Who will win the Straight, Middle-Class White Male Vote?

[shaayecanaan]

9. Only in the south

[P]erhaps most importantly because it is so often overlooked in popular analysis, the defection of the white South from the Democratic Party plays a central role in driving the overarching story of white working class politics. As Bartels succinctly summarizes: “Democratic presidential vote share has declined by almost 20 percentage points among [S]outhern whites without college degrees. Among non-southern whites without college degrees, it has declined by one percentage point. That’s it. Fourteen elections, 52 years, one percentage point.” The same basic relationship holds across all income groups of non-college educated whites: a 20-point-gap between the South and the rest of the country. This is Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy come to life, not a widespread national defection of white working class voters from the Democratic Party. Case in point: in 2008, Obama won 54 percent of whites with incomes under $50,000 outside of the South, while he secured just 35 percent of this group in the South.