Statistical slicing and dicing of the election results shows what I had been saying: Blue-collar workers, who used to be Democrat’s base, are now overwhelmingly voting Republican. Higher income folks are voting for the Democrats. These class dynamics, of course, fly in the face of leftist political theory.
Democrats remained strong in areas with the party’s core of minorities and higher-educated whites. But movement of white working-class voters away from the party is a concern for Democrats, especially because of President Obama’s traditional weakness with those voters.
Republicans’ success with the blue-collar vote and the high enthusiasm of the tea party gives it a fired-up base headed into 2012. But in a presidential election with higher turnout, the party might have trouble winning a majority with those voters alone. It certainly can’t rely on that bloc to carry the party into the future.
Democrats largely held on to their high share of the vote in the country’s densest places. The party captured 54 percent in counties with populations of more than 500,000 people, compared with only 49 percent in 1994. In smaller counties, Democrats’ share of the vote slid to 39 percent this year from 43 percent in 1994.
Much of the reason for the Democrats’ decline in less-dense areas can be attributed to the party’s trouble attracting white, working-class voters. Exit polls showed that Democrats lost white voters without a college degree – one way to measure blue-collar voters – by almost 30 percentage points in House races.
via Political divide between coasts and Midwest deepening, midterm election analysis shows.
The article, which is putting the best construction on everything for the Democrats, says that the Republican dominance among low income white people will not last long, since that demographic is shrinking. I don’t know. With the current economy, that number may just skyrocket.
And it doesn’t look like the Democrats will try to win back their base as long as they give off the classist vibe, the sense that all of those uneducated voters, those ignorant white trash rednecks, just don’t belong among their betters.
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