[Leftists shouldn’t counterpose working-class voters on the one
hand and college-educated voters on the other. Our strategy can
combine a working-class economic program with a progressive approach
to social and cultural questions.]
[[link removed]]

DON’T OVERSTATE THE DIVIDE BETWEEN THE CAMPUS AND THE WORKING CLASS
 
[[link removed]]


 

Chris Maisano
December 13, 2022
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Leftists shouldn’t counterpose working-class voters on the one
hand and college-educated voters on the other. Our strategy can
combine a working-class economic program with a progressive approach
to social and cultural questions. _

Supporters cheer during an election night event for Democratic Senate
candidate John Fetterman on November 9, 2022 in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania., Jeff Swensen / Getty Images

 

Last week, _Financial Times_ columnist Edward Luce published a sharply
observed piece
[[link removed]] on
the plight of “America’s shipwrecked working class.” Luce
pointed out the gap between the Biden administration’s pro-union,
pro-worker rhetoric and some of its major recent policy decisions,
including student debt relief and imposing a rail labor agreement that
workers rejected. “As a result,” Luce argues, “working classes
of all colors have been steadily drifting towards the Republicans.
More Americans with household income below $50,000 voted Republican
[[link removed]]
than Democratic last month.” Luce’s analysis echoes claims from
some Democrats
[[link removed]]
that their party is too woke to appeal to working people, and from
some Republicans that the GOP is, in the words of self-styled
“populist” Republican Josh Hawley, “a working-class party
now.”

There is no doubt that a significant portion of the Republican base is
working-class — particularly among white workers — and that the
GOP has made recent inroads among working-class Latino men in
particular. It is also true that the data Luce draws on for his claim,
the 2022 Fox News Voter Analysis
[[link removed]],
shows the GOP with a slight edge (49 to 48 percent) over the Democrats
among voters with household incomes below $50,000 nationally. That is
cause for concern, not just for the Democrats, but for the broad left
in this country too.

Still, there is an analytical and political danger in overinterpreting
headline data like this. A closer look at the data we have so far from
the 2022 midterm elections, including the data that Luce draws upon,
reveals a more complicated picture about how the American working
class is voting than many of the postelection narratives suggest.

A Redder (and Whiter) Electorate

The “red wave” that nearly all pundits expected to sweep
Republicans to a smashing victory failed to materialize. This
frustration of GOP electoral hopes has, however, obscured the fact
that the 2022 midterm electorate had a distinctly crimson hue to it.
Even though Republican candidates lost a string of high-profile races
for governorships and US Senate seats, Republican voters turned out at
a markedly higher rate than Democrats.

According to the Fox News Voter Analysis Luce draws on, 49 percent of
midterm voters were Republicans or Republican leaners, while 43
percent were Democrats or Democratic leaners (the remaining 8 percent
were independents). By contrast, the 2020 electorate had a 48 to 47
percent Republican advantage, while the 2018 electorate had a 46 to 43
percent Democratic advantage. This year’s midterms had one of the
most Republican electorates in years.

Furthermore, the 2022 electorate wasn’t just redder than those in
other recent elections — it was also significantly whiter. According
to _New York Times_ analyst Nate Cohn, the white turnout rate exceeded
[[link removed]]
black turnout by the largest margin since 2006. A whiter electorate
is, generally speaking, a more Republican electorate, and, as Cohn
points out, “the Black population share was below the national
average in virtually all of the key districts and Senate contests.”

Considering this drop-off in black voter participation, it’s not too
surprising to see Republicans faring better than one might expect
among lower-income voters. If anything, it’s noteworthy that GOP
candidates like Blake Masters in Arizona or Herschel Walker in Georgia
turned in such weak performances, which suggests that even many
Republican voters found them too extreme or too unprepared to hold
office.

The View From the States

While it’s true that US politics has become thoroughly nationalized
in recent years, this does not mean that electoral dynamics play out
the same way across all fifty states. Increasing nationalization
generates increasing divergence between states where Democrats are
strong and those where the GOP holds sway.

As political scientist Jake Grumbach
[[link removed]]
argues in his important new book, _Laboratories Against Democracy_
[[link removed]],
one’s “state of residence really matters now in a way it didn’t
a generation ago,” from government policies like abortion and
collective bargaining rights to patterns of voting behavior. As such,
the slight 49 to 48 percent Republican edge among voters with
household incomes under $50,000 nationally is not uniformly replicated
when we look at the results on a state-by-state basis.

Let’s take a look at the Fox News Voter Analysis data for some of
the highest-profile statewide races. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, the
Democratic candidates for governor (Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro,
respectively) cruised to victory over their Republican opponents.
Whitmer easily defeated Republican Tudor Dixon, one of Donald
Trump’s handpicked MAGA candidates, 55 to 44 percent among all
Michigan voters. But she did even better among voters with household
incomes below $50,000, besting Dixon 58 to 40 percent — a margin of
eighteen points.

Whitmer also won among voters with household incomes over $50,000, but
by a smaller five-point margin (52 to 47 percent). Shapiro trounced
his Republican opponent, the truly unhinged Doug Mastriano, by a
roughly sixteen-point margin (57 to 41 percent). There was not a
difference in voting patterns by income group in this case;
Pennsylvania voters with household incomes on both sides of the
$50,000 threshold voted for Shapiro 57 to 41 percent.

