Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Media Myth of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats
________________________________________
The Media Myth of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats
By Neal Gabler [1] / Moyers & Company [2]
May 8, 2016
Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, we
are likely to get all sorts of mainstream media analysis about how his
narrow pathway to Election Day victory runs through white working-class
America, the way Ronald Reagan's did, while the presumptive Democratic
nominee, Hillary Clinton, must corral young people, minorities and the
well-educated.
In case you haven't noticed, there is an unmistakable media bias in this -
one that was framed perfectly in a Newsweekcover story by Evan Thomas [3]
eight years ago. It was about Barack Obama's alleged "Bubba Gap," and
illustrated with a picture of arugula - and beer. Democrats, naturally, were
the arugula eaters.
This idea that Republicans are "real" Americans and Democrats aren't is now
a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had tremendous repercussions
for our politics. It used to be that Republicans were the effete ones and
Democrats the salt-of-the-earth. Then Ronald Reagan came along and pried
working-class voters away from the Democrats - the so-called "Reagan
Democrats" - and suddenly the media reversed party roles, deciding that
America tilted right, and that Democrats were elitists.
This idea that Republicans are 'real' Americans and Democrats aren't is now
a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had tremendous repercussions
for our politics.
I have no idea who will win the election this November, but I can pretty
much assure you of this: we will be hearing an awful lot about Trump
Democrats who, like those Reagan Democrats, may abandon the Democratic Party
because they allegedly find it too high-blown.
But this is what you probably won't hear: those Reagan Democrats, at least
not as we usually think of them - urban, Rust Belt laborers - didn't last
much beyond Reagan. They were a temporary blip who didn't realign American
politics the way the media tell us they did. Trump Democrats might be
something of a myth, too - a collaboration of the MSM and the candidate to
portray him and his party as the agents of blue-collar, middle America
because it fits the media's stereotype of angry workers blowing gaskets.
Let's get a few things out of the way when we talk about Republican hegemony
and the party's appeal to disaffected Democrats. Yes, Republicans control
both houses of Congress, and, yes, they are dominant at the governor and
state legislature levels. This, however, is largely the product of certain
peculiarities in the American political system rather than any great
Democratic defection or love of Republicanism: things like low turnout in
local and midterm elections among minorities and the poor, who are likely to
vote Democratic; subsequent gerrymandering of districts to benefit
Republicans; absurd disproportions in which Wyoming, with its population of
584,000, gets the same number of senators as California with its 39 million;
and the role of money in elections, as money generally flows more freely to
Republicans than to Democrats for the obvious reason that the GOP's
benefactors have more to gain from the system.
If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probably never
guess that actually there are fewer self-identified conservatives in America
than there are self-identified liberals, or that Democrats outnumber
Republicans 29 percent to 26 percent in the latest Gallup Poll [4].
These are, says Gallup, historically low figures for both parties, but they
may heavily discount Democratic identification. According to a survey by
Republic 3.0 [5], if you add in self-declared Independents who nevertheless
lean toward one party or the other, Democrats actually constitute 45 percent
of Americans, while Republicans constitute just 33 percent. So if you have
been thinking that this is a conservative GOP country, think again.
If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probably never
guess that actually there are fewer self-identified conservatives in America
than there are self-identified liberals.
Which brings us to those Reagan Democrats. As Thomas Frank wrote in his 2004
best-seller, What's the Matter With Kansas?,the "dominant political
coalition" in America is the union of business voters and blue-collar
voters, many of the latter one-time Democrats diverted from their economic
interests by the bloody shirt of social wedge issues from abortion to gun
rights to immigration. That was the great Republican prestidigitation. Now
you see economic distress, now you don't. And the great political
realignment that followed was laid at the foot of Ronald Reagan.
But was it true? In 2006, in theQuarterly Journal of Political Science, [6]
the brilliant political scientist Larry Bartels, then of Princeton and now
at Vanderbilt University, took on this story in a searching analysis of
Frank's thesis. Looking at voting trendlines over a 50-year period, from the
1952 presidential election of Eisenhower to the 2004 reelection of George W.
