3 ms·

> Dems appeal among actual working class people (read: usually minorities who don't own quarter million dollar trucks) remains extremely strong. The latest NYT

> 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.

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.