Zandar pretends not to understand why white Kentuckians have stopped self-identifying as Democrats during the Obama Era. He attempts to explain the change in a variety of ways but keeps coming up empty. But, like the dog that didn’t bark, eventually the one plausible explanation that is available reveals itself simply through its absence. The president’s race has something to do with it.
This is often left unsaid even when it is said.
“I think if Hillary Clinton were in the White House today, McConnell would be behind by 20 points,” said Todd Hollenbach Sr., a former Jefferson County judge executive whom Mr. McConnell unseated in 1977.
Maybe Mr. Hollenbach is simply wrong. But let’s proceed as if he’s correct. To what degree is the damage done to the Democratic Party in states like Kentucky and West Virginia by having a black standard-bearer an irrevocable kind of damage? Surely there is some lasting erosion to the Donkey Party’s brand? No?
Yet, perhaps it is a soft kind of erosion. If Alison Lundergan Grimes would be winning by 20 points if only the president were not black, then would Hillary Clinton carry Kentucky by 20 points?
I don’t believe that, yet I also think that the racism that has hurt the Democrats in certain parts of the country is making the Republican Party look artificially strong.
Of course, this cannot all be reduced to race. Some of it has arisen from other cultural markers. The president is urban, cosmopolitan, and intellectual. Your average white Kentuckian could relate to Bill Clinton in a way that he or she could never relate to Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton seems to carry at least some of the cultural appeal of her husband, despite having a background more like the current president than her husband’s. There’s no doubt that the Clinton family is more popular in much of the South and Appalachia than the Obama family.
It could be that a white urban candidate with coastal roots and an intellectual demeanor would suffer much if not all of the same disadvantages of the president in these regions of the country.
Cultural alienation in the Heartland is based in large part on the changing racial demographics of the country, but it has always been partly defined by opposition to the condescension of our intelligentsia and coastal financial elites.
This is why who the Democratic nominee is is as important as what they stand for. This is particularly true in our current era because the Republican Party is ferociously dedicated to convincing white people that the Democratic Party is not for them. Watch Fox News for fifteen minutes if you are not sure what I mean.
Our country seems stalemated at the moment, but I believe it is only the success of the campaign of white tribalism the GOP has been carrying out that has kept the country evenly divided. If that strategy stops working effectively, I think the right will collapse.
I don’t think the collapse would be as significant as Mitch McConnell losing by twenty points, but I might be convinced of ten.
What’s sad is that this analysis is forced to see policy as almost irrelevant, and certainly subservient to identity.
I think your post hits the nail on the head. A whole lot of folks pay almost no attention to the policy positions of the politicians. As an example take that Mitt Romney was viewed as more centrist than Obama in the last election. Perception of elected officials and self identification are much more indicative of voters’ choices than anything else. Racism surely plays some role, especially in the South, but (Professor) Elizabeth Warren may find the same obstacles as Obama has.
Obama didn’t run as a “centrist”. He ran as a transformative leader. Romney ran as a man who would embody whatever the view of the morning was. I’d argue that he was in the center of the political spectrum, which skews to the needs of the privileged.
Google “Mitt Romney cares about people like me” instead. People understood the policy of these two candidates, they just didn’t want the “centrist” policies.
How and how soon do you see such a strategy losing its effectiveness? because from where I’m sitting, the factors that make this approach a success–in no particular order, and by no means an exhaustive list: staggering ignorance, tribalist paranoia, narcissism bordering on solipsism, white entitlement, simultaneous guilt and fear of displacement as the majority demographic, steady media drumbeat of “it’s not your fault,” an overpowering deeply-held need for someone to blame–are not some passing fad in the national consciousness, but are characteristic psychological markers of that segment of the population this strategy works so effectively on.
I mean, I don’t see these people growing up and getting a clue in the next 3 weeks or so–do you?
It’s all in the demographics. It would be foolish to expect the Republican base to grow up and get a clue at any time in the foreseeable future, but we can expect their numbers to decline. So the strategy loses its effectiveness when there aren’t enough white bigots left.
Just compare the Republicans’ prospects in California to the Democrats’ prospects in Texas. As long as they stick to the all white people strategy, California is lost to the GOP, while in Texas it’s only a matter of time until the growing Latino population turns the state blue.
It is partly racism, but also Christian fundamentalism. The Democrats are out of favor in the whole Bible Belt that stretches from central Pennsylvania and West Virginia to Oklahoma, Missouri and Texas.