Bush, Bartels found that there was, as Frank and pundits said, a decline in
Democratic support - roughly six percentage points; not huge over five
decades, but still significant.
But wait! That decline was among white voters without college degrees, which
was the demographic Frank chose to use. If you include non-white voters
without college degrees, Democrats actually enjoyed a two-point increase.
You may notice that when the MSM talks about the whole Reagan/Trump
Democratic conversion, they are focusing on whites, too, even though the
share of white voters in the electorate is falling while that of minorities
is rising. Basically, it's the media equivalent of the three-fifths
compromise of the Constitution in which slaves, for the purpose of
calculating representation, counted for less than whites.
Further, Bartels found that if you look at income rather than education, the
results are even more pronounced in favor of Democrats. The percentage of
low income voters going Democratic has actually risen since the 1980s. In
2012, Barack Obama received [7] 60 percent of the votes of those with
household incomes under $50,000, roughly the American median, and only 44
percent of those over $100,000.
And here is something else Bartels discovered [6]. Nearly all the Democratic
decline among low-income white voters without college degrees came in the
South: 10.3 percent. Outside the South, the Democratic percentages actually
increased (11.2 percent) for an overall national increase of 4.5 percent.
Again, that is just among whites. The inescapable conclusion: All those blue
collar workers who are supposed to have left the Democratic Party for Reagan
and then stayed in the GOP, or who might soon be leaving for Trump, didn't
in the first case, and aren't likely to do so in the second.
I suppose there is a reason why the MSM doesn't feel comfortable
broadcasting those numbers. Doing so would force them to label Republicans
for what they are: the party of white, rich, disproportionately Southern
folks, as opposed to the Democrats, who are a diverse party racially and
economically. When put that way, it inevitably sounds like the media are
taking sides, even though it would only be fact-providing.
This isn't to say that in 1980, when it came to union households, Reagan
didn't cut seriously into the lead Carter had over Ford in 1976. And he made
some inroads into the working class as defined by income as well. But the
real story of the so-called post-Reagan Republican tilt is that white
Southerners, who had long been departing the Democratic Party, until one of
their own, Carter, stanched the flow in 1976, were the primary defectors.
And presumably they were leaving not over economics but over race.
That's another story neither the MSM nor the Republicans are eager to tell
because it makes the GOP out to be overly dependent on racist troglodytes.
For the MSM to tell the truth this way would, again, seem to be picking on
Republican salt-of-the-earth rank and file, and the MSM won't risk doing
that. Picking on allegedly Democratic elitists? That's OK.
None of this is to say that Trump won't attract lots of angry, white
working-class voters. It isto say that it's highly unlikely he will draw
many working-class voters away from the Democrats, in large part because
there probably aren't a whole lot of white Democratic votes left in the
South to take away, and because most blue-collar workers still identify with
the Democratic Party. So get ready to hear about all those angry,
blue-collar white guys who love Trump and might hand him the election. But
when you do, remember this: Democrats drink beer too, even though the MSM
has you thinking they're all sipping chablis as they munch their arugula.
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA TImes
Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's
biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at the
Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society and is currently
writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [8]
[9]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/media-myth-working-class-reagan-democr
ats
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/neal-gabler
[2] http://billmoyers.com/
[3] http://www.newsweek.com/cover-story-obamas-bubba-gap-86197
[4]
http://www.gallup.com/poll/188096/democratic-republican-identification-near-
historical-lows.aspx
[5] http://republic3-0.com/myth-independent-voter-stefan-hankin/
[6] https://www.princeton.edu/%7Ebartels/kansasqjps06.pdf
[7]
http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-groups-voted/how-group
s-voted-2012/
[8] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Media Myth of the
Working-Class Reagan Democrats
[9] http://www.alternet.org/
[10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Media Myth of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats
The Media Myth of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats
By Neal Gabler [1] / Moyers & Company [2]
May 8, 2016
Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, we
are likely to get all sorts of mainstream media analysis about how his
narrow pathway to Election Day victory runs through white working-class
America, the way Ronald Reagan's did, while the presumptive Democratic
nominee, Hillary Clinton, must corral young people, minorities and the
well-educated.
