A message from Ed Kilgore:
Dear Readers:
The Democratic coalition is currently engaged in an intense and urgent debate about vastly expanding the scope and role of grass-roots organizing. From Democratic financial contributors to political campaign managers and strategists, the issue has now attained critical importance in the new post-Citizen’s United age.
The Democratic Strategist is proud to present the first in-depth look at one of the most important organizations in this field — Working America, the three million member community affiliate of the AFL-CIO. Although little known and less understood, Working America is actually a critical player and extraordinary social “laboratory” for progressive grass-roots organizing in white working class America.
Every participant in the current debate should become familiar with how WA works and what it has been able to achieve.
To read the memo, click here.
Month: June 2012
One of the topics I’ve been covering regularly at Washington Monthly has been the politics of health care reform above and beyond the disposition of “ObamaCare” by the Supreme Court, which is likely to be announced in the next two weeks.
If the Court does strike down or disable the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, then the GOP’s alleged “replacement” plans will get considerable attention. And it’s important for Democrats to understand that Mitt Romney’s overall health care agenda–including his endorsement of the Ryan Budget and of legislation designed to disable state insurance regulation–would represent a large step back from the health care status quo ante, which would be bad enough for many millions of Americans.
Moreover, Romney’s claims to support “popular” reforms associated with ObamaCare, such as the prohibition of exclusions for pre-existing conditions, are completely bogus.
The stakes in November with respect to health care cost, coverage and quality go well beyond the simple yes-or-no questions about ObamaCare. It will represent a choice between a systematic effort to create a rational system of universal access to affordable health insurance, and a big step back towards the 1950s.
One of the least discussed topics in conservative circles these days is inequality of wealth and income. Yet, as TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira points out in the latest edition of his ‘Public Opinion Watch’, “public awareness of inequality is very high these days,” according to the Pew Research Center’s New American Values survey:
…One survey question asked respondents if they agreed that today the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. About three-quarters (76 percent) agreed, while just 23 percent disagreed.
And it’s not just the poor who are losing ground to the rich–it’s the middle class as well. In the same survey three-quarters (76 percent) also say the gap between the standards of living of the middle class and the rich grew over the last decade, compared to just 16 percent who think it narrowed.
Teixeira adds that “These sentiments are too lopsided to go away anytime soon” and conservatives should “offer a few solutions as a refreshing change.” However, that’s not likely, as Teixeira concludes, “since that would mean recommending something besides tax cuts for the rich, conservatives’ one-size-fits-all economic policy.”
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on June 12, 2012.
In my June 8 post on “The Recall in Broader Perspective,” I briefly referenced the GOP meme “that public workers have extravagant pensions, propagated by Republicans who amplify a few horror stories as emblematic of public worker retirement benefits.” It’s part and parcel of a broader Republican scam vilifying public workers as overcompensated in general.
For a revealing example, see Josh Barro’s Bloomberg.com post, “Does Obama Know Why the Public Sector Isn’t ‘Doing Fine’?” in which he spotlights city employees of San Jose, CA, where
…Costs for a full-time equivalent employee are astronomical and skyrocketing. San Jose spends $142,000 per FTE [full-time employee] on wages and benefits, up 85 percent from 10 years ago. As a result, the city shed 28 percent of its workforce over that period, even as its population was rising.
The unspoken, but unmistakable gist of Barro’s post is “See, those greedy public workers are responsible for causing their own layoffs.” Without even taking a look at nation-wide data, Barro is clearly suggesting in his post’s title that San Jose’s experience is somehow typical of public workers in cities across the nation. Worse, he takes it a step further and blames public worker unions in his concluding sentence, “If the president wants to know why state and local governments can’t afford to hire, he could start by asking his own supporters in public employee unions.”
That’s why Romney can say stuff about President Obama like “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message in Wisconsin?” and get away with it, while media dimwits point their fingers at Obama for his one gaffe in three years.
Had Barro clearly presented his horror story as an exceptional case, that would be defensible. Or had he backed it up with some credible national data, you could grudgingly credit him with a solid argument. But he didn’t do that because he couldn’t.
