Barack Obama first captured the national spotlight with a speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston in which he called for an end to the politics of division. The audience roared back its applause at the end of almost every line:
Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.
Americans, Obama declared, are
one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?
Now, faced with a tough re-election fight, President Obama has, in fundamental respects, adopted the strategy he denounced eight years ago.
He is running a two-track campaign. One track of his re-election drive seeks to boost turnout among core liberal groups; the other aims to suppress turnout and minimize his margin of defeat in the most hostile segment of the electorate, whites without college degrees.
This approach assumes a highly polarized electorate and tries to make the best of it.
On his campaign web site, Obama singles out 16 specific target constituencies under “groups.” Some are listed because it would be politically damaging to fail to include them: People of Faith; Veterans and Military Families; Rural Americans; Seniors; and Small Business Owners.
Others make up the heart of the liberal-left coalition: African Americans, Environmentalists, Latinos, Young Americans, LGBT Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, Educators, Jewish Americans, Nurses and Women.
Obama is actively courting all of these constituencies: ending the deportation of many young workers who are in the United States illegally; endorsing same-sex marriage; loosening work requirements for welfare recipients; pressing Congress to keep student loan rates low; rejecting the proposal to build the northern portion of the 1,700 mile Keystone pipeline from Canada to Texas; and promoting health-care reform that requires insurance plans to fully cover birth control without co-pays or deductibles.
Interestingly, the Obama campaign is not spending the lion’s share of its money on these groups. Instead, Obama’s television ads, at $65.6 million the biggest cost of his re-election bid so far, are overwhelmingly aimed at discrediting Mitt Romney.
The negative ads run by the Obama campaign and its allied “super PAC,” Priorities USA — ads demonizing Romney — target not only whites without college degrees, but in particular white men without degrees, a constituency Obama has no hope of winning.
The two anti-Romney commercials that appear to have resonated most powerfully, according to measures of YouTube views, are explicitly aimed at these voters.
Romney is particularly vulnerable to a campaign designed to suppress turnout because his support is more tepid than Obama’s.
The Priorities USA ad titled “Stage” — with over 1.4 million views — is narrated by Mike Earnest, a middle-aged white working-class man. He describes building a stage at a paper plant in Marion, Ind., that was in operation 24 hours a day. Shortly afterward, workers from all three shifts were called in. “A group of people walked out on that stage and told us that the plant is now closed and all of you are fired,” Earnest says. “Mitt Romney made over $100 million by shutting down our plant and devastated our lives. Turns out when we build that stage it was like building our own coffin, and it just makes me sick.”
An Obama ad, “Firms” with over 1.9 million views, shows Romney singing “America the Beautiful” at The Villages, a Florida retirement community. The screen shifts from Romney to images of shuttered factories and empty office rooms, overlaid with a series of headlines, “In Business, Mitt Romney’s Firms Shipped Jobs to Mexico and China,” “He Had Millions in a Swiss Bank Account,” “Tax Havens Like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.”
Obama’s current level of support from white men without college degrees is so low that “if sustained through Election Day,” it “would represent a modern nadir for Democrats,” Ron Brownstein pointed out earlier this month in the National Journal. Brownstein cited a Quinnipiac poll showing Romney beating Obama 56-29 and a Washington Post/ABC survey putting the contest at 65 for Romney, 28 for Obama among these voters.
A central goal of the anti-Romney commercials is to cross-pressure these whites. Persuading more than 28 percent of them to vote for Obama is a tough sell, but the Obama campaign can try to make the alternative, voting for Romney, equally unacceptable. Conflicted voters, especially those holding negative views of both candidates, are likely to skip voting altogether.
In 2004, for example, in a tactic designed to decrease black turnout, the Bush campaign sent deeply religious black voters mail and email noting Democratic support for same-sex civil unions, with the goal of creating ambivalence toward Senator John F. Kerry. Over the past two years, Republican-controlled state legislatures have been conducting an aggressive vote-suppression strategy of their own through the passage of voter identification laws and laws imposing harsh restrictions on voter registration drives.