In case you haven't noticed, there is an unmistakable media bias in this -
one that was framed perfectly in a Newsweekcover story by Evan Thomas [3]
eight years ago. It was about Barack Obama's alleged "Bubba Gap," and
illustrated with a picture of arugula - and beer. Democrats, naturally, were
the arugula eaters.
This idea that Republicans are "real" Americans and Democrats aren't is now
a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had tremendous repercussions
for our politics. It used to be that Republicans were the effete ones and
Democrats the salt-of-the-earth. Then Ronald Reagan came along and pried
working-class voters away from the Democrats - the so-called "Reagan
Democrats" - and suddenly the media reversed party roles, deciding that
America tilted right, and that Democrats were elitists.
This idea that Republicans are 'real' Americans and Democrats aren't is now
a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had tremendous repercussions
for our politics.
I have no idea who will win the election this November, but I can pretty
much assure you of this: we will be hearing an awful lot about Trump
Democrats who, like those Reagan Democrats, may abandon the Democratic Party
because they allegedly find it too high-blown.
But this is what you probably won't hear: those Reagan Democrats, at least
not as we usually think of them - urban, Rust Belt laborers - didn't last
much beyond Reagan. They were a temporary blip who didn't realign American
politics the way the media tell us they did. Trump Democrats might be
something of a myth, too - a collaboration of the MSM and the candidate to
portray him and his party as the agents of blue-collar, middle America
because it fits the media's stereotype of angry workers blowing gaskets.
Let's get a few things out of the way when we talk about Republican hegemony
and the party's appeal to disaffected Democrats. Yes, Republicans control
both houses of Congress, and, yes, they are dominant at the governor and
state legislature levels. This, however, is largely the product of certain
peculiarities in the American political system rather than any great
Democratic defection or love of Republicanism: things like low turnout in
local and midterm elections among minorities and the poor, who are likely to
vote Democratic; subsequent gerrymandering of districts to benefit
Republicans; absurd disproportions in which Wyoming, with its population of
584,000, gets the same number of senators as California with its 39 million;
and the role of money in elections, as money generally flows more freely to
Republicans than to Democrats for the obvious reason that the GOP's
benefactors have more to gain from the system.
If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probably never
guess that actually there are fewer self-identified conservatives in America
than there are self-identified liberals, or that Democrats outnumber
Republicans 29 percent to 26 percent in the latest Gallup Poll [4].
These are, says Gallup, historically low figures for both parties, but they
may heavily discount Democratic identification. According to a survey by
Republic 3.0 [5], if you add in self-declared Independents who nevertheless
lean toward one party or the other, Democrats actually constitute 45 percent
of Americans, while Republicans constitute just 33 percent. So if you have
been thinking that this is a conservative GOP country, think again.
If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probably never
guess that actually there are fewer self-identified conservatives in America
than there are self-identified liberals.
Which brings us to those Reagan Democrats. As Thomas Frank wrote in his 2004
best-seller, What's the Matter With Kansas?,the "dominant political
coalition" in America is the union of business voters and blue-collar
voters, many of the latter one-time Democrats diverted from their economic
interests by the bloody shirt of social wedge issues from abortion to gun
rights to immigration. That was the great Republican prestidigitation. Now
you see economic distress, now you don't. And the great political
realignment that followed was laid at the foot of Ronald Reagan.
But was it true? In 2006, in theQuarterly Journal of Political Science, [6]
the brilliant political scientist Larry Bartels, then of Princeton and now
at Vanderbilt University, took on this story in a searching analysis of
Frank's thesis. Looking at voting trendlines over a 50-year period, from the
1952 presidential election of Eisenhower to the 2004 reelection of George W.