As David Cooper, Mary Gable, and Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute note in their report, “The public-sector jobs crisis“:
Despite these significantly higher levels of education–and contrary to assertions by some governors in recent state-level debates–the most rigorous studies have consistently shown that state and local government employees earn less both in wages and total compensation than comparable private-sector workers (Keefe 2010). Using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey and standard regression models for wage analyses, we compared the wage income of private-sector employees with that of state and local government workers. After controlling for education, experience, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, full-time/part-time status, number of hours worked, citizenship status, Census region, metropolitan status (whether residing within or outside the boundaries of a major metropolitan area), and employer size, we find that state and local government employees make, on average, 11.7 percent less in wages than similar private-sector employees.
if those greedy public workers can be faulted for their extravagant compensation packages, what should be done about their better-paid private sector cohorts?
Look, none of this is to deny that there are public worker pension/salary horror stories. But it takes a pretty shameless media to imply that extravagantly compensated public workers are the norm. Is it too much to ask that some honest journalists call Romney out on it?
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on June 7, 2012.
Ron Brownstein has a couple of recent posts tracking white working class political attitudes that should be of interest to presidential campaign strategists. In “Working Class Whites Still Wary of Obamacare,” he explains:
The problem, as on almost all issues relating to government’s role, is centered on whites, particularly those in the working class. According to figures provided by Kaiser, in their latest survey, 35 percent of non-white respondents believe that the law will benefit their family. That compares to just 14 percent who believe they will be worse off (the remaining 39 percent don’t think it will make much difference). Whites offer nearly a mirror image: just 18 percent believe the law will leave their family better off, compared to 38 percent who believe they will be worse off as a result.
The skepticism among whites is most concentrated among whites without a college degree. Just one-in-seven of them believe health care reform will personally benefit them or their family. Among college whites about one-in-four expect to personally benefit from the reform.
Gallup Polling in March 2010 found that while few whites expected to personally benefit from the law, a majority of them believed it would benefit low-income families and those without health insurance. That suggested they viewed health care reform primarily as a welfare program that would help the needy but not their own families. Kaiser didn’t replicate that question in their latest survey, but it may have detected an echo of that sentiment in the finding that twice as many whites believed the law would benefit children than thought it would help their own family.
Ironically, adds Brownstein, “…non-college whites are uninsured at much higher rates than those with degrees; for that reason, the law would personally benefit far more of them than the college-educated whites who are somewhat more open to it.” Yet, “the targets of that effort remain entirely unconvinced that the law will benefit them. Rather than ameliorating their skepticism that government will defend their interests, it appears to have only intensified it.”
Brownstein warns that the skepticism about the ACA is “another brick on the load Obama is carrying with white working class voters, who appear poised in polls to reject him at levels no Democratic presidential nominee has experienced since 1984.”
In another post, “How Diversity Divides White America,” Brownstein addresses white working class attitudes towards immigrants revealed in the just released Pew Research 2012 Values Survey:
Among college-educated whites who identify as Democrats-an increasingly central pillar of the party’s coalition-over four-in-five say that the immigrants do not threaten American values. But nearly two-thirds of Republicans without a college degree-an increasingly central pillar of the GOP coalition-do consider immigrants a threat to American traditions…That overwhelming unease among the blue-collar (and older) white voters central to GOP electoral prospects today represents a huge hurdle for the Republican strategists who want the party to expand its Hispanic outreach.
One conclusion to be drawn from both of Brownstein’s articles is that the Obama campaign should upgrade it’s outreach to white workers as a large constituency which benefits from Obama’s reforms, yet remains unpersuaded — doubt which the Republicans are eagerly prepared to reinforce in their ad campaigns.
This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on June 4, 2012.
Now that Mitt Romney is officially the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and we have some distance from the primaries that decided it all, it’s time to consider the lessons. Otherwise, poor memories, shaky analysis and self-serving spin will combine to congeal a conventional “wisdom” that is anything but.
As someone who obsessively chronicled every twist and turn of this very odd nomination contest for TNR, here are my five top takeaways:
1.Mitt Romney is a very lucky man. The Republican Party’s dominant conservative wing resisted his nomination as long and as hard as it could, but in the end, had no better options. Herman Cain was not ever going to win the nomination. Nor, likely, was the immensely vulnerable, highly unpopular Newt Gingrich or the extremist Michele Bachmann, both of whom were an oppo researcher’s dream. The two potentially viable rivals were Tim Pawlenty, who gambled everything and lost on the fool’s gold of the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa last summer, and Rick Perry, who ran one of those rare, amazingly inept presidential campaigns that are a constant reminder of the importance of minimal competence in politics. It’s a sign of Romney’s vulnerability that Rick Santorum–whose 2006 Senate defeat told you everything you needed to know about how well he wore on voters, and how much ammunition his record provided his opponents–came within a few thousand votes in Michigan of sending Mitt’s campaign into a potential death spiral and the national GOP into a panic. Anyone who tells you Romney’s nomination was pre-ordained by some iron law of succession or some shadowy “Establishment” was obviously not paying much attention to how the deal actually went down.
