[rayiner]

College education is not only a strong proxy for income, but an even better proxy for working class status than income. The guy who redid my bathroom probably makes more than some of my lawyer friends doing government work. But he still removes and replaces toilets for a living and they don't and that's a form of privilege in and of itself.

And the current poll does not reflect the "way it's always been." Democrats were competitive for white voters with just a college degree as recently as 2008: https://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493763493/charts-see-how-quic.... In 2016 they lost that group by almost 30 points.

They've replaced those folks with a coalition of Silicon Valley engineers and Wall Streets bankers who used to vote Republican, and racial minorities. Good for fund raising, but results in a party that cannot effectively advocate for the working class.

[joshuamorton]

> And the current poll does not reflect the "way it's always been." Democrats were competitive for white voters with just a college degree as recently as 2008: https://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493763493/charts-see-how-quic.... In 2016 they lost that group by almost 30 points.

In a parallel thread about Obama's performance in 2012, you said

> The recovery from the 2008 recession was very slow, and the unemployment rate for most of 2012 was over 8%. George H.W. Bush lost reelection with an unemployment rate that was less than that.

Can you explain to me how it is that the economic recovery anxiety affected precisely one group of people, white voters without a college degree, and why their support continued bottoming out in Obama's second term even post-recovery?

Like my thesis here is "The Republicans, as early as 2009, adopted a strategy to appeal to the racial anxieties of less-educated white voters, which pulled support from those groups to republicans".

Yours appears to be "Until around 2013, support among only less-educated white voters dropped due to economic recovery concerns, but all other groups were unconcerned with the economy, and, just as the economy began to improve, the dem party decided to switch strategies specifically to not appeal to those voters".

Like for all the weird bad pundit takes that exist, I don't even think this take exists on the spectrum. Pretty much everyone agrees that there was concerted effort by Republicans to stoke racial anxiety and appeal to white voters. Like, that was the entire way Trump got his initial boost onto the scene (Obama's birth certificate nonsense). Why are you pretending that's not the case?

> College education is not only a strong proxy for income, but an even better proxy for working class status than income.

What does "working class" mean here? Like, if you're going to say that working class isn't income-driven but perception driven, ok sure, but then the existence of concepts like "driving while black" suggest that the US's class system also includes race, which means that policies that help minorities are class based! You can't have it both ways.

And keep in mind that the whole income v. education thing is highly impacted by race (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rfd.as...). A white voter who didn't complete high school has the same income, on average, as a black voter who has completed some college, and for all races except whites, the difference between no high school and a BA is more than 2x, but for white people it's only around 1.86x. That is, correlation between income and education is significantly weaker for white people than for any other race.

[rayiner]

> Pretty much everyone agrees that there was concerted effort by Republicans to stoke racial anxiety and appeal to white voters.

Everyone does not agree on that. The period leading to Obama's second term coincides with a period during which white Democrats got significantly more liberal, to the point where they had moved to the left of Black Democrats on race issues: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white.... Part of that was redefining "racism" to mean things other than personal prejudice. Positions that working class Democrats had previously embraced, such as Bernie Sanders' opposition to immigration, became "racist" under the new definitions.

But minorities themselves largely do not accept these theories, and most do not hear the "dog whistles" that white liberals claim to hear: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote... ("We began by asking eligible voters how 'convincing' they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned 'illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs' and called for 'fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.' Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.").

Democrats during that period also rediscovered policies regarding racial preferences in education and hiring that remain wildly unpopular among minorities themselves, not to mention working class white people: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...

> Why are you pretending that's not the case?

Because it's self-serving nonsense. Your theory is that folks in Iowa soured on Obama because Republicans pointed out that he was Black, and not because he appointed a former Goldman Sachs executive to Treasury and doubled down on globalization after having run as a populist.

It's also an attitude that is terribly counterproductive for Democrats (but great for Republicans). America is far less "racist" than my native Bangladesh. But some degree of "racism" is inevitable in any society. It's inevitable that working class people are going to have less racially progressive views than elites who learned elaborate social-science theories in college. If it becomes politically acceptable to hold that against them, then that becomes a powerful club for elites to use against the working class. Which is what's happened.

> A white voter who didn't complete high school has the same income, on average, as a black voter who has completed some college

That's an interesting social science fact, but you can't build a politics for a working class party around that. The 90% white county where my wife's family is from has a median household income lower than the median for Black households nationally. Folks in that county do not care if you tell them that 2/3s of white people are richer than them, but only 1/2 of Black people. And they correctly perceive that policies that focus on redistributing opportunities based on race--policies that accord more preferences to affluent immigrants from Africa than first generation college students from the Oregon coast--are contrary to their personal interests.

[joshuamorton]

> Everyone does not agree on that. The period leading to Obama's second term coincides with a period during which white Democrats got significantly more liberal, to the point where they had moved to the left of Black Democrats on race issues:

This is based on a single question, and shows that most of the shift happened post 2012. Which would make this a perfect example of Simpson's paradox: the right-most democrats left the party, making the average (white) democrat move left.

> Your theory is that folks in Iowa soured on Obama because Republicans pointed out that he was Black, and not because he appointed a former Goldman Sachs executive to Treasury and doubled down on globalization after having run as a populist.

Yes, because it makes sense that less educated white voters who in many cases supported the ACA but didn't support Obamacare, and who support abortion pre-viability but not in the second trimester, have well defined, cogent opinons about a member of the cabinet who I, someone who cares enough to argue about this stuff, can't even name.

> That's an interesting social science fact, but you can't build a politics for a working class party around that.

This begs the question.