Month: October 2010

Why do “working class whites” continue to vote against their own best interests?

Posted on by Marc Jampole

It’s truly befuddling to me why the group labeled working class whites continue to prefer Republican candidates.

The results of the latest Associated Press-GfK survey says that this group favors Republicans 58% to 36% of Democrats, an incredible 22% margin.  The AP story announcing the survey results contrasts that poor showing with the last two elections, in which working class whites supported Republicans over Democrats by a margin of 11% and 9%.

Before we can go any further, we need to define white working class.  The survey and virtually all other researchers and pundits use this definition: “whites without four-year college degrees.”

Now this group currently represented 39% of all voters in the last presidential election (in which it was the only “racial group” to go for McCain). But a 2009 study by Roy Teixeira shows that over the past 20 years, the percentage of total voters who are white working class declined by 15%.  Teixeira also shows that all other “racial groups” are becoming more liberal, including middle class white.  Teixeira concludes that working class whites remain the only reliable group for Republicans.

Let’s keep in mind that attitudes might be slightly different today as a result of the mainstream media’s its incessant driving of the political dialogue rightward over the past year and its preoccupation with the Tea Party.  But Teixeira is talking about long-term trends, which may fluctuate from year to year but show a steady decline in the importance of the working class white voter and the continued movement of the rest of electorate leftward. 

The AP-GfK poll has not been posted at www.ap-gfkpoll.com yet, so I can’t delve into the details of the questions asked, the findings, the sample or the methodology.  The article did not mention the decline of the white working class population.  Nor did it cite the analysis by Sherry Linkon of the Center for Working-Class Studies, which suggests that the white working class voting pattern is more a function of geography than of race or education (57% of white workers in Massachusetts voted for Obama, but only 9% voted for him in Alabama). If the Republican lead in this group is regional, its impact on mid-term elections will be less important.

But despite the flaws in the AP story and the possible flaws in the initial survey, the results speak loud and clear.  On a national basis, working white class voters prefer Republicans so much today that for a Democratic candidate to win a national election, he or she would have to gain 59% of all other voters, a near impossible task, when you consider that 53% is typically called a landslide. 

The question remains, why? Economic and social theories and “laws” usually take it for granted that people always act in their best interests.  But how could it be in the best interests of people without college degrees, white or black, to vote Republican?  On average, people without four-year degrees earn less money than those with four-year degrees, regardless of their racial or ethnic background.  That means that they should be supporting policies that help those of modest means.

Let’s take a look at some of the positions that most Republicans have supported:

  • Many Republicans oppose the minimum wage and virtually all vote against any bill to raise the minimum wage.  And yet, when the minimum wage rises, so do all wages, a boon to the white working class.
  • Most Republicans are against labor unions.  What labor unions have tended to do historically is raise the wages and benefits of people without college diplomas, plus those with college degrees who make lower wages such as teachers and nurses.
  • Virtually all Republicans support lower taxes for higher incomes, which results in some combination of higher taxes for others and the creation of safe-haven investment opportunities for those wealthy enough to buy a lot of government bonds.  As a result of too low taxes and lots of government debt, those lower down on the economic ladder such as the white working class end up  paying more than their share because the rich are paying less than their share.  See my blogs of June 14  and 15 for more details.
  • Republicans are more apt to want to gut Social Security, and it was the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan that first started to roll the Social Security Trust Fund into the general budget and then claimed that the Trust Fund was near bankruptcy when all it needs to remain strong is get the money back that it lent the federal government.  Social Security has been one of the foundations of the retirement of most working class whites for years.

So what’s the attraction that the white working class has to Republican candidates?

It would be easy to evoke the pat answers of racism, resentment at losing wealth/power, social values, gun control or security, but I think it’s more complicated than any of these concepts and issues even as it involves most of them. 

Consider this analogy: No matter how much he hated the cook and how many times he heard that he’s already had his supper, the starving man will eat! The German playwright Berthold Brecht put it best when he said, “Erst kommt fressen, dann kommt Moralen,” which means, “first comes eating, then comes morals.”  The additional nuance in German is that Brecht says “fressen,” which is an animal eating, not “essen,” which is a human being eating. The meaning is clear, as is its application to voting: We vote with our stomachs, that is, we vote on economic issues. And yet, the white working class does not.

I want to do a little additional research and then explore with my readers more on this question: why do white working class voters vote against their own best economic interests?

After giving expanded coverage to Beck rally, media puts a same-sized rally of left-centrists on the back burner.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Many of you probably won’t know that on this past Saturday, labor unions, the NAACP and hundreds of other liberal-centrist and progressive groups rallied in Washington in support of liberal economic policies, President Obama and Democratic candidates in the November election.

The reason you may not have heard of this rally is that the news media didn’t cover it much.   Remember that when Glen Beck held his so-called “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington in August, more than 5,300 stories appeared on Google News.

