I don't have any special reason for writing this post. There's no hook. It's just something that bears knowing about.
The failure of Democrats to maintain support among the white working class is a frequent topic of concern. But the truth is that it's not really a thing. Not nationally, anyway. Democrats have lost a huge amount of support among white voters in the South:
Starting in the mid-90s, Democrats began shedding support in the South to Republicans in massive numbers. In 1992 there was little difference between the parties. Today, white voters in the South prefer Republicans by 27 points on a "warmth" scale of 1-100.
But that's the South. Here's what it looks like everywhere else:
White voter preferences have tracked almost identically between Democrats and Republicans all the way to the present day. Outside the South, Democrats are mostly appealing to white voters just fine.
Now, it's true that these charts are averages for voters of all education levels, and education is a big factor among voters these days. But this doesn't change the picture much. White high school and college grads have almost identical party sentiments in the South; it's only elsewhere they diverge. It's not a non-factor outside the South, but it's not an overwhelming issue either.
The moral of this story is that in American politics you always need to break apart the South and non-South. It is the great dividing line. Looking at national averages will almost always mislead you.
White high school and college grads have almost identical party sentiments in the South; it's only elsewhere they diverge.
This is interesting. It suggests that, in the South, non college whites have moved into the GOP camp as they have elsewhere; but also in the South, college-educated whites have not joined the exodus to the Democratic Party.
I live in the south and over the last couple years I've made various comments about this and pushing back on the conventional wisdom that those with higher education are mostly democrats and high school or less are mostly republicans. My comments were based on my observations and experiences so admittedly don't carry a ton of weight. But, virtually all of my friends and acquaintances have a college education and a good portion (maybe a majority) of them have advanced degrees. Of this group, a definite majority are republicans.
"Of this group, a definite majority are republicans."
Curious, are they also Trump supporters?
Depends on what you mean by supporter. Haven't taken a poll, but I'm sure most voted for him. However, they are not MAGA people. I think most would have preferred just about any other republican and are not specifically fans of Trump. My friends and acquaintances aren't some monolithic group but that's how I would describe the majority of them. I also have lots of friends that are democrats.
Thanks.
Side note. If someone votes for Donald Trump, to me that makes them a MAGA person. You really can't vote for Trump, with all of this MAGA baggage, without being MAGA yourself. They are just too intrinsically linked.
In this election I might agree with you. Not in 2016 though when many people held their noses and hopes he would become more presidential. Trump is terrible but, as a Republican, I’m certainly happy we at least got three Supreme Court justices.
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White Southerners got their teeth kicked in during the Civil War. They responded by creating "Jim Crow" as a substitute for chattel slavery: starve 'em until they steal something and then you've got 'em back on the chain gang.
That was, broadly speaking, fine with Democrats in the North. They were ethnic partisans mostly, and big on party patronage -- "Tammany Hall" and the like. But Franklin Roosevelt was an extraordinary human being: someone who walked his talk and somehow understood the suffering of poor people even from Hyde Park.
That started a massive squeeze against the explicit Southern racists in the party, and by the end of Nixon's term they had completely decamped to the Republicans. So the focus turned north with busing and affirmative action, and all of a sudden, being a lad or having a cousin in the N'Drangheta didn't open doors like it once did. The Business Republicans got a leg up and said "We respect you; we're corrupt too. You fit right in here." Thus the long downward arc for Democrats after 1994 for Non-South White Voters.
Eleanor Roosevelt walked the walk. Franklin by contrast was a pragmatic politician who was careful not to get out over the tips of his skies. Blacks got moral support from Franklin, but little more. He also stood by and let General de Witt intern Americans rather than confront the war time hysteria.
You don't have to have been there to know history (though it helps.) But you don't have to haved through those events to know about them. Why people don't know basic history is beyond me. But then again, I'm old and read in bed.
Yep Franklin compromised away a ton in the name of getting his New Deal agenda through and then in the name of getting support for WWII. Eleanor was the angel on his shoulder who push him for what little Blacks did get in that era. You left out the antisemitism, that drove the policy of not rescuing more Jews alas.
I don't understand Kevin's logic. So in the non-south white Democratic support went from ~58-60% to 40% and that should not be the focus? If it had gone to 31% that would be a bigger problem for the Democrats?
Regions in the north that used to be competitive for Democrats are no longer (see Ohio), and others are teetering. Feeding this self-soothing narrative that upper middle-class white suburban moms will save the Democrats is going to get them cooked in the long run.
I *think* his point is that both parties have declined in the non-South - for example, both parties were at 60 in 1984 and both were at 45 in 2016.
