Media Curmudgeon

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February 27, 2008

No Country for White Men

Guest blogger Cody Keenan, columnist for The Citizen, the newspaper of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, writes:

If only Al Gore had won over a few more values voters. If only John Kerry had picked off a few more NASCAR dads. Right? Wrong.

Every four years, as Democrats rush to court the new hot demographic, they consistently ignore that most secretive and elusive of species: the white male. Since 1980, no Democratic nominee has won more than 38 percent of the white male vote. Al Gore and John Kerry each lost it by 26 points. Had either peeled off just a percentage point or two, Gore might be a lame duck today or Kerry might be up for re-election.

Conventional wisdom blames President Johnson’s signature on the Civil Rights Act for handing a generation of Southern white voters over to the Republican Party. But that no longer accounts for white male disillusionment with the Democratic Party; it hasn’t for some time.

The problem is that there are tens of millions of white males in America who feel disenfranchised and disadvantaged.

It sounds ridiculous: white males make up the vast majority of CEOs, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices and every president ever. But tens of millions chafe under the general feeling that, even though they do everything they’re supposed to, they no longer have the control over their lives that they used to.

The economy that used to guarantee a stable manufacturing job with enough income and security to care for your family, afford leisure and put your children through school has slipped away. A vapid and violent culture infects their children. Lousy trade agreements and illegal immigration steal their jobs. They feel as if they’re getting screwed.

“An entire generation of white men was raised in a system in which they felt disadvantaged,” writes The Politico’s David Paul Kuhn in a recent book on the subject. “It did not matter if the perception was true; the perception itself had political consequences.”

Democrats are the ones who actually have the working man’s economic interests at heart, pushing for a higher minimum wage and universal health care, and railing against tax cuts for the richest Americans and CEOs that make 500 times the average worker.

And yet in 2004, George W. Bush won nearly every state in the bottom half of lowest per capita income, and white men across every economic category.

It’s because the disillusioned white male is opposed to more government and still holds out hope he’ll be wealthy himself someday. And so Republicans smartly go after the bogeymen, bashing illegal immigrants and moral decay. And they win.

Working-class white men make up one in four voters - more than blacks and Hispanics combined. They make up a quarter to a third of the vote in the battleground states of Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Of those, Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio went for Bush last time. All but Iowa were blowouts for Bush among white men – and he won them there too.

These working-class men voted for Democrats by a margin of two to one in 2006. But that margin wasn’t the consequence of a shift back toward the Democratic Party; it was the combination of Bush fatigue and Iraq fatigue. There were some scattered successes, however, by Democrats who focused on the white male vote, either winning it outright or peeling enough away to win the election.

Mark Warner, the posterchild for this new Democrat, won formerly bright red Virginia in 2002 and is running for Senate this year. “There was a morphing of the Democratic Party from a sense of a common good or a common commitment to each other as fellow citizens to being an advocate for groups,” he says in Kuhn’s book. “And I think that Democrats were advocates for every other group except for white males.”

Some of the new Democratic officeholders like Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, and Montana’s Senator Jon Tester and Governor Brian Schweitzer, understood that problem. They understood what those disillusioned white males value: character, culture, and security.

So which of the two remaining Democratic candidates can best appeal to the white male? The white, or the male?

Let’s be honest, there are those, even Democrats, who will refuse to vote for a woman or a black man. But race and gender aren’t the problems; every Democratic nominee in history has been a white male. And so Senator Obama or Senator Clinton must work to win over some of that vote by recognizing that disillusionment, not writing it off as John Kerry did by ignoring the South entirely.

Senator Clinton’s strength with the white working class has faded over the past few weeks as Senator Obama has begun capturing the white male vote by widening margins, taking 55 percent in Virginia and 62 percent in Wisconsin.

But the general election is another story entirely. It’s not yet clear working class Democrats will embrace Obama should he become the nominee. He’ll have to recognize their disillusionment, reassure their economic worries and give them a sense of confidence. And he’ll have to rely heavily on the youth vote he’s harnessed. The tens of thousands of new voters he’s brought into the process and epic crowds he draws may provide an equalizer he’ll need.

There are macrotrends that will tempt the Democratic nominee to ignore the second-largest demographic in America yet again. The gap between Americans who self-identify as Democrats and those who self-identify as Republicans is at a record high. Democrats are “more enthusiastic than usual” about voting in this election by nearly a two-to-one margin. Disapproval of President Bush is so high on every single issue that simply hanging the mantle of a third Bush term around Senator McCain’s neck and calling it a day seems like enough.

But it’s easy to be dismissive. The New York Times’ Frank Rich, examining the crowds at Senator McCain’s appearances, makes that mistake. “Trapped in an archaic black-and-white newsreel, the G.O.P. looks more like a nostalgic relic than a national political party in contemporary America,” he writes. “A cultural sea change has passed it by.”

This is precisely the thinking that loses elections.

One would think it impossible for the Democratic nominee to lose after eight years of President Bush. But there were those who thought it in 2004. The Democratic nominee must appeal to the disaffected white male voter, especially in those swing states that make the difference.

Otherwise, we’ll be having this conversation again in four years.

Posted by Charles Warner at February 27, 2008 09:59 AM

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Bruce Braun at February 27, 2008 12:43 PM writes:

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