2. Conservatives reasserted their control of the GOP. You’ll also hear that Romney’s nomination was a victory for Republican “moderates” over “movement conservatives” or their latest grassroots incarnation, the Tea Party. Don’t believe it. Yes, hard-core conservatives would have preferred a different nominee–for the most part, someone who wasn’t running, like Jim DeMint or Mike Pence or Marco Rubio–but they had issues with virtually everyone in the actual field, and more importantly, they got what they needed from Romney, who was, as everyone seems to have forgotten, their own preferred candidate in 2008. He’s atoned for his health care heresy by promising about ten thousand times to repeal ObamaCare root and branch. He’s on board with the twin pillars of the Small Government counter-revolution, the Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, and the Ryan Budget. He’s foresworn increased taxes as any part of any budget deal, however large. He’s met all the basic social-issues litmus tests of the Christian Right. He was by most measures the hawkiest of all the candidates on foreign policy issues. And for good measure, he tacked hard right on immigration policy in order to croak Rick Perry. Thanks to his “flip-flop” problem and conservative hyper-vigilance, there will be no back-tracking by Romney between now and November, or most probably, between now and the end of time. Mitt’s no stubbornly independent cuss like John McCain. He’ll stay bought.
3. 2012 is not just “about” the economy. The primaries did not notably feature debates among Republican candidates about how, exactly, to bring the U.S. economy back. In part that’s because they were in total agreement on the big points: both fiscal and monetary stimulus of the economy are terrible ideas; excessive federal spending and extension of housing credit to irresponsible poor and minority folk caused the Great Recession; and a systematic agenda of universal deregulation, public-sector austerity, health-care rationing to reduce costs, restriction of collective bargaining rights, and high-end (including corporate) tax cuts are the prescription for recovery. That this is the conservative movement’s permanent non-cultural agenda for good times and bad is the tip-off that even the GOP’s “economic” plans are about an ideological commitment to smaller government–extending very nearly these days to a complete overturning of the New Deal and Great Society legacy–rather than any shrewd macroeconomic strategy. Beyond that, there is no question the primaries reflected an abiding preoccupation with cultural issues, whatever the candidates professed, viz. the endless angels-dancing-on-pins distinctions on whether to ban “abortifacient” contraceptives as well as clinical abortions, the war on Planned Parenthood, and the final plunge of the GOP (and for that matter, the Catholic Bishops) into full harness with the Christian Right’s long-standing position that church-state separation represents a “war on religion.” It’s hard to imagine much of anything about the subject-matter of the primary contest that would have changed had the economy been booming.
4. Super-PACs have changed politics. Whether it’s simply a matter of the drift towards uncontrolled campaign financing accelerated by Citizens United, or the hyper-mobilization of an unprecedented group of politically active billionaires, there’s no question the Super-PACs played a big role in the nomination contest. Newt Gingrich’s Palinesque media-bashing debate performances had a lot to do with his candidacy coming back from the grave twice, but he would have remained a novelty candidate like past debate phenoms had not it been for Sheldon Adelson’s decision to give him the resources to run an actual campaign. It was Romney’s Super-PAC that destroyed Perry in Iowa, Gingrich in Florida, and later on, Santorum in the Midwest. And when the losing candidates’ own sugar daddies (Adelson and Santorum’s friend Foster Friess) closed the checkbooks, it was all over. The same forces (and many of the very same people) may be about to save Scott Walker’s bacon in Wisconsin, and are in the process of challenging the assumption that the sheer power of paid media can’t win a presidential general election.
5. The crazy nomination process is here for another four years. The dog that didn’t bark in 2012 was the usual chorus of complaints about the crazy-quilt nominating process itself–the disproportionate power of the early states, and the buyer’s remorse of voters and elites stuck with a nominee they didn’t want. The stretched-out nature of the primary calendar–which kept Romney from formally claiming the nomination until late May–was part of that non-event. So, too, was the rapid consolidation of support behind Romney once he essentially clinched the nomination in Wisconsin if not earlier. There will be some grumbling about the procedural glitches that allowed Ron Paul’s minions to dominate delegate selection events long after the deal had gone down, but for the most part, minor adjustments should suffice. We’ll be stuck with the same crazy system in 2016.