But that obscures what happened in the interim - Southern whites started abandoning Democrats big time in the early-to-mid 90s, while non-Southern whites started preferring Democrats. In this way, the non-South was largely offsetting the South - but no longer. Since 2008, Democrats have lost ~15 favorability points among non-Southern whites, while Republicans stayed flat with that group.
Kevin's broader point is valid - the South really does look different politically than the country as a whole - but he's trying to prove too much here. Also, the South's votes count just as much as everyone else's. More, in the Senate.
By the way, I was curious what "South" meant, so I went and looked up the definition:
This var identifies the 11 secession states: Alabama, Arkansas,
Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South
Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia
Source: https://electionstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/anes_timeseries_cdf_codebook_var_20220916.pdf#page=43
but that’s wrong at this point. most of the midwest is culturally Southern at this point- you’ll hear a distinct drawl and see Confederate flags in northern Minnesota. state lines are arbitrary, the cultural South is much larger at this point (altho its heartland is still Dixie.)
I have to disagree with this firmly. The cultural South extends up to about I-70 in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. North of this (and with exceptions for some remnant diasporas from the Appalachian migration to the Rust Belt) and you are in Yankee land. Which doesn't mean everyone is a liberal Democrat-- but it does mean the GOP voters are different than they are in the South-- less motivated by racial or social issues and more by things like taxes.
There's the North and there's the South but one should note that the Great Migration and then other patterns in the Post II period drove various states to shift from "North" to "South" and vice versa. Maryland, Delaware and Virginia are no longer pure Southern states while states like West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana became Southern. The Great Migration drove descendants of the Confederates North for jobs and the growth of Washington, DC after WWII drove a bunch of folks from PA, NJ, NY and other Northeastern states to the suburbs of DC which eventually split with the GOP over the war on government and the GOP's culturally southern stances.
I assure you no one here in the south considers Ohio and Indiana to be southern states.
A measure of your own corruption.
Culturally - they hate the people the South hates, They also hate uppity women.
The chart is very clear to me. Democrats have lost a great big chunk of northern white support since 2008, and they can't afford this.
It seems to me that splitting by education changes the picture radically.
Nationwide, working-class whites have moved strongly towards the Republicans. In the South, so have college-educated whites; in the north (where college-educated whites are historically Republicans), college-educated whites have moved towards the Democrats.
You guys are missing the huge dividing point here - if you support a multi-cultural society, if you are comfortable having a female boss etc, you are a Democrat. If you want the White Male Patriarchy to continue, you are at home with the GOP. I'm a big fan of Thomas Zimmer a historian at Georgetown, he's written and podcasted about this a lot.
Liked because I'm also a big fan of Zimmer.
The Republican's Southern Strategy worked.
And you also have the Southification of the North, especially in the old Rust Belt and Midwest.
But the Southern Strategy only takes you so far. The GOP is now losing in states that are more suburban like Virginia, Colorado, Maryland and now Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. Why? Because the shifting populations went both ways so folks at home with the Democrats changed the states they moved to.
Perhaps another way to look at it is this
Why just 2 parties?
The rise of independent of non-affiliated voters is key to both parties
Personally I think that many people have come to realize that NO ONE will make them completely happy politically. so they are becoming issue voters. THIS is where republicans dominate. They drive the issues in front of the electorate whereas in the past the news media did it.
Is immigration a big thing?
Is election "truth" a big thing?
And when things ARE a big thing republicans control how its presented. Climate Change is a big thing but its portrayed as "you gotta give up something:, or ""the hockey stick graph has been proven wrong by Joe down the street":, or "they'll take your cars away".
This after years, decades, centuries of being told that we are exceptional, we are the saviors of the world and we are "it".
So republicans have become quite good at presenting information to the public to buttress their arguments for or against a policy.
Why just two parties? It's a function of having representatives elected by district, one per district and "first past the post" wins. Everybody else's vote was, to use a technical term, "wasted" in that it resulted in zero representation.
Other systems, like proportional representation, give third (and fourth) parties a chance. Each party nominates multiple candidates for the given district, which has multiple seats. Then the seats are allocated by what percentage of the vote each party got.
Many Americans hate this concept because they still think they "vote for the man, not the party." These folks have been asleep for 50 years. They probably don't even know why the Senate isn't working.
Why do you think the Senate isn't working?
Don't feed this troll. It is not arguing in good faith.
I always argue in good faith.
What else would a troll say? You so do not argue in good faith; you're one of the most dishonest commentors here.
Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, troll. Everybody knows you for what you are.