The country is becoming increasingly polarized by religion, as Christian Evangelicals prefer to live in areas where there a lot of people of the same faith.
2000
KY: GWB 56.5%; Gore 41.4%
WV: GWB 51.9%; Gore 45.6%
2008
KY: McCain (plus the northwoods dumbass) 57.4%; Obama 41.2%
WV: McCain 55.6%; Obama 42.5%
2012
KY: Romney 60.5%; Obama 37.8%
WV: Romney 62.3%; Obama 35.5%
Did fewer Kentuckians and West Virginians notice in 2008 that Obama was an African-American?
The difference between Gore and Obama’s KY polling was 0.2% and I don’t recall that Gore was black.
So, who and what were Kentuckians voting against in 2000? And why have they and West Virginians been doubling down ever since. (The AA population is relatively small in both states.)
Not suggesting that race isn’t a factor, but something larger than race is going down in these two states. Also note that Alison Grimes’s campaign began to stall out when see brought a certain someone in to campaign for her.
I think talk radio has been a huge influence in places like Kentucky and West Virginia. I think the constant drumbeat that emanates from it is simply feeding a seed which was planted long ago. So much of what shapes the worldview in those places can be proven to be factually incorrect, but yet that really does not matter. The end result is all that matters. The world that they believe exists, in large part, is a manufactured reality. And it is going to take a monumental, long term effort to turn that around.
Stagnant or declining wages for working class whites and increasing unemployment as jobs continue to disappear is a huge factor. The left/environmentalists mostly neglect to address the legitimate fear of those who live in economies more or less dependent on coal. The same thing happens when allowable commercial fish catches are restricted to permit restoration of fishery ecosystems. It’s easy to give Detroit bailout money to hire more workers to build more cars — but we need fewer cars, not more. What would become of all the workers dependent on jobs with military equipment, supplies, and weapons if we’d ever have the good sense to stop the MIC wastefulness? Even the Sandy Hook School massacre ended up pitting responsible gun legislation against workers building Bushmaster and other brands of assault type weapons.
Agree. What you point to is much more a factor. I think the talk radio aspect is more what helps to maintain the overall anti-government and anti-Democratic attitude. Of course, when you have things like hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians reaping huge personal benefits from the ACA, and you still have Democrats running as effing fast as they can away from it, then that is pretty indicative of a Party that is completely adrift and clueless when it comes to being able to understand and relate to the concerns of those working class whites. The Dems wrote off those people many years ago, so it no wonder they have been receptive to the divisive Republican message.
What makes you think that this would have made a difference? Democrats come out swinging for economic populism, then they get trumped on social issues. And all they would have to show for it is an antagonized plutocratic donors.
I’m not saying that the Democratic Party shouldn’t go full-throated economic populist. Antagonized plutocratic donors or no, that is the way to electoral dominance in the medium-run. However, where this would help are places where the Democrats are on the margins like PA and Virginia and NC and in elections (such as 2008) where the black swans broke their way; this won’t do a damn thing about the general trend in Kentucky and WV.
Now rewind this backwards for a few decades, when and where the Democratic Party was structurally weaker across the nation thanks to social issues, and you can see why the Democratic Party in your words ‘wrote these people off’. Why sacrifice money trying to reach after people you can’t get due to your policies when you could use said money to hold onto places where you’re marginal?
liberalism and its advocates. Not new: see George Wallace.
As a result the White Working Class votes against its economic interests.
Dionne has a good column on this today.
In 2008, the stench of Dubya was still in the electorate’s nostrils, the GOP brand was poisonous, so (IMO) a lot of the GOP base stayed home.
In 2010, the Teahadist rebranding was in full swing. By 2012 they had infected the main GOP with their degenerative brain virus that causes amnesia of the 2001-2008 time frame (and blames the problems of 2008 on Obama).
The candidate doesn’t have to be black for race to be the biggest factor. Isn’t this a prime example of how the Southern Strategy has been used so effectively?
“What’s sad is that this analysis is forced to see policy as almost irrelevant, and certainly subservient to identity.”
You can’t afford to consider that “sad”, as it is the central fact of the situation.
But it is also not about race per se; it is only topically about race as the propaganda of the moment. If race were somehow magically taken off the table, it would be immediately supplanted by some other wedge. The Party is playing for all the cards and the only way to set that game up is to make the factions irreconcilable. It doesn’t matter how it is done or which specific wedges are used.
The party needs racist votes. It has a policy agenda, but one that intrinsically can’t gain a majority (for increased inequality), so it grabs the votes where it can.
