Good article on the changing Democratic Party demographics.
Money quote: But here's the secret of the Democratic primaries: They are no longer dominated by millworkers and milkmen. Steadily, the Democratic Party is becoming the party of the educated upper middle class
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Democrats Drop the Lunch Pail
By E.J. Dionne Jr. Washington Post
Tuesday, October 14, 2003; Page A23
There was a time when the Democratic Party followed the lead of that great political philosopher John Lennon in believing that a working-class hero is something to be. That time may be passing, and that could be a problem for Democrats.
One of the most striking moments in last week's debate among Democratic presidential candidates in Phoenix was Sen. John Edwards's reply to a question from Jeff Greenfield of CNN. Greenfield made the point that two of the party's greatest heroes, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, were patricians. Why, Greenfield wanted to know, did Edwards make such a big deal about his background as the son of a millworker?
Edwards gave one of his better answers of the night. "The way you grew up," he said, can lend "credibility . . . to your vision."
Because he was the first member of his family to go to college, Edwards said his plan to allow other Americans to have the same chance is "personal to me."
"When I fight to make sure that the middle class in America, not just the wealthy, gets a chance to do what they're capable of doing," he said, picking up his refrain, "that's personal to me."
Greenfield was right that FDR and JFK were patricians, but both won the presidency supported by a Democratic Party with deep roots in what we used to call, without embarrassment, the working class. As recently as a decade ago, Edwards's themes about the links between his roots and his political convictions would have gone over very well indeed. Look how far the man "born in a place called Hope" got. Rep. Dick Gephardt would also be making strides with his similar talk about his background as the son of a milkman.
But here's the secret of the Democratic primaries: They are no longer dominated by millworkers and milkmen. Steadily, the Democratic Party is becoming the party of the educated upper middle class.
Just look at last week's recall vote in California: The strongest opposition to tossing Democratic Gov. Gray Davis from office came from voters with postgraduate degrees. (Davis also appeared to do reasonably well among voters who did not graduate from high school -- part of the Democratic base that pollster Andy Kohut calls "the partisan poor." But members of this group did not figure in large enough numbers in post-election surveys for analysis.) Where Davis got clobbered was in the middle range -- effectively the great middle class Democrats talk about so much.
These are worrisome numbers for Democrats. For one thing, those "postgraduate" voters include many members of what political scientist Henry Milner labels "the state middle class" -- teachers, nurses, social workers and others whose livelihoods depend on government expenditures. It is no knock on the helping professions to say that a political party won't win -- and Davis didn't -- if it cannot extend its reach far beyond their ranks.
This year's Democratic primary fight is, with its relentless focus on Iraq and foreign policy, pushing candidates even more toward the concerns of the educated class. Yes, it's far better for Democrats to talk about foreign policy than to be tongue-tied on the subject, as so many of them were in the 2002 election. Voters of every class care about national security.
But there also could be a push-pull effect: A campaign that fails to focus enough on bread-and-butter concerns might aggravate the Democrats' middle-class problems by burying the very themes that could draw such voters away from President Bush in the fall.
Of course, all the candidates talk about taxes, health care and jobs. And this is no longer FDR's electorate. In the three elections from 1992, Democrats won the popular vote partly because they did so well among the highly educated. This group has become ever larger as people -- John Edwards among them -- have climbed the class and education ladders.
Still, the Republicans who regularly condemn "class warfare" have shown great skill at playing the class card. They have condemned "liberal elitists" on cultural and moral issues to make deep inroads into once-Democratic constituencies.
The class war could play itself out in the Democratic primaries. Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, says his analysis of recent Gallup polls finds that while former Vermont governor Howard Dean's constituency is rooted among "upscale, antiwar social liberals," retired Gen. Wesley Clark "does really well among middle- to low-income voters."
Dean, to gain ground, and Clark, to hold his, could usefully study up on the speeches of John Edwards. Without the votes of America's working-class heroes, the Democrats can't win.
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