How Democrats Lost White Voters
Former Alabama Gov. George Wallace gave voice to blue-collar frustrations and middle-class resentments of "pointy-headed professors," the liberal "beatnik crowd" and Washington's "briefcase-totin' bureaucrats." Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 partly by positioning himself as a moderate, pragmatic alternative to Wallace's extremism in attracting what were called "white backlash" votes.
Where, many reasonably asked, were the affirmative action programs for white workers?
A new conservative voting majority replaced the once-dominant Democratic presidential coalition beginning in the late 1960s, as described by Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary Edsall in their landmark 1992 book, "Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics." The book helped to inform Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, in which Clinton vowed to aid "the forgotten middle class" and "end welfare as we know it."
Two decades later, many Democrats still ask why so many working-class whites "vote against their economic interests?" Blogging in The New York Times after November's elections, Tom Edsall said Democrats really should be asking themselves: "What has the Democratic Party done for these voters lately?"
Good question. As the Republicans' post-2012 autopsy found, working-class voters understand their interests. Obama's victory was helped not only by voters of color but also by working-class white voters who switched to Obama or didn't vote at all because of Romney's failures to connect with working-class interests.
It is important to ask why voters don't vote their economic interests. But I think the most important question in politics, regardless of race, creed or color, is simply, "Who's on my side?"
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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