But the news media showed much less in this past Saturday’s rally of liberals.  A search of Google News could only find about 930 stories about the rally.  And the stories that did appear seemed to be smaller and less prominent.  For example, the New York Times did not even put its story on the liberal rally on the first page of the national news section, but buried it at the bottom of the page deep in the paper.  The Times gave front page and front of the national section coverage to the Beck rally.

Now let’s consider the issue of attendance.  Most significantly, CBS News, which hired an independent consultant to estimate the Beck Rally at 87,000, made the decision ahead of time not to rehire the firm to do an estimate of the liberal rally.  Perhaps the CBS news executives were frustrated that much of the media preferred to ignore its honest and scientific estimate for the outrageous overestimates of Beck (500,000) and Republican Congressional Representative Michelle Bachman (2 million, but she may have been counting fingers and toes, and maybes ears, too!).  But I think not, seeing that CBS did not even file its own story about the liberal rally online, preferring to use the Associated Press’ version of events.

Most articles ignored attendance at the liberal rally, said it was around 100,000 or commented that it “appeared to be less” than the number at the Beck rally.  A few media published the organizers’ estimate of 175,000.  After looking at a few photos, my uneducated guess is that attendance at these two rallies was about the same.

With or without attendance numbers, the question remains: Why did the media give so much more coverage to Beck than it did to these 400 liberal, labor and progressive groups?  I’m thinking that it’s for the same reason that throughout the 2010 primary season, most media focused on Republican races, almost to the exclusion of the Democratic races.   I’m thinking it’s the same reason that this past week the national edition of the New York Times found room for four personality profiles of Republican candidates (Whitman, O’Donnell and Paladino twice) and none of Democratic candidates.

I’m thinking it’s because the mainstream news media wants the Republicans to win in November.

With one PR blunder, Meg Whitman may have wiped out $120 million in election spending.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Let’s say one subgroup who represented 18% of all voters all cast their ballot against one candidate, which in the United States would usually mean they cast their vote for the one other candidate.  That means that the candidate against whom that one subgroup voted would have to win about 61% of the rest of all voters to win the election.

Getting 61% of any non-ethnic group to vote one way is very tough to do, especially if the candidate is a Republican in blue-state California.  And that’s why yesterday Meg Whitman, the Republican candidate for Governor, may have committed the very worst public relations blunder of the 2010 election season.

Earlier this week, a former housekeeper for Whitman, the billionaire founder CEO of E-Bay, said that Whitman knew for years that the housekeeper was an illegal alien, but kept her on illegally all the same.  Whitman has denied she ever knew the housekeeper was illegal.  The crux of the dispute comes down to a letter that the Social Security Administration sent to Whitman in 2003, which Whitman claims she never got.  The letter said that the housekeeper’s name did not match the Social Security number she had submitted to Whitman.

Here is the Associate Press version of Whitman’s explanation today of why she never got the letter:

When asked at a news conference whether the worker, Nicky Diaz Santillan, might have taken the letter intended for Whitman, she said “it’s very possible.” The housekeeper was in charge of going through the mail, she said.

“She might have been on the lookout for that letter,” Whitman said. “It would pain me to believe that that’s what she might have done but I have no other explanation.”

In other words, the billionaire white lady accused her Hispanic housekeeper of thievery!

How do you think Whitman’s comments will sit with Hispanic voters, who every day experience the prejudice of being stereotyped as dishonest, especially as hired help?  The stereotype of the dishonest Hispanic maid or hired hand is almost a standard caricature in TV and movies.

It was okay for Whitman to deny the allegation that she knew her housekeeper was illegal.  But to accuse the Hispanic maid of stealing the letter was a big step into deep doo-doo, or, if you prefer, a whale’s mouthful of foot.  I’m certain that most if not all Hispanic voters will get a shiver of disgust when they read or hear Whitman’s comments.  It reminded me of George Allen, 2008 Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Virginia calling someone at a rally a “macaca,” considered an odious racial slur in much of the world.

Luckily for Whitman, Hispanics constitute 37% of the population of California, but only 18% of its voters.

We know that a certain part of the population everywhere believes the stereotype or have other racist opinions about Hispanics.  But those people were never going to vote for Jerry Brown or any other Democratic candidate.  Hispanics, an economically and even socially diverse group of people, might have voted for a Republican.  Political candidates from both parties have actively courted the Hispanic vote in California for years.  But I don’t think they’ll vote for anyone who trades in an awful and untrue stereotype about them.

When asked the question, Whitman should have said, “I don’t know why I never received the letter, but I know I never did” and left it at that.

And to think, Meg-Bay has spent $120 million of her own money getting elected Governor so she could fight for lower taxes and other standard Republican positions.  Could it all be down the drain because she or her public relations advisors went into attack mode with no evidence?  She violated one of the most important rules of PR: don’t attack unless you have a clean kill.  With nothing but speculation on her side, Whitman’s verbal attack on her former maid did nothing but hurt her own cause.