The Great White Wail: The Not-So-Silent White Majority

[CountDeMoney]

New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Contributing Op-Ed Writer
The Not-So-Silent White Majority

Thomas B. Edsall NOV. 17, 2016

Between Richard Nixon's election by the silent majority in 1968 and Donald Trump's stunning victory in 2016, there have been six conservative waves that swept Republicans into office. Disaffected white voters without college degrees have been the driving force in all of them.

This is surprising not only because these voters were once the backbone of the Democratic coalition, but because they have steadily declined as a share of the electorate. The percentage of white voters without college degrees fell from 83 percent in 1960 to 36 percent in 2012. It was 34 percent this year.

So why did they matter as much as they did in 2016? For one thing, Trump's 39-point lead among less well educated whites surged past Mitt Romney's 25-point margin. This was enough to make up for the fact that Trump's margin of victory among whites with college degrees, at 4 points (49-45), was well behind Romney's. (Romney carried college-educated whites by 14 points, 56-42.)

Despite their declining share of the electorate, these voters continue to exercise an outsize influence: as the Silent Majority of 1968 and 1972; the Reagan Democrats of 1980; the Angry White Men of 1994; the Tea Party insurgents of 2010; and now the triumphant Trump Republicans of 2016.

Let's take a look at the history of this trend.

In 1968, these white voters — often low or moderate income, disproportionately male and clustered in exurban and rural areas, then as now — were crucial to the birth of the modern conservative coalition.

That year, famously, southern whites angered by enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, and they were soon joined by many northern whites opposed to court-ordered busing.

The Democratic Party's commitment to civil rights prompted millions of white voters to cast ballots either for Richard Nixon, running as the Republican nominee, or for George Wallace, the segregationist Dixiecrat and former governor of Alabama, running as the nominee of the American Independent Party.

Together, Nixon and Wallace won 56.9 percent of all votes in 1968 and more than six out of every ten white votes, laying the groundwork for the conversion of the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party into a key component of the modern Republican Party. Democrats have made inroads into this coalition a few times, either by running more centrist Southerners like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or through the campaign magic of Barack Obama, who promised to transcend the red-blue divide. But this white Republican coalition has proved remarkably enduring.

In the two elections before 1968, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, both Democrats, averaged 55 percent of the white working class vote. According to Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the pro-Democratic Center for American Progress, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern, both Democrats, averaged 35 percent of that vote, in 1968 and 1972. Since that time, many Republican candidates have tapped into anti-black bias without running as overt segregationists.

"The Republicans suddenly became the party of the white working class," Teixeira wrote on his blog.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 further strengthened the commitment of the white working class to Republican presidential candidates, especially in the North.

It was not, however, until 1994, with the so-called Gingrich revolution, that the Republican Party was able to finally rupture the continuing commitment of lower and moderate income whites to Democratic congressional candidates. The accompanying charts, derived from the 2000 book, "America's Forgotten Majority," by Teixeira and Joel Rogers, show how the bottom fell out in 1994 for white working class Democratic congressional support.

Gingrich claimed responsibility for his party's 1994 victories. Bill Clinton's initial abandonment of the themes that he campaigned on in 1992 was, in fact, more important.

In his first presidential run, Clinton promised welfare reform, a middle-class tax cut and to commit his presidency to the "ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you'll be rewarded." Clinton's first two years in office, however, were dominated by the issues of gays in the military, health care reform and his attempt make good on his vow to pick a cabinet that "looks like America."

The changed agenda proved disastrous for Democratic members of the House and Senate.

Stanley Greenberg, Clinton's 1992 campaign pollster, wrote in the 1999 book "The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics'' that

    The 1994 congressional debacle should be a reminder of what happens when Democrats lose touch with the lives of working people. Bill Clinton's election was accompanied by great hopes in the country, but over the next two years those hopes turned to disappointment. On the eve of the off-year elections Clinton seemed like a culturally liberal president who could not deliver.

Greenberg continued:

    The 1994 election was a disaster produced by a downscale, working-class revolt against the Democrats. Support for congressional Democrats among high school graduates dropped 12 points to only 46 percent. Among white male high school graduates, support for the Democrats fell off a cliff, careening 20 points downward from 57 percent to 37 percent.

The march of working and middle class whites toward the Republican Party took another giant step forward in the Tea Party election of 2010, when they voted against Democratic congressional candidates by 30 points (65-35), providing crucial ballast for the Republicans as they gained 63 seats in the House.

For many analysts and Democratic operatives, Obama's two victories in 2008 and 2012 marked the final collapse of the conservative coalition. Even the Republican Party, notably in the so-called Autopsy Report produced in 2013 by Reince Priebus — soon to be Trump's chief of staff — acknowledged that a white-dominated conservative alliance was doomed to defeat unless the party opened its doors in general and to Hispanics in particular.

