THE STUMP NOVEMBER 23, 2011
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What's the matter with Pennsylvania? That question, or the implication of it, was embedded near the end of my last post looking at whether President Obama faces an "Ohio versus Virginia" choice in plotting a path to reelection. While all this political geography is still fresh in my mind, before the latter is benumbed by the Thanksgiving repast, I figured I ought to take up the question more directly.
Here's the deal: polls at this point are of course to be taken with big rocks of sea salt, but there was a disconcerting one for Obama yesterday showing him tied in a hypothetical matchup with Mitt Romney in Pennsylvania, 45-45. This was striking given that Obama is generally polling a few points ahead of Romney nationally and won Pennsylvania by 10 points in 2008. If Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral college votes emerge as a serious challenge this time around, that would be a big, big problem for Obama.
So what's up with the state? Well, here I turn to the exhaustive new report out from Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, looking in detail at Obama's reelection prospects in various states and with various constituencies. Teixeira and Halpin point out that Pennsylvania, despite the final 10 point margin, was actually uniquely tough territory for Obama in one regard: its white working class (defined here as whites without a college degree.) For all the talk of his troubles with Joe Six-Pack, Obama actually outperformed John Kerry with working class whites nationally, and, remarkably, in Michigan and Iowa he did better among them than he did with white college graduates in those states. But in Pennsylvania, he lost them by 15 points -- a worse showing than Kerry's. He won Pennsylvania easily anyway thanks to huge margins among minority voters and young voters and very impressive showing among white college graduates.
What is behind Obama's weakness with the Keystone working class? Are the pipefitters and store clerks of Scranton and Erie so different than their counterparts in Saginaw and Waterloo? One sharp reader sent in a possible theory today: that the 2008 primary in Pennsylvania damaged Obama with the state's white working class. Remember: this was the state where things got particularly nasty between Obama and Hillary Clinton, who was desperately hanging in the race even as her prospects dimmed. It was in the month-long run-up to the Pennsylvania primary that Obama's comments about "bitter" voters who "cling" to "guns and religion" surfaced, and Hillary jumped to capitalize on them, calling them "elitist and divisive," heading to a bar for some whiskey shots and conjuring up fond memories of childhood shooting outings (she would later say that Obama was having trouble winning over "hard-working Americans, white Americans.") I saw first-hand what her riling-up was producing when I ventured to the steel towns in the Monongahela Valley and met Democratic voters who made observations such as: "people are sort of bitter, but they're not carrying around guns and causing crimes like he specified."
Clinton won the primarily easily, her last great hurrah, but Obama went on to secure the nomination anyway, making for ill will with Hillary's Keystone loyalists. Or, as the reader who wrote me put it, "Hillary's refusal to drop out once the math got bad for her in February meant Obama has lingering problems with PA whites he doesn't have in other states."
Come the general election, the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka drew attention to Obama's weakness with the Pennsylvania working class with his stirring speech imploring white union members to vote for Obama, telling them of the little old Democratic lady in his hometown of Nemacolin, who, when she mentioned that she had doubts about voting for a black man, got this response from Trumka: "Are you out of your ever-loving mind, lady?" But plenty Democratic-leaning voters in Nemacolin and the towns like it passed on Obama nonetheless.
Will their resistance to Obama undo him in Pennsylvania this time around? Teixeira and Halpin point to one upside for Obama: they predict that the working class white share of the vote in Pennsylvania will drop by 5 percentage points, an even bigger drop than elsewhere as demographic shifts gradually change the shape of the electorate. What Obama should be as worried about as his shaky standing with the Yuengling drinkers of small-town Pennsylvania, they say, is whether he can hang onto the voters who were with him last time, above all the state's white college graduates. The working class Pennsylvanians who are resentful that Obama ousted their shot-and-a-beer heroine Hillary may never come around (though if anyone sends them into Obama's arms, it might be a private-equity quarter-billionaire). What he'll really need are the suburbanites who were never put off by his "bitter" comments in the first place, but who may today be feeling, if not bitter, then at least somewhat blue. As Teixeira and Halpin put it: "The move toward Democrats is a recent trend among this growing group and could easily be reversed by disappointed expectations -- such as a lack of economic mobility due to continued economic stagnation."
Finally, to end on a note of blatant self-promotion: readers who go in for this sort of political geography as much as I do might be interested in my review in last Sunday's Washington Post of Colin Woodard's "American Nations," a book that quite compelling seeks to trace our regional political divisions back to ethno-cultural differences in the earliest days of the country's settlement and founding. In addition to prompting some unsettling big questions about our country's age-old fissures, the book is full of quirky details, such as this one: did you know that there were bitter armed clashes between Pennsylvania and Connecticut in the late 18th century over what is now northeastern Pennsylvania? The "Yankee-Pennamite Wars." I sure didn't. Electoral map strategy would presumably look a bit different these days if Scranton and Wilkes-Barre were under the blue-state grip of Hartford...
