All This White Working-Class Voter Talk...

I've been doing a lot of reading the last week, particularly about the reactions to the 2014 elections. Of course, those readings center around how the sky is falling for Democrats. How they don't have the same appeal, how the President is this or that. It's fun to read, but it's kind of humorous. The truth is, Democrats win Presidential elections, and Republicans win mid-terms. Since 1990, twenty-four years ago, Republicans have won the majority in the House five out of seven times in mid-term elections. Since 1992 (the Presidential election after 1990), Democrats have won the White House four of six times, and have won the popular vote five out of six times. That's the truth. Presidential electorates are more diverse.

But since we have to have something to talk about, let's talk about white working-class voters. Democrats apparently can't reach them. It's the Obama Coalition, dammit! Actually, in reality, this pre-dates President Obama by years, even decades. Post-Carter, only really Bill Clinton was ever relatively strong with these voters. Bill Clinton was, yes, a white, Southern guy. Bill Clinton also had really strong appeal to most of the Obama coalition (for those of you who weren't around pre-Obama, Clinton was the Presidency in which African-American voters had fully come into the party). Clinton's policy prescription was broad, his prosperity reached all corners of the electorate, and in short, we weren't really having this discussion.

Now, in lieu of another Bill Clinton, yes, white working-class voters do think they get a raw deal. They do think their taxes go up every year, and their money goes to "those people." A lot of that is ignorance by them, and an inability to show the fruits of our labor in government. A lot of that is national Democrats who are unable to explain what they do. We immediately think of a Barack Obama on this one, because it's widely held that he hasn't sold his accomplishments in office very well. Let's go beyond that though. Has Nancy Pelosi been a great messenger to these voters? How were governors, such as Jon Corzine, at selling their work? Most of these white working-class voters don't even realize half of the government services they benefit from every day, they just don't have the time to do that much research while they're working their second or third job that day. We can call them stupid for this, but it's much less about intelligence than it is about having the ability, time, and energy to do it. That's not their fault.

All of this leads to the South- why is it so Republican? When Democrats dominated the South, they were a culturally conservative party. Today, they are the opposite. A huge chunk of this is simply the Civil Rights agenda re-aligning America. Republicans have dominated the South Presidentially since 1968, and frankly there's no real reason to be alarmed by what happened down there in 2014. The South is a Christian Conservative place. It is what it is.

So yeah, I guess i'm not as alarmed as many are about 2014. I just think it's another election in the rear-view.