Which brings us to 2016.

On one level, demographic change was moving in Clinton's direction. The overall white share of the electorate, which was 91 percent in 1960, continued to decline, falling to 72 percent in 2012 and 70 percent in 2016.

How, then, is it possible that this supposedly fading constituency played such a decisive role in 2016?

Two reasons.

First, while Trump barely improved on Romney's margin among whites generally, the whites who did vote for Trump were significantly different from those who voted for Romney. Trump won non-college whites by 14 points more than Romney, a modern day record. Just as important, the working class voters Trump carried by such huge margins were heavily concentrated in the rust belt states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Pennsylvania — all states carried by Obama in 2012 and lost by Clinton in 2016. Together, these state cast 70 Electoral College votes.

Trump's voters were situated in a way that allowed them to exercise far more influence on the outcome in the Electoral College than their overall numbers would suggest, allowing Trump to sweep across the rust belt to victory.

This apostasy among white voters has certainly not gone unnoticed, and party strategists have long debated what, if anything, could be done to bring these voters back into the Democratic fold, particularly since the landslide defeat of 1984.

In 1985, Democrats conducted two major studies of white working class discontent, one by Greenberg, which looked at white U.A.W. workers and retirees in Macomb County Michigan, the other of 33 focus groups nationwide conducted by CRG, a marketing and polling firm.

Greenberg found that for these voters, "Blacks constitute the explanation of their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives."

This

    special status of blacks is perceived by almost all of these individuals as a serious obstacle to their personal advancement. Indeed, discrimination against whites has become a well-assimilated and ready explanation for their status, vulnerability and failures.

The CRG study was equally brutal. These voters

    have a whole set of middle-class economic problems today, and their party is not helping them. Instead it is helping blacks, Hispanics and the poor. They feel betrayed.

CRG found that in the view of the white working class, the "Democrats are the giveaway party and 'giveaway' means too much middle class money going to blacks and the poor."

The struggle to revive Democratic support among low and moderate income white voters has more recently become a regular subject on The Democratic Strategist, a website run by the Democratic activist Ed Kilgore, who was once the vice president for policy at the Democratic Leadership Council. Kilgore also publishes a newsletter, the White Working Class Roundtable. In the first issue of the newsletter, Kilgore wrote:

    It has become increasingly clear that progressives and Democrats have no alternative except to challenge the hold that conservative and the GOP have established over white working Americans.

In a direct counter to Kilgore, Lee Drutman, a senior scholar at the New America Foundation, argued in a Nov. 11 essay in Foreign Policy that the Democrats need to give up on appeals to working class whites. The headline of his article reads: "The GOP has become the party of populism. Now the Democrats have to build a new party of multicultural cosmopolitanism."

Drutman argues that

    If Democrats define themselves as the party that is opposed to Republicans (as they must), they will soon find themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility (as opposed to the Republicans, who will again run huge deficits), as the party of international responsibility (as opposed to the more isolationist and nationalist Republicans), and as the party of global business (as opposed to the protectionist Republicans). They will continue to be the party of environmentalism (the stakes of this will get even greater soon) and the party of diversity and tolerance.

At the policy level, there are substantial objections to the full-scale emergence of a Democratic Party along these lines. It would mean that neither party would represent the economic interests of the bottom half of the income distribution — regardless of race or ethnicity — on crucial issues of tax and spending policies.

There is, however, growing evidence that the wheels of electoral politics have made the developments Drutman describes increasingly likely.

A comparison of 2004 exit polls and 2016 exit polls shows the changing relevance of income to voting.

In 2004, those with incomes under $30,000 voted Democratic by 20 points; in 2016, these voters voted Democratic by 12 points, a 40 percent decline.

At the upper end, voters with household incomes from $100,000 to $200,000 voted Republican in 2004 by 15 points. In 2016, they voted Republican by one point. Voters making more than $200,000 in 2004 voted Republican by 28 points; in 2016, they also voted Republican by 1 point.

As Drutman points out, "with a President Trump, there is now a change agent to accelerate these forces."

In another postelection analysis, published on Nov. 15, Teixeira argues that the conservative victory on Election Day will prove short-lived: "In the end, the race will be won by change — as it always is."

By 2032, Teixeira writes, "we are far more likely to view the 2016 election as the last stand of America's white working class, dreaming of a past that no longer exists."

Maybe.

In 2002, Teixeira and John Judis published the classic book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority," only to see the re-election of George Bush two years later and the election of Donald Trump 14 years later.