Happy Thanksgiving, all.
8 comments
Didn't see the article in the Post, but the classic on the impact of ethnocultural heritage on American politics is "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer.
- Vogelfam
November 23, 2011 at 10:15pm
Educated, and uneducated, southerners are well aware that, in America, "the determinative political struggle has been a clash between shifting coalitions of ethnoregional nations, one invariably headed by the Deep South, the other by Yankeedom.” I'm pleased that Mr. MacGillis is aware too.
- rayward
November 23, 2011 at 10:39pm
Vogelfam, you're right about Albion's Seed, and as I mention in the review, Woodard makes clear that he is heavily indebted to Fischer. But he tries to take things further by broadening out to other ethnocultural strains beyond Fischer's four English ones, and by tracing the strains further forward through US history.
- Alec MacGillis
November 23, 2011 at 10:49pm
Getting Keith Stone to break for Obama, that's the job ahead. Always!
- ironyroad
November 24, 2011 at 12:52am
In the words of President Calvin Coolidge's Speech before the American Legion Convention, Omaha, Nebraska October 6, 1925: “The bringing together of all these different national, racial, religious, and cultural elements has made our country a kind of composite of the rest of the world, and we can render no greater service than by demonstrating the possibility of harmonious cooperation among so many various groups. Every one of them has something characteristic and significant of great value to cast into the common fund of our material, intellectual, and spiritual resources…. By tolerance I do not mean indifference to evil. I mean respect for different kinds of good. Whether one traces his Americanisms back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.” Shame on President Obama for forgetting he once read this speech, and borrowed the last line in 2004. Keith Stone has the option to move to Canada if it is Romney v Obama. Obama actually has two advantages over Romney. Beer. and Sports. Romney did some cross-country track in prep school - which seems to be the opposite of a team sport. Obama will always have basketball... Retiring Senator Jim Webb, VA, can explain the ethno-cultural divide in America, and it is NOT racist. It IS about guns, and military service. Romney avoided that as well. and so did all five Romney sons. "private-equity quarter-billionaire" is too polite. I trend to 'private equity job-and-people killer' Whatever will the Democratic Party do if it is NOT-Romney? All politicians should stop dissecting voters into socio-demographic clusters based on ancestry. Try to imagine what it means to be American. Otherwise, we might as well all secede and be more like the EU with more guns than Africa.
- K2K
November 25, 2011 at 2:21am
Just scanning the blogpost titles - Obama may have 'disappointed' liberals, but the other 80% of America knows he does not like his job (so he has said) except when he is campaigning, and tells everyone we are soft, a bit lazy, and lacking in imagination and ambition when we are clinging to our guns and religion. As much as I dislike anyone with both an MBA and law degree from Harvard, I give Romney credit for not being, in public, a total confidence-destroying anti-anti-depressant. Memo to Elizabeth Warren: western Massachusetts is not full of landlocked "hicks". How did such a smart, vibrant woman become the New Martha Coakeley?
- K2K
November 25, 2011 at 2:38am
Yeah, I always thought it was pretty sad the way Obama's one-off remark that time cost him the presidency. I believe that it's pretty much a done deal that Warren's remark in which she uses "landlocked" in a slightly odd way and says nothing whatsoever about "hicks" will have just as devastating an effect on her Senate race.
- ironyroad
November 25, 2011 at 2:48am
The reader who chalked up Obama's weakness in PA to the bitter 2008 primary was spot-on, and that weakness lingers here in the same way that the strength Obama built up in a state like Iowa lingers with better-than-average approval ratings for him in that state versus other similarly situated states, like Wisconsin or Minnesota. It's true that Kerry outperformed Obama among PA's white working class, and Hillary would have certainly outperformed Obama's 2008 performance among them had she won the nomination in 2008. However, the Democrats' share of national vote totals in PA has been slipping ever since the early '90s, with Gore and Kerry both having to fight for the state (and both losing neighboring West Virginia, whose population is primarily made up of working class whites of similar heritage and views as those in Pennsylvia's T between Pittsburgh and Philly). I think there is another reason at play here, it doesn't have to do so much with Scots-Irish anti-elitism as with the Democrats' embrace of environmentalism and its ingrained hostility toward resource extraction. More than manufacturing, resource extraction and its concomitant energy generation have been and remains major pillars of the Pennsylvania economy, and the national Democratic party's actual or perceived hostility to coal mining, oil refining and (more recently) deep natural gas drilling have all served to give socially conservative working-class whites outside Metro Philly a self-interested reason to vote for the Republicans who are in favor of their industries and their jobs -- especially when those jobs are among the last refuges of well-paid work for people with high school or trade school degrees. While environmentalism may work more in the Democrats' favor on a nation-wide scale, it is certainly a drawback in coal-mining and gas-drilling states like Pennsylvania or West Virginia (and, to a lesser extent, Ohio).
- wildboy
November 28, 2011 at 11:02am