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Flipping around the web today, I came across this concern trollish title at the Politico:
Dems must woo white men to win
The subsequent article to follow this title was written by David Paul Kuhn in order to help sell copies of his new book: "The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma." Reading through the article felt like I was caught in some sort of time warp in American politics, where the 2006 elections never happened and the non-white population of America wasn't exploding. Beyond simply 2006, it read as though it came from an even earlier era, like the 1980's or 1990's, when conservative backlash against "PC" was all the rage. For example:
As portrayed by the new breed of liberalism, the white man held all the cards, and everyone else's bad deal was his fault. The problem was that the bulk of white men did not feel like dealers or players. They felt like pieces on someone else's table, and their livelihood, their family's very stability, was in richer men's hands, as well.
And:
These men are seen as failing to capitalize on "white male privilege." Those who felt powerless, like so many women and minorities, were told they were indeed powerful. Conservatives came to validate a struggle many liberals had demeaned as merely the anger of the "angry white male."
Thank you very much Morton Downey Jr. I have a couple of quick responses to the basic thesis being presented here:
- Democrats are not losing all "white men." In fact, Democrats are performing just as well among non-Christian white men as they are among non-white men (about 65%-70% vote Democrat in both cases). Democrats also score about 70% of the male LGBT vote, and 65% of the male union member vote. I imagine many of those groups are white, too.
- Democrats are actually losing the white, straight, Christian, non-union male vote. More than just losing, Democrats are getting thoroughly trounced in this demographic, and are lucky to score more than 30% of the vote here in any given national election. This group forms about 25-30% of a shrinking percentage of the electorate, as both self-identified Christians and self-identified whites are dropping precipitously as a percentage of the electorate. These drops easily cancel out the drop in union membership.
- If the Democratic electoral problem is actually among white, straight, Christian, non-union men (termed WSCNUM from now on), then doesn't the cause of this problem become pretty obvious? It is a combination of multi-faceted identity backlash and the collapse of union density in America.
- Given the scope of the causes that led to this electoral situation, isn't it as equally obvious that this isn't something political strategy or a change in rhetoric can solve? These are massive, underlying, ideological and economic trends in America, and will not be fixed unless there is a broad shift in the operation of several important ideological state apparatuses. Democrats can't paper over these differences with a few tweaks in candidate recruitment and national convention rhetoric. These divisions will persist in America almost no matter what Democrats do, even during a long-term period of governance.
- Looking to the long-term trends, rather than the past, the WSCNUM vote (25-30%) is smaller than the non-white and / or non-Christian vote (NWNC, 35-40%). This wasn't always the case, as the WSCNUM vote was equal in size to the NWNC vote as recently as 1994, and before then was much larger than it. Sure, this is how Republicans took power from 1968-1994, but in 2006 Democrats lost white men by 9% and still won the election by 8.2%, a margin greater than any Republican victory since 1984. In fact the entire reason why Republican blowouts in the mode of 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988 and 1994 don't happen anymore is because of this demographic shift. Democrats never won this vote, and in fact never really made a dent in this vote outside of Bill Clinton and Iraq-fueled 2006, but they kept getting closer anyway because the size of the two bases were moving in opposite directions. Republicans were actually winning by less and less from 1972 to 2004, and unless there was a demographic change in the two coalitions, eventually they were going to start losing without any shift in the WSCNUM at all.
My point is all of this is two-fold. First, Democrats are not losing all types of white men, and are actually doing quite well among some groups. Second, the groups they are doing the worst among are also shrinking relative to the rest of the electorate. Basically, this means that Democrats don't need to do any better among white men, but the occasional moments when they do as the result of a major national catastrophe like Iraq will lead to huge landslides ala 2006. Further, in another nine years, Democrats won't even need Iraq to replicate results like 2006. By that point, the gap between WSCNUMs and NCNWs should reach 16% as a percentage of the electorate, giving Democrats a built-in advantage equal to 2006 election results if there are no changes in the partisan preference of existing demographic groups.
And even apart from all of that, how does changing your electoral strategy to appeal to your least favorable demographic group make sense, especially now that you are starting to win elections across the board and since that demographic group is declining in size? Personally, that sounds like snagging defeat from the jaws of victory.
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