Judis, whose most recent book is "The Populist Explosion," is less confident than Teixeira. He argues that in this year's election, either John Kasich or Marco Rubio "could have beaten Clinton, but the coalition would have looked different," adding in an email that

    what I would say, if someone put a gun to my head, is that there is still a stalemate between the two parties in spite of Trump's and the Republicans success. Trump could fail, the Dems could come back, and then the G.O.P. Or Trump could thread the needle and win two terms. Not clear what will happen. But politically — leave aside the Census Bureau — the Dems are in disarray.

White tribalism or ethnocentrism — whatever you want to call it — is undeniably a powerful force. But so are the identities, loyalties and resentments of those who have their own competing racial and ethnic commitments. The American experiment, which gives all these interests participatory roles in a dynamic democracy, has long been under strain. Over the next four years, it will now be openly tested. The outcome may well be wrenching.

grumbler-compliant link

[Berkut]

I think that all misses the impact that hate speech media has had on the right. That is not same old, same old.

[MadImmortalMan]

I think the Democrats have, in turn, benefited from one candidate that people really wanted to vote for - Obama - and then suffered from one that not many people really were excited about - Hillary.

Underneath that, the number of state and local seats that have gone GOP since Bush left is maybe more instructive. What do we have, like five states left?

[Grinning_Colossus]

15 governorships, but only undivided control of 6 states, yeah. Versus 26 R-controlled states.

[Phillip V]

I think the Democrats have, in turn, benefited from one candidate that people really wanted to vote for - Obama - and then suffered from one that not many people really were excited about - Hillary.

Underneath that, the number of state and local seats that have gone GOP since Bush left is maybe more instructive. What do we have, like five states left?

Find another Obama.

[alfred russel]

I think the Democrats have, in turn, benefited from one candidate that people really wanted to vote for - Obama - and then suffered from one that not many people really were excited about - Hillary.

Underneath that, the number of state and local seats that have gone GOP since Bush left is maybe more instructive. What do we have, like five states left?

Find another Obama.

Michelle?

Not sure any other Obama meets the requirements to be president.

[Martinus]

I think the Democrats have, in turn, benefited from one candidate that people really wanted to vote for - Obama - and then suffered from one that not many people really were excited about - Hillary.

Underneath that, the number of state and local seats that have gone GOP since Bush left is maybe more instructive. What do we have, like five states left?

Find another Obama.

Michelle?

Not sure any other Obama meets the requirements to be president.

There is something deliciously occult about this apparent Democrat insistence that the dignity of the presidential office is transmitted with male seed.

[Grinning_Colossus]

Find another Obama.

Michelle?

Not sure any other Obama meets the requirements to be president.

There is something deliciously occult about this apparent Democrat insistence that the dignity of the presidential office is transmitted with male seed.

It's from all the spirit cooking.

[Valmy]

I think the Democrats have, in turn, benefited from one candidate that people really wanted to vote for - Obama - and then suffered from one that not many people really were excited about - Hillary.

Underneath that, the number of state and local seats that have gone GOP since Bush left is maybe more instructive. What do we have, like five states left?

Find another Obama.

Michelle?

Not sure any other Obama meets the requirements to be president.

I don't think he meant a literal Obama Dorsey

[Valmy]

I keep hearing that any day now these people will be beaten by a great rising tide of minority and woman voters. Any day they want to start doing that would be great.

[crazy canuck]

I think that all misses the impact that hate speech media has had on the right. That is not same old, same old.

I agree.  And particularly social media.  I forget what the percentage is but a fairly large group now learns about the world through their facebook feeds and other social media.  Facebook feeds are self selecting and so people's biases tend to become reinforced.

[viper37]

I keep hearing that any day now these people will be beaten by a great rising tide of minority and woman voters. Any day they want to start doing that would be great.

In your country, religion is a driving force.  The less educated the people, the more religion becomes a refuge.  In some States, seperation of Church&State is a real joke.  Religion makes laws, religion controls education.  Once you lost control of your education, there is not much you can do to reverse the tide in the short term.

[Valmy]

I keep hearing that any day now these people will be beaten by a great rising tide of minority and woman voters. Any day they want to start doing that would be great.

In you country, religion is a driving force.  The less educated the people, the more religion becomes a refuge.  In some States, seperation of Church&State is a real joke.  Religion makes laws, religion controls education.  Once you lost control of your education, there is not much you can do to reverse the tide in the short term.

We have never had control of our education. Religion is receding in the US, not increasing, and its power has always been substantial.

[MadImmortalMan]

We have never had control of our education.

Not since Horace Mann, anyway.

[Valmy]

We have never had control of our education.

Not since Horace Mann, anyway.

I am familiar with Horace Mann but not sure what you are getting at