7 ms·

This doesn't hold up given that in 2012, Wisconsin was only +7.5, Iowa was +6, and Michigan was +10, an across the board drop of 5-8 points in those states over

This doesn't hold up given that in 2012, Wisconsin was only +7.5, Iowa was +6, and Michigan was +10, an across the board drop of 5-8 points in those states over 4 years for the same guy when, by all accounts as in incumbent, he should have done better. This line of conspiracy only works if you pretend that Democrats are the only people with agency, and that there wasn't active and successful work in the Republican arena to appeal to voters "racial anxieties". The party was actively being racist, but apparently saying that is unacceptable. > Regan suburbs in Atlanta Cobb county is majority minority as of the 2020 census. It was 75% white in 2000, probably like 80 or 85 for Reagan. Dems appeal among actual working class people (read: usually minorities who don't own quarter million dollar trucks) remains extremely strong.

hpkuarg 4y ago
> Dems appeal among actual working class people (read: usually minorities who don't own quarter million dollar trucks) remains extremely strong. The latest NYT/Siena poll suggests exactly otherwise for the coming midterms. Dems carry the white college-educated vote by a substantial margin and lose all working-class groups (non-college-degree, lower income) to Reps. The message is that the Democratic Party as of now caters to those who are financially well enough off that social ("woke") issues matter more than economic issues.
- joshuamorton 4y ago
  the poll you're referencing (https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/us0722-crosstabs-nyt071122/33ffa85627ee4648/full.pdf https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/us0722-crosstabs-nyt0...) doesn't check income anywhere. Dems fail to win the non-college white vote, but carry the non-college educated vote for other ethnic groups, which is the same way its always been.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    College education is not only a strong proxy for income, but an even better proxy for working class status than income. The guy who redid my bathroom probably makes more than some of my lawyer friends doing government work. But he still removes and replaces toilets for a living and they don't and that's a form of privilege in and of itself. And the current poll does not reflect the "way it's always been." Democrats were competitive for white voters with just a college degree as recently as 2008: https://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493763493/charts-see-how-quickly-white-non-college-voters-have-fled-the-democratic-party https://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493763493/charts-see-how-quic.... In 2016 they lost that group by almost 30 points. They've replaced those folks with a coalition of Silicon Valley engineers and Wall Streets bankers who used to vote Republican, and racial minorities. Good for fund raising, but results in a party that cannot effectively advocate for the working class.
    - joshuamorton 4y ago
      > And the current poll does not reflect the "way it's always been." Democrats were competitive for white voters with just a college degree as recently as 2008: https://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493763493/charts-see-how-quic https://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493763493/charts-see-how-quic.... In 2016 they lost that group by almost 30 points. In a parallel thread about Obama's performance in 2012, you said > The recovery from the 2008 recession was very slow, and the unemployment rate for most of 2012 was over 8%. George H.W. Bush lost reelection with an unemployment rate that was less than that. Can you explain to me how it is that the economic recovery anxiety affected precisely one group of people, white voters without a college degree, and why their support continued bottoming out in Obama's second term even post-recovery? Like my thesis here is "The Republicans, as early as 2009, adopted a strategy to appeal to the racial anxieties of less-educated white voters, which pulled support from those groups to republicans". Yours appears to be "Until around 2013, support among only less-educated white voters dropped due to economic recovery concerns, but all other groups were unconcerned with the economy, and, just as the economy began to improve, the dem party decided to switch strategies specifically to not appeal to those voters". Like for all the weird bad pundit takes that