What's All This Talk About The White Working Class?

Why Is There Controversy About White Working Class Voters?

First, when people talk about WWC voters, they usually mean white voters without a 4-year college degree. For more details, see this paper.

With that in mind, consider the following recent, much discussed tweet from Bloomberg politics reporter Sahil Kapur:

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Let’s focus on “meaningful gains.” As a group, WWC voters are more likely to vote for Republicans and that will almost certainly continue be true in 2020. But there are a lot of WWC voters! So the difference between the 37% (66% - 29%) loss in 2016 and the 24% (61% - 37%) loss in 2018 represents a lot of votes. For instance, WWC voters make up about 59% of the electorate in Wisconsin. If there had been a 13% swing to Clinton instead of Trump—the swing from 2016 to 2018—in 2016, Wisconsin would have gone blue. Michigan (53% WWC) and Pennsylvania (55% WWC) are also states where a 13% shift in the 2016 WWC vote would have flipped them blue. But there’s more: those states were very, very close—so even a 2% shift in the WWC vote would have flipped them all blue.

Where does this leave us? On the one hand, the WWC is a large (though shrinking) group and even small swings in their likelihood of voting for Democrats can make a difference, particularly in WWC-heavy midwestern battleground states. But the gap we need to close in those states is small, so centering a campaign on winning WWC votes isn’t the only—or best—strategy.

To make that point even clearer, let’s do an experiment: what change in turnout among non-WWC voters in each state would have generated enough votes in 2016 to win three key battlegrounds? In all three states, it turns out that a pretty small turnout boost among non-WWC—less than 3%—would have made the difference.

This is summarized in the table below (votes in thousands):

NB: The turnout boost % assumes an approximate turnout of 50% among Non-WWC voters in all 3 states. Our source for the percentage of WWC voters in these states is this article. Our vote totals are from Wikipedia and our Democratic voter preference (29%) is taken from the tweet above. The Non-WWC Democratic voter preference is calculated from the WWC voter preference, the WWC percentage of the populations and the vote totals, assuming that turnout is similar among WWC and non-WWC voters. Details of these calculations are available in this spreadsheet.

This little thought experiment makes an important point about the 2016 election, turnout and voter rights. In all three of these states, non-WWC turnout fell by over 5% from 2012 to 2016. If even half of those folks (or even far less, in some cases) were able to and chose to show up on election day, that also would have been enough to turn the tide and win the presidency.

How Democrats Can Win In Heavily WWC States

It’s important to re-iterate how close the midwest battleground states were in 2016, and how difficult it would be for a Republican candidate to win them with numbers anything like what we saw in 2018. So Democrats may be justified in not making any special appeal to WWC voters. However, as progressives often point out, many progressive policies are good for almost everyone, including the WWC. So we think the approach should be three-fold:

1. Do what we ought do everywhere else: work hard at registration and turnout among everyone, particularly the Democratic base. This involves defense of voting rights: fighting unfair poll purges and voter ID laws, working for automatic and same-day registration, and working to keep more polling places open and for more days and hours. And this also requires the traditional tools for improving turnout: registration drives, knocking on doors, etc. This idea inspires part of Blue Ripple Politics’ support for local candidates in places where their voter outreach will also help candidates running for other offices.

2. Identify which parts of the WWC can be convinced, hopefully by their willingness to embrace parts of the progressive agenda. Data For Progress has done amazing work looking at progressive policies with broad support. For instance, capping credit card interest rates polls positively among Trump voters in all 50 states, and marijuana legalization polls positively among Trump voters in all but AK, MS and AL. Ending the war in Yemen is more mixed among Trump voters, but polls well among them in PA, MI and WI. All of these policies are supported by many progressive candidates, including several vying for the Democratic nomination.

3. In the short-term, some WWC voters may choose to vote Democratic because of their disgust with Trump and his enablers. For example non-evangelical WWC women are more than 10% of the national electorate and were strong Democratic voters (57% D vs. 41% R) in 2018. Trump’s approval rating with non-evangelical WWC women is now about 35% so there’s no hint that they would vote any differently in 2020 than they did in 2018. We note that this is a tactical consideration and so ranks low for us. But it’s a reminder that the “against Trump” message is also worthwhile in this election.

In other words: yes, we should rally and support the voters who are reliable Democratic supporters while also minimizing losses among the WWC. Working hardest for the people who support Democrats is the right thing to do. But we should also find common ground with WWC voters that share many of our core values and encourage them to show up in November and pull the Democratic lever, because progressivism is good for almost everyone, and especially good for the working class. This two-pronged strategy will energize and broaden our base—which is key for both the long-term success of progressive policies and also the tactical, short-term goal of winning the 2020 presidential election and getting Trump out of office.

Take Action

Give your time or money to organizations that work on registration and turnout, especially among groups that tend to support Democrats.

• BLOC, community organizers in Milwaukee, WI, working to improve black voter turnout.
• Rock The Vote is “nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to building the political power of young people.” Through them you can organize your own registration drive or volunteer to register and engage voters or donate money to further that work.
• Voto Latino works to register voters, and “empower Latinos to be agents of change.”
• Vote Riders works specifically on voter ID, with a “mission to ensure that all citizens are able to exercise their right to vote.” You can volunteer to help voters acquire appropriate ID or donate money to help with their work.

We tried to find more local organizations working specifically in battleground states but didn’t find many. Please email us if you know of local organizations doing this work and we’ll update this post!

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