The White Working Class Vote

In this week’s issue of dead-tree TIME, which hits the newsstands today, I have a story that looks at the political math underlying all the back and forth over Obama’s comments about small-town voters–specifically, the importance of the white working class vote in this fall’s election.:

Working-class whites are a shrinking segment of the overall U.S. population. In 1940 they accounted for 86% of adults 25 and older; by 2007, that percentage was only 48. But they tend to be concentrated in many of the states that have been most competitive in recent presidential elections and are likely to be again this fall: states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

In a new study for the Brookings Institution, visiting fellow Ruy Teixeira and Emory University political-science professor Alan Abramowitz argue that the test for Democrats is not whether they can win working-class whites outright but whether they can hold their losses among these voters to 10 percentage points or less. In 2000 Al Gore lost them to George W. Bush by 17 percentage points; four years later, John Kerry lost them by 23 points. By contrast, Democratic candidates in the 2006 midterm elections ran 10 percentage points behind Republicans among working-class whites–and managed to win back the House and the Senate as well as six governorships and nine state legislatures. The issues that mattered in that election–disapproval of President Bush, opposition to the Iraq war and economic insecurity–remain at the top of their concerns today and could make white working-class voters more open to the idea of voting for a Democrat.