Whistling Past Dixie
by David Atkins
Dave Weigel gives an important reminder about the “white working class voter.”
National polls don’t tell us the whole story about white voters. Outside the South, since 2008, the white working class has edged away from the Democratic Party. But it remains open to the Democrats. That’s why the rest of the country’s so competitive! Take the example of Minnesota, where 90 percent of the 2008 electorate was white. Barack Obama split that vote, 49-49, with John McCain. He narrowly lost whites between the ages of 30 and 44, but won all other ages, and won elderly whites by a 17-point landslide.
Compare that to Georgia, where Obama did better than any Democrat since 1996. He won a measly 23 percent of the white vote. He lost elderly whites, aged 65 and over, by 56 points.
This might be obvious, but I think it gets lost in our daily culture war dialogues. To win the election in a squeaker, Barack Obama needs to win around 39 percent of the white vote. But outside the South, if he’s winning, he’ll be basically tying Romney with whites or losing them by 2-5 points. He’s the first Democrat to win national elections in the post-Dixiecrat era. For generations, the Democratic attitudes of the South made it easier for the party to hold Congress, even as ticket-splitters were voting Republican for president — Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes. Now it’s reversed. A Democrat can lose the deep South in a landslide, but win the presidency, as southern conservatives send a massive crop of Republicans back to the Capitol.
Modern Republicanism is a largely older, Southern white phenomenon. Nationalized politics is allowing that culture to creep somewhat into the midwest (Missouri being a prime example), while states in the Mormon triangle and the plains are also deeply conservative for similar reasons, but lack the population prevents them from doing much damage outside of the undemocratic Senate.
By and large, though, the cultural divide that has plagued this nation since its founding remains with us today. We fought a war over it that cost many lives, but should have been decisive. In the end, it will be demographic changes that draw the 250-year-old simmering battle to a close not with a bang but with a whimper. And I hope to be there when Texas votes Democratic for President in 2024, playing the world’s smallest violin for a peculiar culture that at last can do little further damage to America and the world.
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