The Working White Working Class Really Is Leaving the Democrats
[See the end of this post for how the debate/discussion has played out… it has been quite civil and productive]
I published an essay in The Guardian two weeks ago offering one reason why most white working class people in the USA vote Republican. Two excerpts:
politics at the national level is more like religion than it is like shopping. It’s more about a moral vision that unifies a nation and calls it to greatness than it is about self-interest or specific policies. In most countries, the right tends to see that more clearly than the left….
In focusing so much on the needy, the left often fails to address – and sometimes violates – other moral needs, hopes and concerns. When working-class people vote conservative, as most do in the US, they are not voting against their self-interest; they are voting for their moral interest. They are voting for the party that serves to them a more satisfying moral cuisine.
I had been inspired by a New York Times column by Tom Edsall, on how Obama’s re-election team had largely written off the white working class vote:
In the United States, Ruy Teixeira noted, “the Republican Party has become the party of the white working class,” while in Europe, many working-class voters who had been the core of Social Democratic parties have moved over to far right parties, especially those with anti-immigration platforms.
My essay was strongly condemned by two worthy critics. First, Andrew Gelman said that I had gotten the basic facts wrong. The working class does NOT vote Republican, he said; it votes Democrat, and has for over 70 years. There’s been no change. And it votes for the Left in most (but not all) countries.
I made a careless mistake in not specifying in my excerpt above that I was talking only about the WHITE working class. That’s the subject of the big debate, ever since Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” Of course African Americans and Latinos vote heavily Democratic, and make up much of the working class. But even when we focus only on whites, Gelman says I (and therefore Edsall and Teixeira) still got it wrong.
Second, George Monbiot published a rebuttal in The Guardian, saying that whatever the merits of The Righteous Mind, I had stumbled “stupidly and disastrously” in applying my ideas to politics. He pointed to an analysis by political scientist Larry Bartels that refuted Thomas Frank’s claims about the very existence of a shift away from the Democrats of white working class voters. Bartels’ analysis, like Gelman’s seems to show that there has been essentially no change in the allegiance of the white working class to the Democratic Party in the last 70 years. Rather, Monbiot argues, the working class (in Britain and the US) has become less likely to vote at all, because it sees little difference between the economic programs of the two major parties. It would therefore be foolish for the Democrats or the Labour party to try to appeal to working-class voters by “triangulating” on moral issues when what is needed is a stronger shift to the LEFT, to draw them back to the ballot box by offering them a better deal on economic issues.
But was I really wrong in claiming that the white working class has moved away from the Democrats? It all depends on how you define “working class.” All of the authors in question grant that there is no gold standard. You can use education, income, job classification, self-identification, or some combination of those criteria. They all intercorrelate, but different criteria sometimes lead to different conclusions.
Bartels and Gelman focus on income. They operationalize “white working class” as whites in the bottom third of the national income distribution, for any given year of analysis. Gelman’s very interesting book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State explains the paradox that richer STATES in the USA vote more Democratic, yet within almost all states, richer INDIVIDUALS are more likely to vote Republican. Point taken: there is a robust tendency for people to become more conservative and/or Republican as they get richer (when you hold everything else constant). I had not known this.
Bartels focuses on Thomas Frank’s claim that there has been a “backlash” against the Democrats – Frank claims that the white working class has changed its allegiance in recent years. In chart after chart, based on ANES data from the 1950s through 2004, he shows that there’s been no change, no shift to the right, no abandonment of the Democrats by whites in the bottom third of the income distribution. Once again, there’s no reason for the Democrats to change strategy or reinvent the party because there is no problem to be addressed.
But things look different if you define class based on education. In a paper by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz, titled “The decline of the white working class and the rise of a mass upper middle class,” the authors note that taking whites in the bottom third of the total national income distribution (not the white distribution, which can’t be computed from ANES data) gives you an odd sample: the majority of them are not working. It’s mostly students, retired people, homemakers, and people who are unemployed or on disability. In 2004, only 39% of white voters in the bottom third were currently employed (compared to 73% of white voters in the middle third of income). So this is a group that is more dependent on government programs. Bartels’ analyses do indeed show that this group is still and has always been reliably Democratic.