exist, I don't even think this take exists on the spectrum. Pretty much everyone agrees that there was concerted effort by Republicans to stoke racial anxiety and appeal to white voters. Like, that was the entire way Trump got his initial boost onto the scene (Obama's birth certificate nonsense). Why are you pretending that's not the case? > College education is not only a strong proxy for income, but an even better proxy for working class status than income. What does "working class" mean here? Like, if you're going to say that working class isn't income-driven but perception driven, ok sure, but then the existence of concepts like "driving while black" suggest that the US's class system also includes race, which means that policies that help minorities are class based! You can't have it both ways. And keep in mind that the whole income v. education thing is highly impacted by race (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rfd.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rfd.as...). A white voter who didn't complete high school has the same income, on average, as a black voter who has completed some college, and for all races except whites, the difference between no high school and a BA is more than 2x, but for white people it's only around 1.86x. That is, correlation between income and education is significantly weaker for white people than for any other race.
rayiner 4y ago
> This doesn't hold up given that in 2012, Wisconsin was only +7.5, Iowa was +6, and Michigan was +10, an across the board drop of 5-8 points in those states over 4 years for the same guy when, by all accounts as in incumbent, he should have done better. The recovery from the 2008 recession was very slow, and the unemployment rate for most of 2012 was over 8%. George H.W. Bush lost reelection with an unemployment rate that was less than that. > Dems appeal among actual working class people (read: usually minorities who don't own quarter million dollar trucks) remains extremely strong. White non-college graduates made up 43% of the electorate in 2018. Non-whites made up only 24%. Restructuring the Democratic Party around graduate-school level race theory was an excellent way to destroy its ability to advocate for the working class. At best, working class white people don't get the rhetoric. At worst, they correctly perceive that it's not in their interest to support Democratic policies that redistribute opportunities along racial lines: https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2021/06/12/yet-another-federal-court-tells-biden-that-he-cant-exclude-whites-from-his-relief-programs/?sh=aab21d15e1fc https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2021/06/12/yet-an.... Such policies deliberately avoid redistribution across class lines. I.e. if you spend political capital fighting to redistribute funds amongst small businesses based on race, you have less political capital to spend redistributing from big businesses to small businesses. Democrats have already lost working class people. They're 11 points behind among non-college graduates overall according to recent New York Times polling: https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/working-class-and-hispanic-voters https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/working-class-and-h.... Currently, what's keeping them afloat is a supermajority among minorities. But that's eroding as well, as working class Hispanics start trending the same way as other working class people. Biden won just 55% of non-college Hispanics in 2020. In the latest NYT poll, the parties are tied among non-college Hispanics in terms of which party they want to control Congress in 2022. Democrats' long-term hope long term is that Hispanics vote the way Black people do, rather than the way Italians and Irish did. (The latter were key Democratic constituencies until they went for the GOP under Reagan.) The math on that isn't looking good. Democrats cannot be the party of racial gerrymandering and critical race theory and also the party of the working class. That's not mathematically possible.
- joshuamorton 4y ago
