You Measure a Government by How Few People Need Help

In March, the Pew Research Center found that 56% of high school-educated white voters see newcomers as threatening, compared with less than a third of those with a college degree. White voters who haven't graduated from college, according to a Pew poll in September, were more than twice as likely to think Obama is Muslim as those who have. And not coincidentally, it is among these less educated white voters that McCain is strongest. Among non-Hispanic whites who have attended graduate school, according to Gallup this month, Obama leads McCain by 13 points. Among those with a high school diploma or less, he trails by 12.

Why is this significant? Well, white working class people make up about 55% of the electorate. That is why McCain and Obama are fighting so hard to attract these voters. McCain is trying to win them over by saying that Obama is an outsider who has nothing in common with you and Obama is telling them that electing George Bush to two terms in the White House has cost you jobs and money. While Bush isn't going to be on the ballot in November, Obama has done a masterful job of linking McCain and Bush.

In What's the Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank said that the working class whites were suffering from a form of derangement because they believed that their woes derived from the decline of traditional values—patriotism, organized religion, self-reliance, the heterosexual two-parent nuclear family, etc.—when the true source of its troubles is a set of economic policies that favors the rich. Republicans have come to win blue-collar votes in elections by portraying Democratic tolerance of racial and cultural diversity as depravity.

In an earlier post I mentioned that GOPAC, the Republican training ground, teaches GOP candidates to appeal to these fundamental values while not alienating independent voters in order to get into office. Once they are there, they set their conservative cultural agenda aside and concentrate on cutting taxes, reducing regulation, busting unions, and so forth. The white working class continues to fall for the bait-and-switch because the Democrats lack the courage to lure it back with appeal based on economy (fortunately for Obama, the GOP cannot win on socially conservative issues when the economy is this bad).

In their book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam point out that the most reliable Republican voters are socially conservative, suspicious of big business and favor a larger government role in helping families manage economic risk. But McCain and the GOP are nothing more than Milton Friedman disciples who work for the rich and he and they cannot change their stripes in the middle of a campaign (but they sure do try).

Obama does not need to win over the entire white working class to win this election. He simply needs to reduce the sizable deficits of Gore (17 points) and Kerry (23 points) within this group. And while Obama may be just another politician with great public speaking skills and incredible timing, his health care reform plan, alternative energy commitment and tax cuts to the middle class speak to me more than any shallow promises of the Republicans I have voted for in the past. Obama has ideas, not just platitudes.

Although my wife and I may no longer fall into the white working class, we are both from Iowa and were raised with the values that permeate this voting block. While there may be some who are racist, ignorant and intolerant, most of them simply want to provide for their families and have a good life.