Love you
Chuckle. Why? I simply made an observation:
Financial advantages to prep for a slot at an Ivy league shcool? Totally fair.
Transwomen competing in women's sports, team and otherwise? In _high school_ women's sports? So totally not fair.
You pretty much screwed the pooch with that one.
??
It really depends on where you sit as to how you feel about that doesn't it. If you are at home with the conservatives you'd be right to argue that it's working just fine. However if you are a fan of having the Senate reflect the wishes of a majority of Americans it's an abject value, a permanent veto mechanism to stop direly needed major reforms in the US.
I think it's serving the purpose for which it was intended. It's helping smaller states to not get ignored by the will just a few large states. The senate and the house offer a great balance in the legislative branch.
And Dems currently control the senate. It's not like its some foregone conclusion that republicans are going to control it.
Sure, Democrats "comtrol" the Senate. But having a majority is not enough to get a bill through the Senate. That's inherently undemocratic.
So you think the system is unjust unless Dems have supermajorities in both chambers of congress?
The system is unjust when it requires supermajorities to get major bills passed that are supported by a majority of Americans.
Not to put words in the Salamander's mouth, but I think that their point that "having a majority is not enough to get a bill through the Senate. That's inherently undemocratic" simply means that having to have a supermajority to get a bill through is undemocratic.
And I tend to agree. Add in that there is no reason why each of the 580,000 people in Wyoming should have 68 times as much say in the Senate as each of the 39 _million_ people in California (and infinitely more say than the 713,000 people of Washington DC), and you've got yourself a starkly undemocratic body.
Now, you may *like* the idea of it being undemocratic because that way "smaller states [don't] get ignored by the will just a few large states," but that doesn't make it any less undemocratic.
Correct. The senate itself isn’t meant to be purely democratic. The election to elect the senators is.
Like I said if you are a conservative, you are in "Everything is Awesome" mode. Everyone else following the issues knows that the Senate subjects us to the tyranny of the 19th century GOP senate stuffing - there didn't need to be two Dakotas nor as many empty western states yet the GOP did this in 1889-1890 when they suddenly regained control of the House, Senate and White House at the same time:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/when-adding-new-states-helped-republicans/598243/
Personally I think that many people have come to realize that NO ONE will make them completely happy politically.
I've been voting now for a good 28 years. It was obvious to me in my first few elections that neither of the 2 big political parties was going to offer up candidates that made me "completely happy." I have no idea how anybody was under the delusion that this possibility even existed: either they have no ideology at all and just vote on personality OR their political preferences are completely malleable to be whatever one of the 2 big political parties declares at any given moment to be its platform. I know that most people aren't plugged into politics, but damn. I've never been comfortable enough in my life's circumstances to literally have no firm political preference whatsoever among all the various politicians that have run for office in the last quarter-century.
You are quite mistaken. The rise of non-affiliated voters is simply shy Republicans to embarrassed to formally affiliate with a damaged brand but quietly vote that way 100 percent. There isn't a middle there are folks politically engaged on the right, folks engaged on the left and the folks to obssessed with whatever it was that the Kardashians did this week. The key to electoral success is getting all of your engaged voters to vote every time all the time and then pick off enough of the unengaged voters to your side - Trump was successful in getting some of the unengaged out to vote in 2016 and 2020 but by 2018 and then 2020 Democrats were able to cajole unengaged female voters out to vote using Trump as the bogeyman.
I make $100h while I’m courageous to the most distant corners of the planet. Last week I worked on my PC in Rome, Monti Carlo at the long final in Paris. This week I’m back inside the USA. All I
do fundamental errands from this one cool area see it. For more information,
Click on the link below… https://GetDreamJobs1.blogspot.com
Well, why don't you take your great big google earnings and go directly to hell, Eve?
More evidence that Lincoln was wrong - we should have let the South secede. It is like a different country and I am frankly sick to death of that tail wagging the dog. We would have a much better country if the South were out of it.
One historical example - I was reading in James MacPherson's magisterial Battle Cry of Freedom that a serious issue of political contention in the years before the Civil War was establishment of Land Grant Universities in the new territories. The South was firmly against it - they didn't want no Yankee professor types coming in and making people smart and all and just creating a bunch of anti-slavery intellectuals - no sir!
The establishment of the Land Grant system had to wait until the Morrill Acts in 1862, after the Southern states were no longer in Congress.
The Southern strategy of keeping people stupid so that they will support cruelty to minorities has a long history.
+1
There an almost direct, unimpeded progression from the antebellum Democratic Party to the post-modern MAGA/GOP. Essentially the same organization.
