Worth Reading

May 21, 2008, 1:01 am
White On White
She’s got her white voters. He’s got his. Her whites go to church every week. His whites are more secular. Her whites have dirt under their fingernails. His are more likely to be changing ink cartridges in the office. Her whites like the hard stuff. His whites will choose Oregon pinot.
It makes you want to scream: enough with the hierarchal rankings of white Democratic voters.
But what Tuesday’s stumble-to-the-finish-line vote showed is that this sort of regional race trumpeting is largely meaningless — unless put in the correct context for the general election.
Consider the media shorthand for both Kentucky and West Virginia, where Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama by huge margins. These are hard-working, real Americans, the Clinton camp says, and a Democrat can’t win without them.
In fact, both West Virginia and Kentucky have gone against the national tide of the last 8 years and have been trending Republican. Also – and this needs to be said – a significant percentage of the voters in both those states have now indicated that they may not vote for a fellow Democrat simply because he’s black.
Pollsters know that people lie about race; voters rarely come out and say they will not vote for someone because he’s black. Instead, they say things like we’re hearing from West Virginia and Kentucky – that “race is a factor.”
In Kentucky, over 25 percent of Clinton supporters said race was a factor in their vote – about five times the national average for such a question. Clinton, if she really wanted to do something lasting, could ask her supporters why the color of a fellow Democrat’s skin is so important to their vote.
Now, consider the argument that a Democrat needs these states. In 2000, George Bush won West Virginia 52 to 46 percent. Four years later, he’d increased his margin to 56-43.
In Kentucky, Bush won 57-41 in 2000, and padded that to 60-40 four years later.
Appalachia, we now know, is Clinton’s heartland – but it does not resemble the Democratic landscape. If these are Democratic states, there’s some strange serum in the local brew at party headquarters.
On to Oregon, where Obama won by double digits. A bunch of chai tea sipping elitists, with zero body fat, living in hip lofts while working at Nike, yes? No. Well, they do like running, and tea. Oregon is one of the nation’s whitest states – just under 2 percent of residents are black – but rich it is not. The state is below the national average in both per capita income and median household income.
This suggests that Obama doesn’t have a white working class problem so much as a regional problem, in a place where Democrats won’t win anyway.
In Oregon, voters’ surveys show Obama essentially tied Clinton for the blue collar vote while running up a big victory.
And Oregon, unlike West Virginia and Kentucky, may actually be in play for the general election. Al Gore won it by barely 7,000 votes in 2000, a margin that went up to 60,000 votes in 2004. McCain’s advisers say he’s a perfect fit for the state – independent, somewhat maverick.
So, from a purely strategic point of view, the ability to win white blue-collar voters in an open-minded swing state is certainly more important than a solid red state. I would include Pennsylvania in that equation. Just weeks after all the talk of Obama’s problems in the Keystone state, most polls now show him beating McCain in the general election.
What happened in the last few weeks is that Appalachia, in a 24-7 media hothouse, skewed perception. We stared at it far too long, parsing it for meaning beyond its historic range and its hard prejudices.
The Gallup poll this week showed that the rest of the nation is closer to Oregon. Gallup’s daily national tracking poll of Democratic voters found Obama tied Clinton among white voters. He’s tied among people with no college. He’s actually leading – yes, leading! – with women. With the young, he’s leading 3-1. Clinton’s last demographic is women over 50.
So, for Democrats: hello life, goodbye Appalachia.
Comments (16)
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16 comments so far...
1.
May 21st,20082:22 am
Thank you so much for this excellent article. You have just proved how wrong political interpreters can be when they don’t take the bigger (national) data into account.
— Posted by Erin
2.
May 21st,20082:25 am
Hard words, Mr. Egan, but hard realities invite them. Spot on.
— Posted by Alan in Chicago
3.
May 21st,20084:08 am
With a sharp plain truth populist campaign- Democrats can win Appalachia too .
— Posted by G
4.
May 21st,20084:15 am
Another excellent column, Mr Egan. I’ve had enough with the hierarchical rankings of white Democratic voters as well! Thanks for putting the democratic primary victories of both Clinton and Obama in the context of the general election, which is when they will really matter.
— Posted by libiki
5.
May 21st,20084:26 am
Your article has made a good case that it is the relative prevalence of racial bias, and not simply socioeconomic class, that contributed to the size of Senator Clinton’s victories in Kentucky and West Virginia. Senator Clinton ignores that factor when touting those results as evidence of her strong support among white blue collar Americans.
If Senator Clinton is successful in this attempt to win the support of super delegates then she will create obligations to people many Democrats and many Americans would rather not see having a major impact on policy decisions.
The Republican Party tied itself so strongly to the Christian conservative evangelical movement that it now finds it impossible to advocate for or enact much needed legislation and administrative policy. Senator Clinton should be careful not to do something similar, and the Democratic Party should be careful not to allow that to happen.
— Posted by thatkenguy