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Back in April, my esteemed mentor and colleague William Galston and I had an exchange at TNR about whether the presidential election would necessarily serve as a “referendum” on the president’s record (particularly with respect to the economy, of course) and what that meant for Obama’s re-election strategy. I won’t rehash the entire discussion, but Bill leaned heavily on the political science consensus that referenda are unavoidable for incumbents, while I demurred in part, citing the contrary example of 2004, the impact of polarization on the number of persuadable voters, and the need to make a sharp characterization of Mitt Romney’s sometimes hazy character and record, as factors dictating a strongly comparative Obama message.
Now after an Obama speech widely hailed as setting the tone for his campaign’s treatment of economic and fiscal issues from here on out, Galston has unsurprisingly registered concern in another TNR column:
Today in Cleveland, President Obama jettisoned the theme of economic inequality that had suffused his economic speeches for more than six months, focusing instead on “how we grow faster, how we e more jobs, and how we pay down our debt.” The real issue, he said, is how we reverse the “erosion of middle-class jobs and middle-class incomes.” In making that claim, Obama doubled down on the guiding assumption of his campaign–that he can turn the 2012 election into a choice between two models for the future, rather than a referendum on his first term. He made only a brief effort to defend his economic record, focusing instead on what he intends to do in a second term and on what he believes are the fatal flaws of the Republican/Romney agenda.
After unfavorably comparing Obama’s message to its ostensible model, Reagan’s “Morning in America” plea in 1984 against turning back the clock to the bad old days of the Carter Administration, Galston concludes:
The president and his top political advisors clearly reject the view that his record is central and believe they can make this election into a choice between two futures. As a Democrat, I hope they’re right. But as a student of American politics, I fear they’re not.
I’m not as sure as Bill is that Obama won’t spend time defending his economic record: The “boring” and “unoriginal” parts of his Cleveland speech that the pundits kept complaining about involved a lot of talk about what his administration has accomplished in areas ranging from the auto industry to education and energy. But there’s a solid reason Team Obama has been forced into a “comparative” message, and it’s not just because job growth seems to be lagging at a crucial moment in the campaign.
Even big fans of the “referendum” theory agree that challengers have to cross an invisible threshold of “acceptability” before they can defeat even the most vulnerable incumbent. Mitt Romney is running an extraordinarily evasive campaign in terms of his record in the one public office he’s occupied, and the agenda he’s been made to accept in order to win the GOP nomination. That’s no accident: There are sound reasons to believe his record and especially his agenda will be highly problematic for him, in no small part because it reflects what Bill Clinton shrewdly called (a term Obama quoted in Cleveland) “Bush on steroids”–a rightward twist on the economic policies that gave the country years of sluggish growth, rising inequality, middle-class insecurity, large budget deficits, and then the Great Recession.
One of the great ironies of contemporary politics is that Republicans have succeeded in separating themselves from the Bush legacy by moving to the right of that one-time hero of movement conservatives. They do have “new ideas,” but they are ideas that until very recently were considered out of the mainstream (e.g., total abandonment of Keynsianism, a deflationary, hard-money prejudice in monetary policy, an effort to shrink the public sector to a fixed percentage of GDP, climate-change denialism, frank opposition to public education, etc.). Making the voting public understand that development–and its implications for anyone with bad memories of the Bush administration–is essential to Obama’s ability to contextualize his own record and defend his own future agenda. To put it bluntly, if Mitt Romney succeeds in presenting himself to swing voters as this mild-mannered “moderate” technocrat who will use his business skills to “fix” the economy and otherwise leave cherished programs and public policy commitments alone, he will be well across the threshold that makes him broadly acceptable to voters seeking “change” not only from Obama’s record but from Bush’s.
Romney is not going to talk about his agenda and its organic relationship to the failed and unpopular hobbyhorses of conservatism unless he is forced to do so. The media show no great inclination to take on that task. Obama must assume it, or all the efforts in the world to defend his own record are likely to fail with low-information swing voters who have no real idea of the opposition party’s lurch in exactly the wrong direction from Bush to Romney.
This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Today in Cleveland, President Obama jettisoned the theme of economic inequality that had suffused his economic speeches for more than six months, focusing instead on “how we grow faster, how we create more jobs, and how we pay down our debt.” The real issue, he said, is how we reverse the “erosion of middle-class jobs and middle-class incomes.”