We really should have. Lincoln should have acquired the slaves - either by seizing them during the war or using eminent domain to buy* them out if he wanted to avoid war - transported them all to the North to free them, and then said "adios" to any state that wanted to secede. If we had only let the South go, the rest of the nation would be in a better place today and no longer held hostage to southern political demands through the Senate and the Electoral College.
*Yes it would have been odious and expensive to have to buy their freedom. But the war itself and Reconstruction afterwards cost us $5.2B in 1865 dollars, or trillions in today's dollars.
Oh go read up about the draft riots in NYC - there was considerable indifference and even some support for the South in the North so there was only so much that could be done on the question of what to do once the slaves were freed.
"If we had only let the South go, the rest of the nation would be in a better place today and no longer held hostage to southern political demands through the Senate and the Electoral College."
And the South would have just gone and gotten itself some new slaves and continued on its merry path of harsh feudalistic immiseration. I'm not sure how that's better. Especially since the huge cash infusion via eminent domain would have created economic chaos in both South and North and given the South the means (and the motive) to fight territorial wars with the North (and the natives) over westward expansion.
Apropos of nothing, had the United States just let the traitor states go to form their own country, we might have seen a long successioin of USA v CSA wars thereafter.
Now, I'm going by the eminent writings of Harry Turtledove here. However, the idea of regional hostilities is and was valid. One big reason for doing away with the old Articles of Confederation was their inability to address the many border disputes and attempted land grabs among the several states. How much more might there be between US and CS? Remember, this was an age where nearly everybody was all prickly about their "honor" and willing to fight for it.
European and other powers could find it to their advantage to stir up animosities between the US, long hated by the kingdoms, and the CS. The opportunities for land grabs and trade monopolies would become more viable motives.
There were lots of reasons for Lincoln to not want the United States to break up. A question for today is, what are our reasons (if any) now?
Exactly. We didn't want them to, say, allow foreign armies to march unimpeded through their territory to make war on the North.
Oh, that other thing about 'a well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of the state'? That wasn't about foreign invaders. It was about the South wanting constitutionally protected slave patrols. These are not nice or good people.
I kind of doubt that. I see a different scenario.
For one thing, there is no way chattel slavery would have lasted into the 20th century, even in a Southern confederacy. The last major country to abolish slavery was Brazil, in 1888. If the south had tried to preserve slavery, it would have been completely isolated and a pariah nation, and its slaves could have easily escaped to freedom in the U.S. or any other country. The South's lack of a solid industrial base would have made it continually vulnerable, not capable of challenging the United States militarily over any kind of long term.
Rather than war, I think there would have been pressure for reunion, or at least some kind of commonwealth, after slavery was gone. But it would have been on the terms of the U.S. - no "lost cause" nonsense, no tail wagging the dog.
_Or_ they could generate a pretext to attack the North in the hopes of acquiring land and property. Possibly with the help of some country eager to grab their share of the loot.
Sounds highly implausible to me. The South was economically and industrially derelict for a century after the war, even with help from the North. As an isolated, agrarian, almost mediaeval nation, it could never have seriously challenged the U.S., which was becoming a world power from the late 19th century.
Well, that was AFTER the civil war. Had Lincoln decided early on, "good riddance and buh-bye", the confederates would have been at nearly their full power. With all their enslaved people intact.
Yes, but their "full power" was not very full, and would have deteriorated over time as they continued to promote a plantation slave economy rather than industrializing. And they could not have sustained slavery for more than a few decades - world opinion was shifting rapidly against slavery as the 19th century went on. And in any case, how would they keep their slaves from escaping? There would no longer be any slave "property rights" in the U.S. or any other country.
I don't concede your characterization the South's economic and military might. But for the sake of argument, you're 100% correct. So what would the South do in that situation? Yep, that's right, they'd find some pretext to war on the North in the hope of acquiring land and property.
Because that's who they are. Their sense of entitlement is immense, they live in a perpetual state of ressentiment, and nothing, _nothing_ is ever their fault.
Hey, nobody ever held the South up as a model of a rational society populated by a rational people. Quite the contrary.
Well, you can never prove counterfactuals, but nothing I have ever read makes me think that that premise is plausible. The southern attempts to invade the North during the war (notably Antietam and Gettysburg) were disasters for the South. I can't see them trying that again.
"For one thing, there is no way chattel slavery would have lasted into the 20th century, even in a Southern confederacy"
Why the hell not? Russia didn't fully rid itself of serfdom until the 1890s. It is lost cause sophistry of the worst sort to argue that a culture willing to kill the better part of a million people so that a bunch of feudalistic quasi-nobles could maintain something as evil race-based slavery that they had maintained for three centuries would have reformed in a decade or two if only that mean old Lincoln had let them dissolve the country.
