Over the past few decades, working class whites – loosely defined as those without college degrees – have been a strikingly reliable indicator of the strength of the two main political parties. These voters are highly volatile and their shifting loyalties are a powerful factor in determining control of Congress and of the White House, according to recently re-analyzed exit poll data provided to the Times by Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, and Sam Best, a political scientist at the University of Connecticut.
Take a look at the fluctuating level of support white non-college voters gave to Democratic congressional candidates between 1984, when exit polls first asked respondents about their level of education, and 2010:
Thomas B. EdsallIn effect, the white working class vote is a barometer.
When this once reliably Democratic constituency moves away from the party by large margins, Democrats lose. In 1984, when Ronald Reagan crushed Walter Mondale, working-class whites backed Republican House candidates over Democrats by 57.1 to 41.9, a 15.2 point difference. In 1994, when Republicans swept to power in both the House and Senate, the Republican margin of support among working class white voters was 21.2 points, 60.6 to 39.4. In 2010, another Republican landslide year in House elections, the margin among whites without college degrees was 20.6 points, 55.3 to 34.7.
Conversely, when working class whites view Republican House candidates less favorably, Democrats do well. In 1986, Democrats regained control of the Senate when they split the votes of whites without college degrees, 49.4-50.6, a difference of just 1.2 percentage points. In 1990, when Democrats picked up seven House seats and one Senate seat, the white working class cast a relatively strong 7.8 point majority for Democratic House candidates, 53.9-46.1. In 1992, with Bill Clinton at the top of the ticket, a majority of these voters again supported House Democratic candidates, 52.7-47.3.
The correlation between support from working class whites and Democratic victory suggests that the party takes a great risk when it downplays the importance of this segment of the electorate, as some strategists are wont to do.
Interestingly, the same barometer effect is not apparent in the voting pattern of whites with college degrees. For 13 elections over 26 years, according to the data provided by Abramowitz and Cash, these college-educated voters have stayed within the 40 to 50 percent range: the Democratic – Republican split in House voting among whites with college degrees scarcely changes over time, and is far less determinative than the gyrations among the white working class.
Thomas B. EdsallAlthough firmly Democratic, African American voters can also shift sharply. The Democratic Party depends heavily on black support, of course, but its electoral success or failure does not correlate with black margins in the same way that it does with those of the white working class. Black Democratic margins were high in two disastrous years, 1984 and 1994 — perhaps in response to the threat of Republican ascendance — and in the victorious election of Obama in 2008. Black margins of support for Democratic House candidates were at their lowest in two relatively good years for the party, 1990 and 1996 – perhaps because Democratic victory seemed secure.
Thomas B. EdsallExit poll and related data also reveals that the Democratic Party has shown a tendency to pick presidential nominees who run relatively poorly among white working class voters. These candidates include Adlai Stevenson, Walter F. Mondale, Michael S. Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, and, famously, Barack Obama.
Regarding Stevenson, who lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower twice in 1952 and 1956 (in the last pair of consecutive elections to feature the same candidates for both parties), Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, collected data that tracks presidential voting by whites without college degrees in elections from 1952 to 1980. Stevenson lost decisively among these voters, in contrast to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter (in 1976), who all did well. Another Democrat who helped boost House Democratic voting among working class whites was Bill Clinton, both times around.
Obviously, the rejection of many Democratic presidential nominees by whites without college degrees is relevant to Obama’s prospects on Nov. 6. In 2008, Obama lost white working class voters by a landslide, 18 points, although he did 5 points better than Kerry. For Obama, the trick will be to avoid falling into the Stevenson-Mondale-Dukakis trap, and to place himself more in the tradition of Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton. It will not be easy.
The white working class has become the lynchpin constituency of conservative Republicanism. As a group, they can be often be relied upon to vote for the candidate on the right by far higher margins than college-educated whites.
Abramowitz included the following chart in his recent book, “The Polarized Public? Why Our Government Is So Dysfunctional.” It shows the decline, over time, of Democratic loyalties and the parallel rise in Republican allegiance among three core New Deal constituencies: southern whites, northern white working class voters and northern white Catholics.
Courtesy of Alan I. AbramowitzCould it be any clearer? These trends would clearly be disastrous for the Democratic Party — except for two well-documented counter-developments: first, the white working class is declining steadily as a share of the electorate; and second, Democrats have made huge gains in a previously Republican constituency, well-educated white professionals, many with advanced degrees.
“America in 1940 was an overwhelmingly white working class country,” Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira wrote in a 2008 Brookings Institution report, “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class:”
In that year, 86 percent of adults 25 and over were whites without a four year college degree. By 2007, with the dramatic rise in educational attainment and the decline in the white population, that percentage was down to 48 percent.
But just as the white working class is now a smaller share of the electorate, Republican margins in this cohort have been getting larger, compensating for the decline in group size. In the five congressional elections of the 1990s, the Republican Party won an average of 52.3 percent of the House vote; in the six elections from 2000 to 2010, Republicans won 58.7 percent.
The defection of these voters was crucial to the ability of the Republican Party to enact legislation – especially tax laws – that favor the affluent; working class support gave the Republican Party protection from charges that it advocated only for the rich and for the material interests of corporate America.
At the same time, the loss of white non-college voters has diminished pressure within the Democratic Party to address the dislocations resulting from globalization and automation, especially the loss of low-to-medium-skill jobs that paid high wages to workers without college degrees.
The result is that the Democratic Party has failed to develop a coherent or consistent set of policies to address what is now the dominant issue of the day, the violent restructuring of the American economy, which can be seen from many angles: in the continuing after effects of the financial collapse of 2008; in the rise of inequality; in the decline of social and economic mobility; and in the devastating $49,100 drop in average family wealth, from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010, a 39 percent drop of net assets in just three years.
Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published in January.