In making that claim, Obama doubled down on the guiding assumption of his campaign–that he can turn the 2012 election into a choice between two models for the future, rather than a referendum on his first term. He made only a brief effort to defend his economic record, focusing instead on what he intends to do in a second term and on what he believes are the fatal flaws of the Republican/Romney agenda.
His argument for reelection is simple: Mitt Romney would take us back to the economic program that failed us under George W. Bush. The alternative, he said, is a strong and growing economy built on a strong and growing middle class–a twenty-first century economy built on a foundation of education, science and innovation, infrastructure, and clean energy, and paid for with a “balanced” program of deficit reduction that asks the wealthiest American to pay “a little bit more.”
All this invites an obvious retort: if that’s the right plan, why didn’t you implement it during your first term? Obama’s answer: the Republicans in Congress wouldn’t let me. And in November the American people should seize their chance to break this “stalemate.”
I’ve long argued that when presidents seek reelection, their record will be the focus of the campaign whether they like it or not. My critics suggest there is a real alternative–but is that really so? When Obama asks why we would return to the policies that failed us, he’s channeling the tag-line of one of the most effective political ads of all time, Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”: “Why would we ever want to return to where we were?”
But I invite my older readers to take another look at the ad, and my young readers to look at it for the first time. You’ll find that most of it is a summary of how well things are going under Reagan’s stewardship. The concluding rhetorical question gains its force from the contrast between the optimistic experience of the present and the bitter memory of the past. The point isn’t that it was dark before, but that it’s morning now. Unlike Reagan, Obama can’t make that claim.
But it doesn’t matter what I think. The president and his top political advisors clearly reject the view that his record is central and believe they can make this election into a choice between two futures. As a Democrat, I hope they’re right. But as a student of American politics, I fear they’re not.
President Obama’s immigration reform initiative has energized Latino voter enthusiasm for his re-election in key ‘battleground’ states, reports Paul West in Today’s L.A. Times: According to a new survey by Latino Decisions, “Forty-nine percent of the Latino voters surveyed said Obama’s move made them more enthusiastic about the president, compared with 14% who were less enthusiastic…That “enthusiasm advantage” of 35 percentage points compares with a 19-point deficit in a survey earlier this year, when Latino voters were asked about the high level of deportations of immigrants under the Obama administration.”
At Time Swampland Massimo Calabresi reports on Romney’s dithering response to the President’s immigration reform initiative. “Romney could hardly embrace Obama’s new policy without cost. If did he would alienate the nativist base of the GOP already sensitive to the idea that with the nomination secure he will abandon the right and run for the center…Given the carefully choreographed roll-out, there was no way Romney could just ignore the issue. That was part of the cleverness of the Obama move. Not only was it a sharp and targeted wedge aimed at splitting two voting blocs Romney needs in November.”
Surf far and wide, but you won’t find a more apt capsule description of the GOP response to the President’s initiative than the title of a PoliticusUSA article by Jason Easely and Sarah Jones: “Obama’s Immigration Surprise Triggers an Epic Blubbering Right Wing Meltdown.”
Kenneth T. Walsh reports at U.S. News on a clever Democratic tactic — pre-shadowing Romney’s campaign stops with a “middle-class under the bus” tour — “with news conferences and media interviews that are severely critical of Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts and as a businessman. The Democrats are planning to shadow Romney in Michigan today with stops in Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Detroit.”
Thomas B. Edsall’s “Canaries in the Coal Mine” in the NYT takes a look at “highly volatile…shifting loyalties” of white working-class voters revealed in exit poll data provided by political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Sam Best, and notes: “The correlation between support from working class whites and Democratic victory suggests that the party takes a great risk when it downplays the importance of this segment of the electorate, as some strategists are wont to do.” However, noted Edsaall, “the white working class is declining steadily as a share of the electorate; and second, Democrats have made huge gains in a previously Republican constituency, well-educated white professionals, many with advanced degrees.”
For the definitive critique of Gallup’s survey methods, look no further than Mark Blumenthal’s post, “Race Matters: Why Gallup Poll Finds Less Support For President Obama ” at HuffPo Pollster. A teaser: “…A dramatic fall in response rates has led to what pollsters call “non-response bias” in their raw data. Partly because survey response rates are typically lowest in urban areas, unweighted samples routinely under-represent black and Hispanic Americans.”
