Reading an article by Thomas Frank in the upcoming New York Review of books,
What's the Matter with Liberals?, I was struck by the following statistic:
Culture war most assuredly helped protect those who had much in 2004. George W. Bush carried the white working-class vote by 23 percentage points, according to pollster Ruy Teixeira.
I was more than a little taken aback by this number, both because I had never seen it before and because it did not seem to square with my reading of
exit poll data. So, I did a Google search looking for the article were Ruy presented that information, since Frank's article oddly did not offer a citation (the article did have several other footnotes, but not for that stat). I found
this article, where Ruy quotes Harold Meyerson quoting Ruy:
In Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, where no major offices were on the ballot, turnout hit an all-time high. That's the white working class, flocking to George Bush.
And did they ever flock! Kerry lost white, working-class voters-a group that constituted roughly half of the 2004 electorate-by 23 percent, six points worse than Gore had done in 2000. The shift away from the Democrats came chiefly among white, working-class women, who voted nine points more for Bush this time than they had four years ago.
There it was again--a claim that Kerry lost the white working class vote by twenty-three points. Even more stunning, somehow this group was now nearly half of the electorate. This really didn't make any sense to me, especially after I went back to
the exit poll data and started crunching some numbers.
How could Kerry have lost the white working class vote, I wondered, when he won the vote among those making under $15K by a huge 63-36 margin? OK, I figured that since this group made up nearly half of the electorate, more than just those making under 15K were included, since they only composed 8% of the total electorate. It also meant it could not just be those making under 30K, a group that Kerry won 59-40, because they only form 23% of the electorate. Also, it couldn't just be those making under 50K, who Kerry won 55-44, since they only formed 45% of the electorate when all races are included. However, it did seem possible that the working class was defined as those making under $75K, since they formed 68% of the electorate. If only whites making under $75K were included, they might indeed form roughly half of the electorate.
However, this still didn't make any sense to me, since Kerry won among all voters making under 75K by a narrow 51-48 margin. Could Kerry really have lost just the white voters making under $75K by twenty-three? That is a twenty-six-point swing, more than Kerry lost the white vote by in total (58-41). Further, it would also mean that Kerry would have won non-white voters making under $75K by something like 87-12, which is pretty absurd, since Kerry only won the non-white vote by a margin of 70-29.
So, frankly, I couldn't figure out what was going on. Where was this statistic coming from? It clearly did not seem to match exit poll data on income and race. Finally, after a long search, I found the article where Teixeira presents his information on Bush's success among white working class voters. It was in an article in Public Opinion Watch, on November 10th, 2004:
Given that Bush's increased margin came entirely from the non-college educated and given the increase in Bush's margin among white voters, we would expect that Bush's performance among white working class voters must have improved substantially. This cannot be estimated directly from the NEP poll because they haven't yet released that level of detail on their data. However, the Institute for America's Future and Democracy Corps conducted
an extensive (2000 interviews) post-election survey and these data indicate that Bush won white working class voters by about 24 points. That compares to a 19-point margin in Democracy Corps' 2000 post-election survey and a 17-point margin in the 2000 VNS exit poll.
Arguably, that's the story of the election right there. An additional wrinkle on the white working class vote is that this falloff was likely concentrated among white working class women, not men, judging from the figures cited above on Bush's big gains among white women, but no change among white men (however, this is an inference from the pattern of the data; no direct evidence on white working class women vs. men is available from the NEP or Democracy Corps surveys).
Ignoring for a moment that this data is not actually inferred from exit polls but instead from a post-election telephone survey, reading this finally made it obvious to me why I couldn't figure out where Frank and Meyerson were deriving their data. The thing is, Teixeira presents this information in part four of his post-election column, the "education" subset, not in part five, the "income" subset.
This was the problem I was having in understanding the definition of class according the statistic offered by Meyerson and Frank. They themselves are using the very definition of class that they decry in the backlash narrative: cultural, rather than economic. Teixeira's statistic of a seventeen point Gore deficit among white working class voters and a twenty-three point Kerry deficit among white working class voters was actually Gore and Kerry's respective deficits among whites without a college degree, not whites making less than $75K (or $50K, or $30K, or whatever). This does in fact match up with exit poll data, since Kerry lost those without a college degree by five, and whites by seventeen, thus making a twenty-three point deficit among non-college education whites perfectly reasonable).
Kerry almost certainly won whites making less than thirty thousand a year, since his overall lead in that category was 59-40. Kerry might even have won among whites making less than fifty thousand a year, since his overall lead in the category was 55-44. At the very least, he came quite close to carrying whites making under $50K. However, income was not the definition of class Teixeira was using in the statistic cited by Meyerson and Frank. This is particularly odd in the case of Frank, since he has long decried the degree to which the backlash narrative has successfully managed to transform class-consciousness in the country away from economic issues and into cultural ones. As he writes in the article I quoted at the start of this essay:
Conservatives generally regard class as an unacceptable topic when the subject is economics--trade, deregulation, shifting the tax burden, expressing worshipful awe for the microchip, etc. But define politics as culture, and class instantly becomes for them the very blood and bone of public discourse. Indeed, from George Wallace to George W. Bush, a class-based backlash against the perceived arrogance of liberalism has been one of their most powerful weapons. Workerist in its rhetoric but royalist in its economic effects, this backlash is in no way embarrassed by its contradictions. It understands itself as an uprising of the little people even when its leaders, in control of all three branches of government, cut taxes on stock dividends and turn the screws on the bankrupt. It mobilizes angry voters by the millions, despite the patent unwinnability of many of its crusades. And from the busing riots of the Seventies to the culture wars of our own time, the backlash has been ignored, downplayed, or misunderstood by liberals.
This is an excellent point and worthy of further discussion, but his article would be greatly aided but not using statistics that reify the very backlash narrative that he warns liberals against. One of the main, if not the main, tenants of the backlash narrative is to destroy the economic definition of class and replace it with a cultural one. In the statistic Teixeira offers, which both Frank and Meyerson cite to defend their claims, class is actually beholden to a cultural definition, such as education, rather than an economic definition, such as income. So gee, I wonder if Democrats are going to perform poorly under definitions of class that are beholden to the backlash narrative. The statistic is something of a tautology: if you view the world through the eyes of the backlash narrative where income is not a determining factor in of class, then yes, the working class is indeed voting for Bush. If you do not view the world through the eyes of the backlash narrative, and conclude that income is indeed a determining factor in class, then no, the working class is not voting for Bush.
If we are going to defeat the backlash narrative, the last thing we need to do is abandon our definition of class. After all, we cannot just point out how the backlash is a fraud, but we need instead to offer an alternative. That would start by offering an alternative view of class to the current, dominant conservative view. I mean, if we want people to start taking economic issues more seriously, not only do we need to offer a better economic platform, but we also need to at least argue that economic issues are important.