  > Restructuring the Democratic Party around graduate-school level race theory was an excellent way to destroy its ability to advocate for the working class. At best, working class white people don't get the rhetoric. > At worst, they correctly perceive that it's not in their interest to support Democratic policies that redistribute opportunities along racial lines This is only a correct perception if they decide to make it a fight. There is nothing that implicitly prevents a big tent dem party from both advocating for working class and minority beneficial policies. It's only zero sum because people like you claim it's zero sum and create the perception that it is so. Don't do that, and push back against others that do that, and the problem goes away. >Such policies deliberately avoid redistribution across class lines. No they don't (I mean even ignoring the extent that redistribution along racial lines usually correlates with class lines pretty well), there isn't anything that prevents you from doing both. It only costs political capital when you make it a fight. If everyone in the dem party were like me, doing both wouldn't cost any political capital! If you believe that such policies are bad, say that. If you think such policies are good, support them! Don't do this half-hearted thing where you just claim the policies are electorally untenable. That's self-fulfilling because saying it's zero sum drives the perception that it is so.
wil421 4y ago
Cobb county is not becoming blue because of demographics. As another poster pointed out it’s likely the college educated younger people like myself.
- joshuamorton 4y ago
  It can be both. (If you overlay the precinct-level results from https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cobbcounty.org.if-us-west-2/prod/2020-11/03Nov2020-SOVC%20Official%20and%20Complete.pdf https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cobbcounty.org.if-us-west... on a demographic map, it becomes apparent that the more educated parts of Cobb are redder than the less educated parts. This correlates basically perfectly with the less white vs. whiter parts). I'm from Smyrna originally and lived there for the majority of my life. East Cobb (although it is purpleish, not just red, and that is due to college education) is redder than Smyrna/Marietta, despite being much more educated.
  - wil421 4y ago
    I’m from East Cobb and live here currently. There’s been a big change from 2000, starting in 2016. 2020 highlighted the shift.[1] I don’t think it’s race related if I look at the demographic changes in the past few censuses. East Cobb has always been more conservative and they have a senior population who’s not changing views. [1] https://www.11alive.com/amp/article/news/politics/elections/seismic-political-shift-takes-place-in-cobb-county-offices/85-a0a27654-5eec-420c-9f34-fcd36ce027c1 https://www.11alive.com/amp/article/news/politics/elections/...
colpabar 4y ago
> Dems appeal among actual working class people (read: usually minorities who don't own quarter million dollar trucks) remains extremely strong. This is a perfect example of why I cannot call myself a democrat anymore. Can you not see how an unemployed white person in the rust belt who lost his job because the factory he worked at was moved to China because of NAFTA may interpret this as extremely dismissive? Why should he vote for someone who claims that he isn't a "real" working class person?
- joshuamorton 4y ago
  I'm confused, are you saying this jobless rust belt person owns a quarter million dollar 18-wheeler? I'm certainly not saying that white people can't be working class. That'd be silly. What I am saying is that often, we pretend that very affluent rural whites are "working class" to the deficit of urban (and often minority) working class people. Edit: I'm really having a hard time understanding how you've turned my statement which was functionally "nonwhite people can also be working class" into "white people cannot be working class". So I'm going to disengage.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - colpabar 4y ago
    > I'm confused, are you saying this jobless rust belt person owns a quarter million dollar 18-wheeler? No, I'm not, and I think you know that I'm not. I grew up around people like this - rich kids who would put exhaust stacks on their lifted F350s - so I know what you mean. My point is that the dem response to the hollowing out of the american working class (obligatory bill clinton approved NAFTA mention) seems to be "should've gone to college lol". Like it or not, white people are the majority in america, so it seems extremely counterproductive to only consider the needs of the "real" (read: not white) working class people instead of the entire group.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    No, you said “actual working class people” are “usually minorities.” That’s both wildly inaccurate and dismissive of working class white people.