Teixeira and Abramowitz argue that education is a better way to identify the working class. (For one thing, it correlates more closely with people’s own descriptions of their class than does current family income). They focus on whites who have not completed a 4 year college degree. (They also look at other ways of slicing the data, including an index of all the major predictors). Using the lack of a college degree as the criterion, they show that the white working class has indeed shifted over to voting for Republican presidents with Nixon (70% in 1972) and never really returned to the Democrats. Clinton drew about as many of them as did his two Republican opponents, but Gore lost them by 17 points, Kerry lost them by 23 points. Obama lost them by 18 points, and the gap seems to be growing. Nate Cohn analyzes several recent Pew and Qunnipiac polls and concludes: “over the last four years, Obama’s already tepid support among white voters without a college degree has collapsed.” (See also this Gallup poll).
I wanted to examine these relationships in more detail, particularly the difference between employed and non-employed whites, so I downloaded the ANES cumulative data file, limited my analysis to whites, and then created 4 groups based on ANES variables vcf0140a (education level = 6 or 7) and vcf0116 (work status = 1):
Group 1 = no college, no job
Group 2 = no college, job
Group 3 = college, no job
Group 4 = college, job
The crux of the debate, therefore, is what has happened to group 2, in comparison to the others. The Democrats have been the party of the working man (and woman) since FDR’s New Deal coalition. So has THEIR allegiance changed in recent decades? The most direct measure for us to look at is ANES question vcf0302: “Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what?” Look at the red line below, which plots the declining percentage of people in group 1 who said “Democrat” in response to that question.
When you break up the non-college white population by employment status, as Teixeira and Abramowitz suggest, you see what they are saying: Both of the non-college groups slope downward, but group 2 (the red line) goes down more steeply. White people who have a job but no college degree have been leaving the Democratic Party. Are they becoming Republicans, or just getting disengaged, as Monbiot suggested (about the British working class)?
They are moving toward the Republican Party. The red line slopes upwards. That first sharp uptick appears to confirm the reality of the “Reagan Democrats.” And, interestingly, the purple line slopes upward too. That’s group 4, people with a job and a college degree. In other words, the Republicans are increasingly becoming the party of white people who currently hold jobs. This seems like a dangerous situation for the Democrats. Should they do anything to address it? Or are my critics correct that there no problem here, no trend, no loss of the white working class?
Bartels and Gelman are far more skilled at this sort of analysis than am I. Most likely I have missed something. I welcome their corrections, which I’ll post or link to below. Furthermore, Monbiot, Bartels and Gelman are probably all correct when they say that economic concerns played a stronger role in recent electoral shifts than the sorts of moral/cultural issues that I and Thomas Frank were talking about. I should not have suggested that concerns about national greatness and such things were the MAJOR drivers of change. I should have more modestly said: “look, here are some moral misunderstandings that are probably contributing to the ongoing alienation of many white working class voters from left-wing parties in the US and UK.” I thank my critics for pointing out this serious error in my initial essay, and for doing it in a way that displayed passionate disagreement about ideas without personal animosity or insult.
But the bottom line is that I (and Edsall, Teixeira, Abramowitz, and Frank) seem to have been correct in our basic claim that the white working class is leaving the Democratic Party. Or, at least, it depends how you define class, and it depends on several moderator variables, including employment status. (I assume the trends would be even more dramatic if we exclude unionized and public-sector employees.)
I’m not saying the Democrats must or can recapture the working white working class. It’s a shrinking demographic, many winning coalitions are possible, and I know little about electoral strategy. But the Democrats have been trying to figure out what and whom they stand for, and they’ve been trying to find their narrative, for a while now. (See Matt Bai.) If the Democrats want to be the party of the American working man and woman, they should first figure out whether they are in fact losing the working white working class, and if so, why. Moral psychology may offer part of the explanation.
