Those of you who follow presidential election politics closely already have heard about a New York Times op-ed in which longtime Washington Post reporter and current Huffington Post contributor Thomas Edsall opined that the president’s re-election team has “effectively jettisoned” any notion of trying to win votes from a majority of “white working class” voters.
Michael Barone evaluates Edsall’s theory in a new Washington Examiner column:
Of course an Obama campaign spokesman issued a prompt denial. No campaign wants any groups of voters to know that it has written them off.
But Edsall is plainly on to something. Obama campaign strategists have made it known that they are concentrating on states like Colorado and Virginia, states with high percentages of college educated voters, young voters, and minorities.
Obama carried both these states in 2008, even though Republican presidential candidates had carried Virginia in every election and Colorado in all but one election between 1964 and 2004.
Not all Democrats accept the Colorado/Virginia strategy. William Galston, a top domestic aide in the Clinton White House, has argued that the Obama campaign should concentrate on states like Ohio, with an older and more blue collar population.
Only one Democrat in the last century has won the presidency without carrying Ohio, Galston points out. If John Kerry had run just 2 points stronger there in 2004 he would have been elected president.
And Ohio’s demographics look a lot like those in Pennsylvania, which Obama carried by 10 points in 2004 but where he is now running behind in the polls.
But Galston’s advice has been spurned, and perhaps that just reflects an acceptance of a longstanding reality.
For the Democratic party has not been the party of the white working class for a very long time.