There are lots of wedges. Their resonance waxes and wanes. Race is a wedge. Right now, quite suddenly after a period of apparent eclipse, it seems to be a very good one. Envy is a wedge — economic, educational, or any kind of status. There have been many others over time.
But the whole point about wedges is that they are fungible. And the whole point, the only point, about the conservative propaganda in this time and place is that it is striving for absolute irreconcilability, which is the working definition of totalitarianism.
Total power is the WHY, irreconcilability is the WHAT, propaganda is the HOW, and the wedges are the WHAT WITH. Diagnose this, or try to fight it, at the wrong level, and guess what: you lose, real hard, real fast.
It is a grave (if commonplace) mistake to try to engage with conservatism as if it were a philosophy. It may (?) once have been, but today it is only a self-propelled propaganda machine and a racket. Shreds of pseudo-philosophy still cling to it, but, again, they are fungible.
Here’s the question for you: are the wedges truly fungible?
Traditional America is set up right now to have a pretty overlapping Venn Diagram of wedges. However, some stick out more than others. Some of the wedges will cause them to gain less political power than others — the heteronormativity wedge has about run out of steam. Some of them will impart a cost that they might not be willing to pay — empowering the religious extremists keeps leading to debacles like TVUs and birth control hysteria.
I maintain that right now, the racial wedge gets used because it’s the safest. The way that the Republican Party is set up is that none of them are currently threatened by hardening racial hostility. It will bite them in the ass in the long run and over several cycles with increasing force. And what’s more, the longer they wait to fix this the more painful the last set of bites will be. However. CURRENTLY the bites are just a little nip… and politicians rarely think more than one cycle ahead. The 2012 election is the first and probably only election since the start of the 20th century where a national party paid the price for pandering to racial prejudice. And while it was decisive, it wasn’t enough of a price to convince conservatives that they need to change. 2014 will validate their decision and 2016 might go badly enough for the Democratic Party that it will further validate it.
“It doesn’t matter how it is done or which specific wedges are used.”
Very true. If they thought they could win by pandering to the child sex molester vote, they be all over it.
Or, to be more accurate, they’d be PUBLIC about it, instead of just being the secret hangout of the NAMBLAs.
Racism is a factor but the huge amount of propaganda spewed into the general conversation is also a factor. The decline of the coal industry must be blamed on someone. Can’t be the miners and the coal operators, whose negotiation skills determine if a contract is let and miners work, have to deflect blame to someone else.
No one wants to believe that mine jobs increased from 2008-2012 in WV. They did. Leveled off in 2012 and dropped in 2013 due to a glut of Natural Gas in the market and end of life cycle of older power generating plants. Also in WV employment shifting from Southern fields to Northern. Eastern KY going through the same problems.
But Obama is an easy target. Any regulations will be years in the making and have no effect on current employment: however, Fox and other media in the pay of Coal and Gas Accociations tell a different story.
Even Democrats want to believe the worst. I was told by one that Obama got in due to voter fraud. I laughed but he was convinced. Why?
What I don’t understand, both in Southern Appalachia and the rest of the country is why everyone is hiding from the ACA. It has made a tangible difference in WV and KY. A very real difference. Why not stand up and ask why Capito doesn’t want your cousin to get the treatments he needs. Why McConnel wants to take away the surgery your brother needs. Show real people with real problems and how that will all change under the Republicans.
They don’t have the guts.
Ridge
For all the GOP bluster there is about “saving those good coal jobs” and how they are the linchpin of the Kentucky economy, it appears that the data, at least in Kentucky, flies in the face of all the bullshit that people like Mitch McConnell spew.
Fact Checking The “War On Coal”
Dare I say it?
Ok, I will.
They are CLINGING TO THE WHITENESS.
CLINGING TO IT.
Yet Grimes is white and won a state-wide race for SoS.
I think the blame falls directly on the malevolent & willfully ignorant Republican lawmakers themselves. They decided that any work of an Obama Democratic administration and liberal (not to mention Progressive) Democratic elected representatives would be ravaged or destroyed. They are shameful individuals. To blame the voters in flyover country is unfair. Many Republicans miscreants didn’t win with overwhelming percentages even in gerrymandered districts. They poisoned the well of knowledge for voters, they ostracized people in their party who could think without racism and nurture empathy and intelligence about the common good. It was their action that lost the hope and good intentions of the Obama voters who wanted America to change and become what it should be. If it bleeds it leads.