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Responses
6/17/12: Edsall posted a followup column, backing up his earlier column with analyses of exit polls in congressional voting, showing that swings in the white working class vote predict the fortunes of the Democratic party; swings in other groups are much less predictive. So its bad news for the Dems when this group (“canaries in the coal mine”) turns against them.
6/18/12: Larry Bartels responds here, mostly critical, saying that the trend I show here in party ID is mostly due to the South; it’s very weak outside the south and doesn’t show up in presidential voting.
6/19/12: Political scientist Chris Johnston responds here. He does not disagree with Bartels’ quantitative analyses, but he is supportive of my overall argument. He shows that the moral values items on the ANES do predict voting as well or better than does income, and this happens even among Latino voters.
6/19/12: Nate Cohn comments here, agreeing with Bartels overall but noting that the pattern of changes among white working class support for the Democrats is complex–down in rural areas, up in suburbs–and that since 2008 things are way down mostly OUTSIDE the South.
6/20/12: Andy Gelman responds here, trying to reconcile it all: “In short: Republicans continue to do about 20 percentage points better among upper-income voters compared to lower-income, but the compositions of these coalitions have changed over time. As has been noted, low-education white workers have moved toward the Republican party over the past few decades, and at the same time there have been compositional changes so that this group represents a much smaller share of the electorate.” “Lower-class whites (especially in the south) may well be trending Republican, but upper-class whites are even more strongly in the Republican camp, and it’s worth understanding their motivations as well.”
6/25/12: Edsall wrote a followup NYT column covering this whole debate, and drawing in commentary and graphs from Abramowitz supporting my basic claims (which had been based on Abramowitz’s earlier analyses), and expanding the discussion to include occupation-type (i.e., “blue collar” vs. “white collar.”). My only disagreement with Edsall’s column is that he describes the tone of the argument as “furious.” Perhaps there was furious argument in the past, before I stepped into this “minefield” (Bartels’ term). But the discussion and debate that followed my initial Guardian essay has seemed to me to be very civil. Not just in the dueling blog posts, but in the email discussions among me, Gelman, Bartels, Abramowitz, and Edsall. It has not exactly been a warm discussion among friends, but neither has there been any anger or ad-hominem argumentation. It’s just researchers and a journalist trying to hash out the conflicting signals that emerge from multiple datasets to try to figure out a basic factual question: have the Democrats really been losing the white working class, or is it a statistical illusion that has been too heartily embraced by the press? After all this discussion, I think the answer is still yes–at least for the working white working class. (Gelman has convinced me that the poorest slice of the white electorate has not shifted away). But I see now that the issue is more complicated than I thought when I first stepped into the minefield.
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Note #1: The ANES dataset has about 1100 white respondents in each election year (every even year) going back to 1948, but some of the items we need for analysis only begin in 1972, so I start there. The graphs look spiky when you plot every single election, so I grouped elections by decade (e.g, 1980 – 1988), and averaged together the 5 elections in each decade.
First, I really enjoyed your book. I self identify with conservatives no doubt in part due to my familiarity with their arguments growing up and as someone who grew up and continues to hold to a religious faith that predisposes one to conservative leanings. That said, I also understand your change in stance to a moderate one, and depending on what I’m reading at particular moment have thought there is quite a bit to both liberal and libertarian viewpoints.
Anyway, the actual point I’m making occurred to me while listening to conservative talk radio. The host was bemoaning President Obama’s attempt to change how the authorities will deal with certain illegal immigrants. His argument was one heavily influenced by what you would recognize as the fairness foundation. He said – and likewise many of his callers – that he personally knew a great many foreign immigrants who went to hell and back to become citizens legally. They sacrificed a great deal to earn American citizenship. They should be the ones that benefit from the strengths of America, because they sacrificed a lot and went through legal channels even if that was always going to be the tougher route. Illegal immigrants didn’t do that so it is unfair to give them some of the same benefits as actual citizens.