When a top Pennsylvania Republican remarked last month that the state’s new voter ID law would help Mitt Romney win Pennsylvania in November, which no Republican presidential candidate has done since 1988, he reignited a debate over whether the law is intended to curb fraud, as Republicans say, or to depress Democratic turnout, as critics charge.
Mike Turzai, the House majority leader in Pennsylvania, made the remark when he spoke to a meeting of the Republican State Committee. He ticked off a number of recent conservative achievements by the Republican-led legislature, including, as Turzai put it, “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, has demonstrated that in 2008, even if Obama had failed to boost turnout among key Democratic groups, he would have won because of the failure of many 2004 George W. Bush supporters to vote for John McCain. “Bush voters’ decisions not to vote or to support Obama were a sufficient condition for Obama’s victory,” Lupia wrote in “Did Bush Voters Cause Obama’s Victory?” a paper published in PS, the journal of the American Political Science Association.
Romney and the Republican Party must achieve the highest possible turnout level among whites. Republicans, including Romney, have adopted anti-immigration stands that have extinguished the possibility of boosting margins among Hispanics. Asian Americans have become increasingly Democratic, self-identifying in public opinion surveys as Democratic rather than Republican by a 52-32 margin. African Americans remain reliably loyal to the Democratic Party by an 86 to 8 percent margin.
Romney is particularly vulnerable to a campaign designed to suppress turnout because his support is more tepid than Obama’s.
A New York Times/CBS poll released on Wednesday found that 52 percent of Obama voters back their candidate strongly, compared to 29 percent of Romney voters. In addition, a third of Romney’s voters say they are voting for him because of their dislike of Obama, while only 8 percent of Obama voters are primarily motivated by their hostility to Romney.
Vote suppression is important for Obama because his numbers among whites without degrees are worsening, despite the omnipresence of anti-Romney ads in the battleground states. Obama’s 29 percent level of support among non-college white men in the Quinnipiac poll cited above is a drop from 32 percent in its April survey, and the 28 percent level in the ABC/Washington Post poll is a drop from 34 percent in their May survey.
With his margins in this group falling, Obama directly benefits from every white non-college voter who stays home and does not vote for Romney. The importance of vote suppression in a close contest can be seen in the following hypothetical: say there are 1,000 voters evenly split, 500 to 500. Candidate A persuades just one of the voters backing his opponent to fail to go to the polls. Candidate A wins 500 to 499.
For Obama, hurdles in recruiting whites without a college degree are particularly high because of the employment patterns illustrated in this chart produced by RBC Capital Markets, which shows the devastating consequences of the 2008 financial collapse for non-college workers.
Voters of all races and ethnicities without college have taken a hit in the job market; politically, however, the drop in employment is most damaging to Obama among whites. African Americans without college degrees are not only loyal to the Democratic Party, but the election puts at risk a second term for the nation’s first black president. Hispanics without college have a president who has taken a liberal stand on immigration reform, backed the DREAM Act and appointed the first Hispanic justice, Sonia Sotomayor, to the Supreme Court.
The problems Obama and the Democratic Party face with white non-college voters have deep roots. A study conducted by political consulting firm CRG Communications for the Democratic National Committee in 1985 reached conclusions about the defection of working class whites to the Republican Party that remain relevant in 2012. CRG reported that these defectors believed that:
the Democratic Party has not stood with them as they moved from the working to the middle class. They have a whole set of middle class economic problems today, and the Democratic Party is not helping them. Instead it is helping the blacks, Hispanics and the poor. They feel betrayed.
Looked at this way, CRG reported, key Democratic constituencies — affluent liberals, gay rights activists, ethnic and racial minorities — were “leaving the ‘common man’ out of the picture.”
Demographic trends — the steady decline of the share of the population made up of non-college whites, from 86 percent in 1940 to 48 percent in 2007 – have made winning these voters by increasingly large margins crucial to the Republican Party, while diminishing the Democratic Party’s need for their support.
The 2012 election will be another test of strength in the decade-long competition between this white voting bloc — which dominated in 2002, 2004 and 2010 — and such ascendant Democratic constituencies as Hispanics, college-educated women and young voters, who flexed their muscles in 2006 and 2008.
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 earlier this year.
