More Dem lunacy
>Should Dems Love White Guys, Or Dump Them?
Thomas B. Edsall, HuffPost Forum
December 12, 2007
One of the longer-running and more contentious strategic debates among Democrats and liberals involves the importance of white men -- especially white working- and middle-class men -- to the building of a majority coalition.
Formerly a mainstay of the pre-1960s Roosevelt coalition, these voters have since become a key constituency for the Republican Party.
First, in the 1980 election, white men provided the votes essential for Reagan's victory and the Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate. Their defection from the Democratic Party was the driving force behind the emergence that year of the contemporary gender gap - much more so than stronger Democratic identification among women.
White males, dubbed "angry white men," were in the vanguard of the Republican Revolution of 1994. From 1990 to 1994, the percentage of high school educated white men voting Democratic in congressional races dropped an extraordinary 20 points (for white, high school educated women, the drop was 10 points).
There are multiple dilemmas posed for liberal and Democratic strategists when considering whether or not it is important to bring white men back into the fold.
On the negative side:
Are white men impossible to win over in greater numbers? Would appeal to those who have abandoned the Democrats require excessively "tough guy" posturing on crime and foreign policy? Are these men now culturally alien to the contemporary Democratic party? Why invest in a constituency steadily declining as a share of the electorate, when others, especially Hispanics, are the source of millions of new votes?
On the plus side:
How can the Democrats claim to be the party of working men and women without the backing of more white men? Would the inclusion of more white men prevent over-dependence on 'identity group' politics? Isn't an appeal to white men an integral part of the broader appeal to centrist, middle-class voters who, arguably, are crucial to Democratic victories?
The Huffington Post has invited some of the participants in this debate to share their views on the subject. They are David Paul Kuhn, a reporter for Politico and the author of The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma; Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation; Thomas F. Schaller, Department of Political Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Whistling Past Dixie; Todd Gitlin, Columbia Professor of Journalism and Sociology and author of The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals; Mike Tomasky, Editor-at-large, American Prospect; Adele M. Stan, a columnist for the American Prospect Online, program director of the National Women's Editorial Forum, and author of the blog AddieStan; Scott Winship, Senior Policy Adviser, Third Way; Donna Brazile, who has worked as a political strategist on every Democratic presidential campaign since 1984, who managed the Gore-Lieberman campaign, and who is the author of Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics; and Michael Lux, CEO of Progressive Strategies, a political consulting firm, and co-founder of Openleft.com.
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KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL, The Nation
Sheer number is one reason why white men are important to the building of a Democratic presidential majority. I don't have the current numbers handy but whites are still about 80 percent of the general US population and white men close to half that of the voting population. Only about 20+ percent of the population has 4-year college degrees. So the "white working class" -- just defined broadly as those without such degrees -- is about two-thirds of the electorate and white working class men about a third. It just doesn't make sense to write off that large a group.
Political opportunity is another. The exodus of whites and white men from the party really only happened in the South--as Larry Bartels has shown. And white guys, at least outside the South (though that's beginning to change, as my colleague Bob Moser is showing in his "Purple America" series for The Nation) have reasonable views on most things. They're concerned about the same stuff as everybody else ... healthcare, job security, education.
If we don't have something that could appeal to such people and lift them up then we shouldn't be in government.
Ordinary decency is a third. Put the shoe on the other foot. If anybody said "Hey, African-Americans and Latinos are not important to building this majority" (together, about a fifth of the electorate) people would say, rightly, that was racist, stupid and terrible. So why say it about white men? They're hurting and their hostility will hurt you in getting something for other groups; here, it's critical that progressives have an immigration policy that is about lifting up standards for ALL workers--uniting not dividing. And white guys are reachable.
Why on earth wouldn't you want to pay attention to them? The big issue in America right now is inequality and the devaluation of work. These are people who've suffered the most (in 'relative', not absolute, terms) from the increase in inequality and who've been devalued. Understanding them better will help us understand our country better. And healing their condition will go a long way toward healing the country--and building a Democratic presidential majority.
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THOMAS SCHALLER, Dept. of Political Science, University of Maryland
In the past half-century white men fell from about half of all voters to a third, and while that is still a significant chunk of the electorate, in business terms that's called a declining market share. Neither party, at this point, would be wise to invest too much attention or effort cultivating their votes, especially since large swaths of white males are not swing voters anyway.
Because of rising non-white populations and what seems like an ever-growing gender gap in turnout fueled by women out-participating men, white men simply cast a smaller and smaller share of the vote with each passing election. Second, within the white male vote there are large subgroups already voting reliably Republican. The two key swing subgroups are blue-collar cultural voters and white Catholics, which often overlap.
If a corporate marketing executive doing long-term planning recommended to his CEO a massive push to capture white male consumers, she'd tell him to clean out his desk by the end of the day because white men simply are not a "growth market." We ought to be equally skeptical of political advisers making similarly myopic recommendations--especially those advising Democrats, who are advantaged by gender and racial growth patterns.
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MICHAEL LUX, CEO of Progressive Strategies, Co-founder of Openleft.com
It is true that when you slice the electorate into four broad categories -- male and female people of color, white women, and white men -- that white men are easily the most Republican of those four groups. After all, men are more Republican than women, and whites are more Republican than any other racial group. But the category is so broad that it is not an especially useful construct.
The two questions Democrats should be asking regarding white men are (1) are there some sub-groups within that demographic that are base-voting Dems that need to be identified and turned out to vote?; and (2) are there swing voters to be found within that demographic? The answer to both questions, of course, is a big yes.
If you are a white man who is Jewish, otherwise non-Christian and/or not a regular church attender, gay, low-income, a big city resident, a union member, unmarried, or young, you are a lot more likely to vote Democratic. There are also plenty of swing voters in all of those categories, but there are also quite a few white male swing voters in other demographic sub-groups as well. White men earning between 30K and 50K a year, that are Catholic, that don't have a college degree and/or work in blue-collar jobs, that live in inner-ring suburbs and in small towns- all are more likely than average to be swing voters.
A generic debate about "shouldn't we be appealing to more white men?" has always struck me as meaningless, or as a veiled substitute for "don't we need to be more conservative?" since most of the people who use that broad argument tend to be from the DLC wing of the party. The question is what kind of message will appeal to the kinds of voters- base and swing, male and female, white and non-white- that we need to win. On that, I've always agreed with Lee Atwater that the crucial swing vote in Presidential politics is a populist vote--and that progressive populism done right also appeals to the base voters we need to turn out.
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SCOTT WINSHIP, Senior Policy Advisor, Third Way
Democratic candidates don't need to specifically prioritize white men, but they won't break-out of "50-50 Nation" elections unless they manage to win more moderates (who are disproportionately white men). |