Um - the 1890s wasn't the twentieth century yet.
Sure another few decades of slavery would have been bad, but then a century of Jim Crow-ism and lynchings was pretty bad too. It's a cliche that the south lost the war but won the peace, but there is a lot of truth to it. Also, the North did NOT fight the war to end slavery - if there had been no secession slavery in the south probably would have continued for a few decades more at least.
Slavery would have been pushed out by world opinion and economic forces by the turn of the 20th century at the very latest, without a war costing 600,000 dead. And perhaps more importantly for today, there would not have been the resentments and lost cause-ism that is still poisoning our society every day in so many ways.
But my main point is that, if the South were gone, the rest of us would live in a better country. Yes, there are right-wingers in northern states, but it is their solid power base in the south that empowers them to do so much mischief. Without the south, I believe we would have more sensible gun laws and would have passed universal health care decades ago, just for starters. And, of course, the rights of women over their bodies would still be protected.
While I find this analysis interesting, I find the following Kevin quote troubling: "Outside the South, Democrats are mostly appealing to white voters just fine."
Ohio and Iowa have become red states: note, these two states voted for Obama. Other upper Midwest states (historic Democratic strongholds) such Michigan and Wisconsin, voted for Trump in 2016, and are now considered swing states.
My point, is was not the loss of people of color that resulted in the aforementioned declines for the Democratic party: rather, it was the loss of working class white voters, in these non southern states.
Kevin has written elsewhere, and at length, about the D party's need to show that it is doing something for ordinary working people. He could have, and maybe should have, addressed that issue in this posting, but I imagine he felt it would just complexify the point he was trying to make.
The Democrats since LBJ have always ever been doing stuff for the ordinary working people. Folks who bleat about the need to do something for the working class are most often folks who are uncomfortable with the multi-cultural, mixed gender coalition that is the modern Democratic party. They year for the days when the White Guy Centrists/Conservatives controlled the party. Unfortunately Kevin seems to be one of those guys.
The problem for the guys pushing this is that there aren't enough people who feel this way -- most of the patriarchy shifted to the GOP to never return. Now if you want to get those people back you will shed the support of Black and unmarried female voters and lose elections in Blue states.
National-level aggregation falsifies many other kinds of statistics as well.
The survey measures white voter sentiment of political parties. The dividing line of American politics appears to be race not geography.
It's a combo of race and sexism - there are those BIPOC voters who are Republican because they support a patriarchy -- that is your Cuban, Vietnamese and some Hispanic voters.
You really think that every republican out there is racist or misogynist? If so, this is a prime example of why you guys handed Trump the election in 2016.
There's a spectrum where Trump & company are on one extreme end and there's the wealthy folks who don't mind the racism and misogyny as long as they get their tax cuts - they don't mind because they assume that the leopard face eating party would never ever actually eat their face. The wealthy are all too happy to sacrifice the women and BIPOC for their own parochial interests.
Because of this there's no path to compromise with that coalition - the foundations of the Democratic party are communitarianism and inclusion. The Democrats would have to sacrifice one or the other to pick off the parts of the GOP coalition and that would be losing more of the existing coalition so it's a stupid road to go down.
BIPOC! That was the acronym I had been searching for. Thanks, and my apologies.
I dunno. I realize I'm statistically unsophisticated (that is, ignorant and probably a strong element of stupid), but all I see is the Democratic share of "white" voters consistently going down, regardless of whether it's in the old Confederacy or the United States.
On the other hand, apparently the "white" share of the population is also going down. Now, let's do "POCS" and "APOCS", or whatever the insulting acronym of the moment is. Given recent Democratic wins, there's got to be somebody voting for them.
The most important thing to realize, according to the political press, is that this has nothing to do with race. Nothing.
Yeah the political press dominated by white male trustafarians who could afford to take the unpaid internships required to get your foot in the door in journalism.
And it's most definitely NOT a "class war." Sez the top 1%.
This post seems a bit too carefree to me.
If I interpolate the two curves in the "non-south" graph, I would see two different slopes for the blue (going down a lot) and the red (going down much less). If I focus on post-2010 data, then it's even worse. So saying: "see, the two curves are pretty much the same" kinda misses the point.
Most readers know who is red and who is blue in the charts. Heck, perhaps even Stuhre (sp) 🙂 But for the broader world, unlikely as they may be to come here, it would still be good to have a legend.
For that matter, it would also be good to have different line/point styles for those who might suffer from color-blindness various...
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