system and think Bush and the Republicans push corporate interests over and above that of the public's.  Indeed, hostile attitudes toward "Big Money", as David would put it, are now at historically high levels.

In other words, much of the public, including the white working class, already knows the Truth--or at least a good part of it.  That suggests that simply throwing more truth at them is unlikely, by itself, to have that much effect.

 

And the truth they've known for over 20 years and the more now, is that they are getting screwed and there is little that government can/will do to stop it. Primarily they've been screwed economically. Factories closing, globalization taking a huge bite, retraining to work at Kinko's.  Health care shot. 

And so having resigned themselves to being screwed by big corporations, they look about for where else they're getting porked and this is on "Values" - values not necessarily "social issues" but immigrants, Muslims and all who "hate our values" (they don't much differentiate). 

Sad but true. So to get em off the values thing, we need first to speak to their values and then and this is key - give them some real and believable hope that the Truth won't screw em for another two decades