Listening to this, it struck me that it’s the illegal immigrants that are the ones that are going to be competing for jobs with working class whites without an education. Working class whites are the ones who are going to be drawn to the fairness rhetoric, because they know it’s entirely possible that the subset of illegal workers may be a more attractive hiring base because they’re the cheaper hire. And that’s not, according to the conservative view, fair at all. Liberals, so much more focused on the harm/care foundation, don’t grasp that and have probably lost working class whites as a result.
I don’t have more than anecdotal evidence for this, but to my mind it sounds compelling. Any thoughts?
The key here is whites “without an education.” Instead of blaming presidents or Democrats, they should be taking responsibility for not investing in paperwork (education) that puts them out of reach of illegal immigrants.
Second, they should be blaming the companies who hire illegals. If no one hired illegals, illegal immigration would grind to a crawl.
But since right-wing radio spins blame towards Dems, and because these very same whites are uneducated and don’t know they’re only getting a skewed explanation, they lean Republican.
And let me add that it’s the Democrats who keep pushing to increase availability of education and end these illegal hires by making corporations accountable.
So these whites are voting against themselves.
Their way out is either education or corporate accountability–two things the GOP is steadfastly AGAINST.
It’s nobody’s fault but their own that they don’t go to school and get an education. It’s still available to them. Until the GOP finally succeeds in cutting it out.
And they can’t blame the Dems for illegal hires if they keep voting for the party that insists government stay out of business.
Dan,
I had never heard that it’s democrats who want to sanction businesses that hire illegals. I did a quick google search – which always can be misleading – and found that the Obama administration was against an Arizona law enacted by a Republican administration that was attempting harsher penalties on companies that do hire illegal immigrants. Likewise state policies in favor of, for instance, allowing illegals drivers licenses generally finds more support among Democrats. And of course recently Obama has said that some illegals will no longer be deported. All this points to the opposite conclusion. That Democrats are for more benefits for illegals, which incentivizes them to stay in the country, which means more competition for uneducated American citizens. From the standpoint of which immigration policy better impacts the lower class whites with little education, it’s not the democrats.
Education is another issue entirely, seperate from immigration policy. Liberals and conservatives look through different lenses when considering how to provide better education for a greater number of students. Liberals (and democrats) generally prefer giving more money than conservatives (and Republicans) to the public school system. The conservative view is that that’s often wasteful and inneficient and they would prefer private schools to carry more of the educational load, providing students from poor families with vouchers so they’re able to go to what’s presumed to be a better educational system. Being a conservative I lean to giving free market solution, but either way, I’m not how one can say conservatives are “against” education.
If you’ve read Haidt’s book, you’re aware that what may seem like a hateful mean spirited policy by the side of the aisle with which you disagree usually isn’t that at all, and may in fact stem from different ingrained moral foundations.
Oh Dan, education as it applies to post grad seems to be a factor, not as you say …uneducated. Investing in (paperwork) has been a poor investment for millions this last decade as evidenced by low paying jobs, outsourced skilled labor, and the high debt of graduating studenuts.
Why blame corporation for using legal Chanel’s that Obama and congress put in place, i.e. H2 visas and the like.
The narratives of political and media elites are often false. The most immigrant friendly president in recent history was George W. Bush who underfunded the border guard. This meant a lot of immigrants crossed without data being kept. And neither was he interested in deporting. Democrats almost always deport more immigrants than Republicans. Both Obama and Biden deported more than both Bush and Trump.
But Democrats don’t tend to advertise this because it’s not what they’re trying to sell to voters. It’s all about branding not reality. That is also why Republicans act tough on immigration but actually are relatively weak. Many of the corporations Republicans represent hire illegal immigrants. So, Republicans are just putting on a show of caring, but in the end they’ll serve their source of money.
This is an awful lot of words to point out that southern Democrats have gone Republican in recent decades…
That is an interesting comment.
Has the white working class gone Republican? Or is it merely the polarized partisanship of the Southern white working class since the Southern Strategy? Inquiring minds would like to know.