‘Don’t blame the voters in flyover country’ would be a lot more convincing if this shit hadn’t been going on for decades. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twenty-three times, people will not only start to think that I’m not actually fooled at all but that I’m in on the scam.
Here’s a pertinent question: why did this foolishness work on the people in flyover country? Foreigners and liberals can see right through this nonsensical affinity fraud, why didn’t flyover country? I mean, George W. Bush had 90% approval after 9/11 but liberals were still lucid enough to oppose him. Why is flyover country always blindsided by vile and suboptimal that liberals see coming a mile away?
Surely it couldn’t be that, rather than being the easily duped yet brave and innocent people who are just waiting for the right articulate leftist hero to lead them on the right track, the people within demand and prop up conservative demagogues who offer nothing but tribalist cultural revanchism? That they are not in fact tricked or mislead but that they think that being crushed by the corporate bootheel and watching their parents and children shrivel up from hunger and pollution is a fucking bargain as long as their inane cultural delusions stay on top?
The time is always right to do what’s right.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Speech delivered in Finney Chapel at Oberlin College (October. 22, 1964), as reported in “When MLK came to Oberlin” by Cindy Leise (The Chronicle-Telegram; January 21, 2008)
No matter what the right thing was to vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
John McCain and Sarah Palin?
One thing I have noticed in my life are things do not change all that much in the usual circumstance. I think the south is still fighting the civil war and race is a big component. And they never got over the civil rights legislation by LBJ. Add to that a sub optimal economy Never mind the Rs are complicit. There’s a Black man in the WH. So what can you expect?
You think race is not a factor in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan? Or in South Dakota?
Some of the most racist people I’ve ever met have come from Wisconsin. White suburbanites there flat out hate Milwaukee, entirely for racial reasons. Their politicians wage war against the entire city.
Of course it is. But it is somewhat special in the south.
Not as much as you might think. In 2012, the county in South Carolina in which I was born voted 61% for President Obama and the county in North Carolina in which I current live voted 71% for President Obama. The first is rural and 51% black population, 41% white population, and 4.5% Native American. The second is in the Research Triangle Park region, if 50% white, 40% black, 3% Asian. The South has be mostly nationalized, or the nation has been mostly Southernized, depending on your perspective. Stack up central Pennsylvania with northern Mississippi and you’ll see a lot of common cultural attitudes.
Rush Limbaugh and his fellow and lady talkers and FoxNews have had that leveling effect over the past 25 years.
Or maybe in 2008 it was easier to accept at black POTUS than an old white man with a really dumb female running mate. NC did revert in 2012 to preferring the all white and all male ticket.
Just read the city-data forums of any city — pick your favorite — and you’ll see that this is exactly true.
“Not as much as you might think.”
I think the point LBJ was making is a valid one. You cannot erase generations of racism with a single civil rights bill in congress. And that would take time. And bc we now have a black President does not mean we are in a post racist world. Of course there is racism all over but it lingers rather strongly in the south. That should not be a surprise. When the dog whistle blows far too many heed the call.
I suspect rural areas in the north are the same way.
So if where you live is representative, lets hope NC is now fully in the democratic corner. But Romney took the state 50 to 48 in 2012.
In 2012, the county in South Carolina in which I was born voted 61% for President Obama and the county in North Carolina in which I current live voted 71% for President Obama. The first is rural and 51% black population, 41% white population, and 4.5% Native American. The second is in the Research Triangle Park region, if 50% white, 40% black, 3% Asian.
Are you not aware that that a 61% vote count for Barack Obama with 90%/80%+ of blacks and Native America (whom comprise 55% of the population) voting for him does nothing to prove your point and in fact disproves it?
For me all thoughts roll back to Ferguson.
The white power structure of places like St Louis County is “Democratic” but the party should not have this kind of big tent. The County Prosecutor McCullouh has held office for 24 and is unopposed this election. His tenue has been as racist as any since the Reconstruction.
The Fannie Lou Hamer St Louis County Democratic Coalition has endorsed the Republican for County Supervisor and asked voters to write in a name to protest McCollouh: Michael Brown.
Thank you, TarheelDem, for pointing this out. I am so tired of the confinement of racism to the Southern states, when it is clearly a factor in virtually all of the 50 states. Indeed, we should ask Rikyrah for her take on the geographical locations of racism.
The Republican leadership decided in December 2008 that race would be the key issue during the Obama administration and that they would stonewall his accomplishments. That was a political strategy as much or more than a psychological attitude–a cynical, divisive political strategy devoid of public purpose or policy content. And then they started pushing the buttons of the public discourse. And ramping up the rhetoric and letting the real nutty racists out of their closets. And hiring blacks to participate in the race-bashing.