hpkuarg 4y ago

> Dems appeal among actual working class people (read: usually minorities who don't own quarter million dollar trucks) remains extremely strong. The latest NYT/Siena poll suggests exactly otherwise for the coming midterms. Dems carry the white college-educated vote by a substantial margin and lose all working-class groups (non-college-degree, lower income) to Reps. The message is that the Democratic Party as of now caters to those who are financially well enough off that social ("woke") issues matter more than economic issues.

joshuamorton 4y ago
the poll you're referencing (https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/us0722-crosstabs-nyt071122/33ffa85627ee4648/full.pdf https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/us0722-crosstabs-nyt0...) doesn't check income anywhere. Dems fail to win the non-college white vote, but carry the non-college educated vote for other ethnic groups, which is the same way its always been.
- rayiner 4y ago
  College education is not only a strong proxy for income, but an even better proxy for working class status than income. The guy who redid my bathroom probably makes more than some of my lawyer friends doing government work. But he still removes and replaces toilets for a living and they don't and that's a form of privilege in and of itself. And the current poll does not reflect the "way it's always been." Democrats were competitive for white voters with just a college degree as recently as 2008: https://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493763493/charts-see-how-quickly-white-non-college-voters-have-fled-the-democratic-party https://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493763493/charts-see-how-quic.... In 2016 they lost that group by almost 30 points. They've replaced those folks with a coalition of Silicon Valley engineers and Wall Streets bankers who used to vote Republican, and racial minorities. Good for fund raising, but results in a party that cannot effectively advocate for the working class.
  - joshuamorton 4y ago
    > And the current poll does not reflect the "way it's always been." Democrats were competitive for white voters with just a college degree as recently as 2008: https://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493763493/charts-see-how-quic https://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493763493/charts-see-how-quic.... In 2016 they lost that group by almost 30 points. In a parallel thread about Obama's performance in 2012, you said > The recovery from the 2008 recession was very slow, and the unemployment rate for most of 2012 was over 8%. George H.W. Bush lost reelection with an unemployment rate that was less than that. Can you explain to me how it is that the economic recovery anxiety affected precisely one group of people, white voters without a college degree, and why their support continued bottoming out in Obama's second term even post-recovery? Like my thesis here is "The Republicans, as early as 2009, adopted a strategy to appeal to the racial anxieties of less-educated white voters, which pulled support from those groups to republicans". Yours appears to be "Until around 2013, support among only less-educated white voters dropped due to economic recovery concerns, but all other groups were unconcerned with the economy, and, just as the economy began to improve, the dem party decided to switch strategies specifically to not appeal to those voters". Like for all the weird bad pundit takes that exist, I don't even think this take exists on the spectrum. Pretty much everyone agrees that there was concerted effort by Republicans to stoke racial anxiety and appeal to white voters. Like, that was the entire way Trump got his initial boost onto the scene (Obama's birth certificate nonsense). Why are you pretending that's not the case? > College education is not only a strong proxy for income, but an even better proxy for working class status than income. What does "working class" mean here? Like, if you're going to say that working class isn't income-driven but perception driven, ok sure, but then the existence of concepts like "driving while black" suggest that the US's class system also includes race, which means that policies that help minorities are class based! You can't have it both ways. And keep in mind that the whole income v. education thing is highly impacted by race (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rfd.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rfd.as...). A white voter who didn't complete high school has the same income, on average, as a black voter who has completed some college, and for all races except whites, the difference between no high school and a BA is more than 2x, but for white people it's only around 1.86x. That is, correlation between income and education is significantly weaker for white people than for any other race.

rayiner 4y ago

> This doesn't hold up given that in 2012, Wisconsin was only +7.5, Iowa was +6, and Michigan was +10, an across the board drop of 5-8 points in those states over 4 years for the same guy when, by all accounts as in incumbent, he should have done better. The recovery from the 2008 recession was very slow, and the unemployment rate for most of 2012 was over 8%. George H.W. Bush lost reelection with an unemployment rate that was less than that. > Dems appeal among actual working class people (read: usually minorities who don't own quarter million dollar trucks) remains extremely strong. White non-college graduates made up 43% of the electorate in 2018. Non-whites made up only 24%. Restructuring the Democratic Party around graduate-school level race theory was an excellent way to destroy its ability to advocate for the working class. At best, working class white people don't get the rhetoric. At worst, they correctly perceive that it's not in their interest to support Democratic policies that redistribute opportunities along racial lines: https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2021/06/12/yet-another-federal-court-tells-biden-that-he-cant-exclude-whites-from-his-relief-programs/?sh=aab21d15e1fc https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2021/06/12/yet-an.... Such policies deliberately avoid redistribution across class lines. I.e. if you spend political capital fighting to redistribute funds amongst small businesses based on race, you have less political capital to spend redistributing from big businesses to small businesses. Democrats have already lost working class people. They're 11 points behind among non-college graduates overall according to recent New York Times polling: https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/working-class-and-hispanic-voters https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/working-class-and-h.... Currently, what's keeping them afloat is a supermajority among minorities. But that's eroding as well, as working class Hispanics start trending the same way as other working class people. Biden won just 55% of non-college Hispanics in 2020. In the latest NYT poll, the parties are tied among non-college Hispanics in terms of which party they want to control Congress in 2022. Democrats' long-term hope long term is that Hispanics vote the way Black people do, rather than the way Italians and Irish did. (The latter were key Democratic constituencies until they went for the GOP under Reagan.) The math on that isn't looking good. Democrats cannot be the party of racial gerrymandering and critical race theory and also the party of the working class. That's not mathematically possible.