Bush, Bartels found that there was, as Frank and pundits said, a decline in
Democratic support - roughly six percentage points; not huge over five
decades, but still significant.
But wait! That decline was among white voters without college degrees, which
was the demographic Frank chose to use. If you include non-white voters
without college degrees, Democrats actually enjoyed a two-point increase.
You may notice that when the MSM talks about the whole Reagan/Trump
Democratic conversion, they are focusing on whites, too, even though the
share of white voters in the electorate is falling while that of minorities
is rising. Basically, it's the media equivalent of the three-fifths
compromise of the Constitution in which slaves, for the purpose of
calculating representation, counted for less than whites.
Further, Bartels found that if you look at income rather than education, the
results are even more pronounced in favor of Democrats. The percentage of
low income voters going Democratic has actually risen since the 1980s. In
2012, Barack Obama received [7] 60 percent of the votes of those with
household incomes under $50,000, roughly the American median, and only 44
percent of those over $100,000.
And here is something else Bartels discovered [6]. Nearly all the Democratic
decline among low-income white voters without college degrees came in the
South: 10.3 percent. Outside the South, the Democratic percentages actually
increased (11.2 percent) for an overall national increase of 4.5 percent.
Again, that is just among whites. The inescapable conclusion: All those blue
collar workers who are supposed to have left the Democratic Party for Reagan
and then stayed in the GOP, or who might soon be leaving for Trump, didn't
in the first case, and aren't likely to do so in the second.
I suppose there is a reason why the MSM doesn't feel comfortable
broadcasting those numbers. Doing so would force them to label Republicans
for what they are: the party of white, rich, disproportionately Southern
folks, as opposed to the Democrats, who are a diverse party racially and
economically. When put that way, it inevitably sounds like the media are
taking sides, even though it would only be fact-providing.
This isn't to say that in 1980, when it came to union households, Reagan
didn't cut seriously into the lead Carter had over Ford in 1976. And he made
some inroads into the working class as defined by income as well. But the
real story of the so-called post-Reagan Republican tilt is that white
Southerners, who had long been departing the Democratic Party, until one of
their own, Carter, stanched the flow in 1976, were the primary defectors.
And presumably they were leaving not over economics but over race.
That's another story neither the MSM nor the Republicans are eager to tell
because it makes the GOP out to be overly dependent on racist troglodytes.
For the MSM to tell the truth this way would, again, seem to be picking on
Republican salt-of-the-earth rank and file, and the MSM won't risk doing
that. Picking on allegedly Democratic elitists? That's OK.
None of this is to say that Trump won't attract lots of angry, white
working-class voters. It isto say that it's highly unlikely he will draw
many working-class voters away from the Democrats, in large part because
there probably aren't a whole lot of white Democratic votes left in the
South to take away, and because most blue-collar workers still identify with
the Democratic Party. So get ready to hear about all those angry,
blue-collar white guys who love Trump and might hand him the election. But
when you do, remember this: Democrats drink beer too, even though the MSM
has you thinking they're all sipping chablis as they munch their arugula.
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA TImes
Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's
biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at the
Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society and is currently
writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [8]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[9]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/media-myth-working-class-reagan-democr
ats
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/neal-gabler
[2] http://billmoyers.com/
[3] http://www.newsweek.com/cover-story-obamas-bubba-gap-86197
[4]
http://www.gallup.com/poll/188096/democratic-republican-identification-near-
historical-lows.aspx
[5] http://republic3-0.com/myth-independent-voter-stefan-hankin/
[6] https://www.princeton.edu/%7Ebartels/kansasqjps06.pdf
[7]
http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-groups-voted/how-group
s-voted-2012/
[8] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Media Myth of the
Working-Class Reagan Democrats
[9] http://www.alternet.org/
[10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