It is a political strategy. It stops when Democrats fight back and win. When Creigh Deeds in 2009 walked away from Barack Obama, the GOP knew they had a winning strategy.
The GOP decided that race would be the key issue in January 1964. And even though it didn’t work that year, they’ve been using it ever since and have won with it more often than not.
Do you have some details on that January 1964 date? As I remember Jacob Javits was still in the Republican Party then. My sense is that the conservatives in the party did not capture the party until Nixon captured the nomination for President in 1968. Had the nomination gone to Scranton or Papa Romney, I doubt there would have been a Southern Strategy.
The “Southern Strategy” was rolled out in 1964. Look at the electoral map from that year. Although, Strom birthed it in 1948. It was codified by 1968 with an able assist from LBJ and Congress doing more the right thing on equal rights legislation between those two elections.
1964 was the LBJ year. In 1968 Wallace took 9.9 M votes or 13.5% of the popular vote all in the traditional southern states. Nixon got the rest of them except Texas.
Had the nomination gone to Scranton or Papa Romney, I doubt there would have been a Southern Strategy.
People always blame the Great Evil Men of History rather than their neighbors, probably because it’s just too painful to confront the fact that the people whom you go to church and enjoy BBQ with are the ones really responsible for societal vileness. Better to concoct a bunch of conspiracy theories and alt. history scenarios rather than admit that these chickens were coming home to roost. I mean, you do that and people might start thinking that the Carter-Clinton-Obama coalition of kissing up to Wall Street to protect the Rainbow Coalition was a defensible Sophie’s choice forced by Real America’s need for violent dominance instead of them being doodoohead centrist sellouts for no reason.
“Maybe Mr. Hollenbach is simply wrong.”
He most certainly is. No way a senate leader loses his seat by 20+ points in any era. That said, race is obviously a huge factor in this and every election. And the higher profile racism gets, the more it gets reinforced. It’s a vicious circle.
As a point of evidence, consider California, where the white population is rapidly shrinking. a threshold has been reached in that state where the remaining white population a) is constantly interacting with people of other races, except in very few tiny towns and b) hispanics and people of color make up the majority.
The GOP has genuinely collapsed there. Better socialization between races combined with demographic shifts, as well as the utter failure of Schwarzenegger, wiped out the right. And while CA still has challenges (housing!), it’s the biggest per-capita private jobs creator in the country.
Talk about assuming your conclusions. Setting aside your obsession with “your average white Kentuckian”, there happen to be about 250 million Americans living outside the “Heartland”. The urban, cosmopolitan, and intellectual population you show such contempt for? That’s the Democratic base. Maybe we should work harder to get them to the polls?
In 2008, the strategy you’re suggesting was the justification for John Edwards’ candidacy, not Hillary Clinton’s. If memory serves, Barack Obama and the Democrats did pretty well that year. A Fox friendly, conservative, southern Democrat from the “Heartland”, isn’t going to motivate voters anywhere in the country, and still won’t make it a contest in Appalachia.
Man, the collapse of the New Deal Coalition is still traumatizing paleoliberals forty years after it went bye-bye. Older liberals just can’t get over the fact that Traditional America doesn’t like what they were selling and until and unless they’re willing to throw women, racial minorities, and gays under the bus they never will. They keep concocting all of these stupid positive black swans and proposed image makeovers that will let them keep Joe Sixpack, not realizing that they’ve already received more than their share of black swans in the 70s and 80s. If only we learned how to communicate better with the Heartland! If only Romney defeated Nixon! If only we had been more cheerful and optimistic! If only Carter didn’t flub the Iranian hostage crisis! If only we could learn to talk to them without being condescending! If only Dukakis didn’t get in that tank and pardon Willie Horton! If only Walter Mondale didn’t admit that he’d raise taxes! If only, if only, if only!
Why, the liberal coalition would’ve gotten everything they wanted without having to compromise! A few smarter (read: privileged and golden parachute’d) ones will go as far as to say that the social gains weren’t worth sacrificing the economic ones and that dismantling Jim Crow and Kinder Küche Kirche was not worth the increase in income inequality and deunionization.
It’s sad, really. Pathetic even. Like jilted, creepy manchildren in their 40s still fantasizing about getting back together with their high school girlfriend that dumped them after they refused to bully the autistic kid and smoke crack with her.