joshuamorton 4y ago
> Restructuring the Democratic Party around graduate-school level race theory was an excellent way to destroy its ability to advocate for the working class. At best, working class white people don't get the rhetoric. > At worst, they correctly perceive that it's not in their interest to support Democratic policies that redistribute opportunities along racial lines This is only a correct perception if they decide to make it a fight. There is nothing that implicitly prevents a big tent dem party from both advocating for working class and minority beneficial policies. It's only zero sum because people like you claim it's zero sum and create the perception that it is so. Don't do that, and push back against others that do that, and the problem goes away. >Such policies deliberately avoid redistribution across class lines. No they don't (I mean even ignoring the extent that redistribution along racial lines usually correlates with class lines pretty well), there isn't anything that prevents you from doing both. It only costs political capital when you make it a fight. If everyone in the dem party were like me, doing both wouldn't cost any political capital! If you believe that such policies are bad, say that. If you think such policies are good, support them! Don't do this half-hearted thing where you just claim the policies are electorally untenable. That's self-fulfilling because saying it's zero sum drives the perception that it is so.

wil421 4y ago

Cobb county is not becoming blue because of demographics. As another poster pointed out it’s likely the college educated younger people like myself.

joshuamorton 4y ago
It can be both. (If you overlay the precinct-level results from https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cobbcounty.org.if-us-west-2/prod/2020-11/03Nov2020-SOVC%20Official%20and%20Complete.pdf https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cobbcounty.org.if-us-west... on a demographic map, it becomes apparent that the more educated parts of Cobb are redder than the less educated parts. This correlates basically perfectly with the less white vs. whiter parts). I'm from Smyrna originally and lived there for the majority of my life. East Cobb (although it is purpleish, not just red, and that is due to college education) is redder than Smyrna/Marietta, despite being much more educated.
- wil421 4y ago
  I’m from East Cobb and live here currently. There’s been a big change from 2000, starting in 2016. 2020 highlighted the shift.[1] I don’t think it’s race related if I look at the demographic changes in the past few censuses. East Cobb has always been more conservative and they have a senior population who’s not changing views. [1] https://www.11alive.com/amp/article/news/politics/elections/seismic-political-shift-takes-place-in-cobb-county-offices/85-a0a27654-5eec-420c-9f34-fcd36ce027c1 https://www.11alive.com/amp/article/news/politics/elections/...

colpabar 4y ago

> Dems appeal among actual working class people (read: usually minorities who don't own quarter million dollar trucks) remains extremely strong. This is a perfect example of why I cannot call myself a democrat anymore. Can you not see how an unemployed white person in the rust belt who lost his job because the factory he worked at was moved to China because of NAFTA may interpret this as extremely dismissive? Why should he vote for someone who claims that he isn't a "real" working class person?

joshuamorton 4y ago
I'm confused, are you saying this jobless rust belt person owns a quarter million dollar 18-wheeler? I'm certainly not saying that white people can't be working class. That'd be silly. What I am saying is that often, we pretend that very affluent rural whites are "working class" to the deficit of urban (and often minority) working class people. Edit: I'm really having a hard time understanding how you've turned my statement which was functionally "nonwhite people can also be working class" into "white people cannot be working class". So I'm going to disengage.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- colpabar 4y ago
  > I'm confused, are you saying this jobless rust belt person owns a quarter million dollar 18-wheeler? No, I'm not, and I think you know that I'm not. I grew up around people like this - rich kids who would put exhaust stacks on their lifted F350s - so I know what you mean. My point is that the dem response to the hollowing out of the american working class (obligatory bill clinton approved NAFTA mention) seems to be "should've gone to college lol". Like it or not, white people are the majority in america, so it seems extremely counterproductive to only consider the needs of the "real" (read: not white) working class people instead of the entire group.
- rayiner 4y ago
  No, you said “actual working class people” are “usually minorities.” That’s both wildly inaccurate and dismissive of working class white people.