In Arizona, lower-income voters carried Democratic gubernatorial
candidate Katie Hobbs to a narrow victory over her Republican
opponent, Kari Lake. According to the Fox News data, Lake edged out
Hobbs by two points (51 to 49 percent) among voters with household
incomes of $50,000 or more. These voters accounted for a larger
portion of the Arizona electorate than lower-income voters, but
Hobbs’s seven-point margin of victory among voters with household
incomes below $50,000 was large enough to put her over the top.

The income gap was even larger in the state’s Senate race, which pit
incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly against one of Peter Thiel’s dead-eyed
minions, Blake Masters. Kelly crushed Masters among lower-income
voters by a thirteen-point margin (55 to 42 percent), but they fought
to a draw among higher-income voters (49 to 49 percent).

The Kelly-Masters race was very similar to the John Fetterman–Mehmet
Oz Senate contest in Pennsylvania, where Fetterman carried
lower-income voters by the same 55 to 42 percent score, more than
offsetting the razor-thin edge (49 to 48 percent) he had over Oz among
voters with household incomes over $50,000.

The Arizona results are all the more remarkable considering the state
electorate’s Republican skew. A near-majority (49 percent) of
Arizona voters were Republicans, while just 38 percent identified as
Democrats (the remaining 13 percent were independents). This is how
the results from Florida, where state Republicans led by governor Ron
DeSantis thrashed their Democratic rivals, really stand out.

The Florida electorate had the same proportion of Democrats as
Arizona, but the state’s GOP has clearly succeeded in winning
independent voters over to the Right. Just 7 percent of Florida voters
were independents, while 55 percent were Republicans — and they
voted consistently for their party up and down the ticket.

DeSantis was reelected governor in a race that was the mirror image of
the Shapiro-Mastriano contest in Pennsylvania. DeSantis beat the
listless former Republican governor Charlie Crist by roughly 59 to 40
percent, a result that was identically replicated among voters on both
sides of the $50,000 household income divide. Crist won just over half
of non-white voters (53 percent), but these constituted just about
one-third of the electorate. Moreover, DeSantis split the Puerto Rican
vote with Crist, a worrisome sign considering the growing size and
strength of these voters in Florida state politics.

Data from states where one of the two parties has a clear and
consistent partisan advantage often don’t show significant cleavages
in voting patterns along the $50,000 household income divide. Support
for Democrats and Republicans in both income groups, at least in
statewide elections, tends to track closely with the overall results.
In Democratic California, incumbent governor Gavin Newsom beat his
Republican opponent by 59 to 41 percent, and that margin was
replicated identically among voters on both sides of the $50,000 line.

Likewise, in conservative Idaho, where the Republican gubernatorial
candidate beat the Democrat 60 to 20 percent (the remaining 20 percent
was split among even more right-wing candidates, including the Mormon
militiaman Ammon Bundy), there was little difference in voting
patterns on either side of the line. And, as we’ve seen above, in
many of the states where there was a meaningful income-based cleavage
in statewide races, lower-income voters broke for the Democratic
candidate and helped them win the election.

The Campus and the Class
Luce ends his column by sketching a future “in which Democrats are
the party of the campus with a cultural agenda that alienates a rising
share of uneducated whites and non-whites, and Republicans who are
skilled at harvesting blue-collar resentment of elites who pay little
more than lip service to their needs.” It’s undeniable that the
Democratic Party, particularly its superannuated leadership, bears a
significant share of responsibility for the parlous state of
working-class America. And if the Democrats — to say nothing of the
new New Left in this country — don’t offer convincing solutions to
working people’s problems, the far right will be all too willing to
step into the breach.

The future Luce dreads has a surface plausibility to it. But a note of
caution is in order.

For one thing, there will always be a substantial portion of the
working class that votes conservative because of cross-cutting
cleavages like religion or ethnicity. Moreover, as educational
attainment continues to expand, it is increasingly untenable to
counterpose “the campus” and the working class. Seventy percent of
employed civilians in the United States have had at least some
postsecondary education
[[link removed]],
including the 45 percent who have attained at least a bachelor’s
degree. Well-educated workers have been at the leading edge of labor
militancy in many sectors, and the most successful current union
drive, the campaign to organize Starbucks, is being led by workers
with substantial student debt burdens, many of whose leaders are queer
[[link removed]].

Finally, as shown above, Democrats still do well among working-class
voters in the states and localities where they are strong, and when
candidates like John Fetterman — who did not abandon or downplay a
progressive “cultural agenda” on abortion, trans rights, and the
like — make a particular appeal to them.

The only way forward is to combine a working-class economic program
with a progressive approach to social and cultural questions, and to
stick to it consistently over time, even where the political terrain
is currently inhospitable to us. Democrats should be criticized when
they fall short on the former, but neither they nor the Left need to
choose between them. We need both the campus and the working class if
we want to win.

===

* Working class voters; Students and Workers; Lower income voters;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]