Paul Waldman sums it up nicely in his post on ‘Economic hearts and Minds” at The American Prospect: “It would be electoral malpractice of the highest order for the Obama campaign not to stir up at least some populist resentment at a figure like Romney, particularly when his policy proposals, like those of all Republicans, are such a pure expression of trickle-down economics.”
Gary Hart argues in his New York Times article, “The Democratic Road Not Taken” that “The Democratic response of triangulation and centrism, essentially splitting the difference between reactionary liberalism and increasingly virulent conservatism, cost the party its identity…As Todd S. Purdum described this phenomenon recently in Vanity Fair, “the Democrats came across more and more as the crouched consolidators and defenders of past gains.” Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein echoed this conclusion in their new book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” The Democrats, they write, “have become the more status-quo oriented, centrist protectors of government.”
FiveThirtyEight’s new series on “Presidential Geography” looks like a must-read for political junkies. Micah Cohen launches the series with an insightful demographic and political profile of New Mexico.
Ronald Brownstein’s post, “Just Like the Gipper” at the National Journal can add clarity to any discussion about Mitt Romney’s prospects for winning in November. Brownstein spotlights Reagan’s success in winning the votes of whites without college degrees as a key to his victory — and explains that demographic changes since then have reduced the size of this constituency in percentage terms, but not their pivotal importance to Romney’s hopes. As Brownstein argues:
…Reagan won 58.8 percent of the vote, 49 states, and an unmatched 525 Electoral College votes. But he did so in a country demographically very different from today’s America. Those changes may be the most important asset available to Obama as he struggles against an intensifying economic undertow. Yet even that might not save the president.
For an upcoming National Journal report illuminating voter trends over the past eight presidential elections, Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz conducted a detailed analysis of exit polls from the 1984 race. That exercise captures the magnitude of the cultural and demographic changes that have remade the nation since then.
When Reagan routed Democratic nominee Walter Mondale in 1984, the white working class dominated the electorate. White voters without a four-year college degree cast 61 percent of all ballots that year, and they gave Reagan 66 percent of their votes, the NJ analysis found. White voters with at least a four-year college degree cast an additional 27 percent of the vote, and 62 percent of them went for Reagan. Eighty-one percent of minorities backed Mondale, but they represented just 12 percent of all voters then.
But Republicans face a much tougher demographic breakdown today, as Brownstein explains:
By 2008, minorities had more than doubled their vote share to 26 percent. College-educated whites had increased their share to 35 percent. The big losers were whites without a college degree, who dropped from 61 percent of all voters to 39 percent–a decline of more than one-third from their level in 1984. That is social change at breakneck speed.
By itself, this evolution in America’s social structure goes a long way toward explaining why Democrats have won the popular vote in four of the five presidential contests since 1992 after losing (usually emphatically) five of the six races from 1968 to 1988. Mondale in 1984 carried only 40.6 percent of the popular vote. But if college-educated whites, noncollege whites, and minorities all voted as they did in 1984, but were present in the same proportions they represented in 2008, Mondale would have taken nearly 48 percent of the vote. Conversely, if those three groups voted as they did in 2008, but were present in their 1984 proportions, Obama would have lost convincingly.
Then there is the rising tide of educated women, who are also a tough sell for Republicans, as Brownstein explains: “…College-educated white men grew only slightly, college-educated white women increased their share by more than half. Those women, most of whom are socially liberal and receptive to activist government, consistently support Democrats more than other whites…” Brownstein adds:
Most polls this spring show Obama running near the 52 percent he won among those upscale white women in 2008, and also remaining very close to his 80 percent showing among all minorities. If Obama can hold that level of support from those two groups, Romney could amass a national majority only by winning nearly two-thirds of all other whites–the men with college degrees, and the men and women without them. To put that challenge in perspective, Reagan, while winning his historic landslide, carried a combined 66.5 percent of those three groups. To defeat Obama, in other words, Romney may need to equal Reagan.
Brownstein concedes that matching Reagan’s support with the less-educated white voters is possible, and if Romney can also make some inroads with educated women and minority voters, that could be his route to victory. Brownstein notes that Obama is doing about as badly with working class white voters as did Mondale, and the economy is a pivotal factor going forward. On the other hand, Brownstein adds that “Obama has a much sturdier base than Mondale did.”
But if Romney fails to energize white working class voters, and Obama turns out his key constituencies, Romney will lose.