As a working class white in the Midwest, I despise Republicans, not that I’m a big fan of Democrats either. Like most Americans, I’m to the left of the elites in both parties.
Dems are losing the white working class because the Dems have all but abandoned their labor platform.
They cater to unions without doing anything for them.
They let the GOP control all labor debates.
They stopped defending workers with NAFTA.
They are afraid to argue against big business.
Worst of all (and Haidt is wrong here) their party identity is “we had it right in the 90s.” That doesn’t sound like a solution to anybody. It’s not that they don’t have an identity, it’s that they don’t have an updated argument.
Let’s face it, EVERYBODY wants liberal policies (for THEMSELVES). They only want conservative policies for others. Why are whites going GOP?
(oops, posted by accident) Whites are going GOP because they WANT SOMETHING from them. They’re hoping the GOP will do for them what it does for the wealthy and big business.
But since they’re uneducated, they don’t realize how terribly mistaken they are.
There is little difference between the Democrats (who serve Wall Street) mainly and the Republicans (who serve the old monied rich). The only way to change things in the USA today is either: a) a revolution (a real civil war for real reasons this time), or; b) a third party, one that unionizes entire communities not just a single work place, one that fights for the poor not just one group within the poor. The latter, I think, will arise out of failed attempts of the former, and we can expect them with the upcoming Great Depression v2.0
To put it another way, Democrats tend to serve new industries (tech, media, etc) and financing. Whereas Republicans tend to serve old industries (natural resources, etc) and old money (inherited wealth of plutocracy).
Consider the Bush family that made it’s wealth from oil, the grandfather having sold to both Stalin and Hitler. Even Trump’s family is more in line with an old industry and it’s ties to old power structures.
By the way, I love your second suggestion. I’m a white working class left-liberal. I used to belong to AFSCME, but stopped paying dues. The reason is, though union members supported Sanders in 2016, the union leadership officially backed Clinton.
Unions are no longer a real force of labor organizing. They’ve become controlled opposition that are beholden to corporate interests, by way of corporatist politicians. The only way to break this would be something along the lines of your Plan B.
I don’t want to organize as a worker. Being a worker is such a small part of my identity. And I have no love of my job, much less pride for merely working. Most of all, I’m a human, a citizen, a community member, and a neighbor. Worker rights would be moot, if we had effective civil rights, in terms of both negative and positive freedoms.
As I recall, Hillary Clinton slightly beat Donald Trump among working class whites or lower income whites. Trump, in general, did badly among the working class overall, with his strongest base of support being middle class (above average in wealth and education), and doing well among the rich. But this is typical of Republicans, as Andrew Gelman pointed out. It turns out that even the white working class hasn’t solidly and consistently turned Red.
Rather, it’s only specific parts of the white working class (Southern, rural, less educated) that is feeling particularly drawn to Republicans, but these demographics don’t represent the majority of the white working class, much less the working class in total. The question then is not only why is the working class divided but, specifically, why is the white working class divided. Yet why do Democrats maintain their hold on the working class, despite forces working against them? And why aren’t we talking about all of those other lower class whites, particularly the majority that is non-Southern and non-rural?
Also, the larger set of data indicates that most interesting is how the situation is fluctuating and uncertain. Consider that a large part of Trump voters said they voted for Barack Obama and would’ve voted for Bernie Sanders instead, if he had been nominated — that means Trump was their second choice as a protest vote, following a Democratic candidate being their first choice. Then again, that is part of the failure of the DNC in shutting out populist and leftist leadership. What this demonstrates is that working class whites haven’t actually gone right.
They simply haven’t been given any real choices on the left. That is because we have a one-party state with two right wings. But there is a pattern here in what many Americans are demanding, specifically in the context of a left-liberal majority. The commonality of Bush, Obama, Sanders, and Trump has been economic populist rhetoric. The problem is, other than Sanders, none of those were actually economic populists. The elite in both parties keep the actual economic populists out of power, through control of the party machines and control of the corporate media. That class war will tell you a lot about the present working class.