How Can Biden Turn Things Around?
Part 1: Recognizing the Class Divide
The Biden campaign seems stuck in neutral. Despite a raft of problems with their campaign, and a mountain of issues they (hopefully) know they need to address, the campaign doesn’t really seem to know which direction to take to begin to make real inroads with undecided voters, or even whether those voters should be their focus. And that may be just another expression of the kind of complacency they have shown over the past few months – a complacency that seems to have been reinforced by Biden’s performance in the state of the union.
But as anyone who has ever played sports knows (or even those who have watched it with interest), the loser is always better prepared than the winner when it comes to a rematch. And in this case that loser would be Donald Trump. Which suggests that he and his campaign will have a pretty good idea what they did wrong in 2020.
Whereas Biden and his people don’t even seem to have a clear idea of what they did right. And that may be because little of what they did in that campaign mattered. Because the truth is that Biden didn’t win the election. Trump lost it – mainly due to his ridiculous Covid policies and prescriptions, compounded by what the pandemic did to the economy. He may have even lost the election because a disproportionate number of his supporters died from Covid – partly because of age, and partly because of their views about the pandemic. As one grieving daughter famously made clear, her father’s only preexisting condition was that he was a Trump supporter.
So it’s hard for me to understand why Biden and his campaign do not seem to realize how much harder it will be for them to win this time around, given that in 2020 their septuagenarian candidate was able to wage most of his campaign from his own basement, and given that he is now four years older and apparently not a bit wiser – certainly not when it comes to what it will take to win in November. That complacency likely stems from the fact that like most winners, they have managed to convince themselves they did pretty much everything right in 2020 and therefore nothing much really needs to change. “Hell, Biden beat him last time,” his campaign seems to be saying, “so why wouldn’t he win it again?”
Well, a few days back I found some really compelling evidence for why they won’t. That evidence comes from a recent report in
which points out precisely why the Biden campaign should be concerned. And it’s based on the ways in which the politics of the 2024 have become much worse for the Democrats than they were in 2020, certainly from a demographic perspective.In an effort to keep this post relatively short, I’m not going to go much into the numbers. But if you want to do that for yourself, I highly recommend reading the article in question.
In any case, the post by Ruy Teixeira shows how the Republican/Democratic electoral divide is increasingly becoming about class – as opposed to race or other cultural or demographic factors. He does this by pointing out that white working-class voters now appear to be more aligned with non-white working-class voters than they are with white college-educated voters. And the same is true of the disparity between non-white college educated and working-class voters.
Among other factors Teixeira points out that:
White and nonwhite working-class voters are very close on the assessment of Biden (42 percent vs. 46 percent say Biden has what it takes to be an effective president), way lower than the 63 percent thumbs up from white college grads. And on Trump’s capabilities, the two working-class sectors are almost identical (48 percent vs. 47 percent think Trump can do the job), way higher than the 29 percent among white college voters who agree.
He further argues that unless something changes in that dynamic, not only will it spell easy victory for Trump in 2024, but that that trend can be expected to hold true for Republicans for several election cycles to come.
This information should strike fear into the heart of the Biden campaign. But it should also show them a ray of hope.
I say that because of my belief that the one marketable political asset the president still possesses, is his natural comfort and perceived connection with working-class voters, especially older men. It also supports my long standing view that the Democrats need to embark on a sincere and concerted effort to appeal to working-class voters of all races, especially men. And an occasional visit to a union shop, as Biden has been known to do, is not what I’m talking about.
Working-class and college-educated voters tend to make their voting decisions in very different ways
One reason I believe focusing on working-class men is an especially effective strategy, is that, as Hillary Clinton once suggested, working-class women tend to vote with their men. And I have personally come to believe that progressive, college-educated couples tend to go the other way – in that it is the men who tend to vote the interests of the women in their lives.
I’m not sure whether there is any formal data to back this up. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that in recent years men and women from opposite sides of the aisle are not likely to marry or even date each other to any extent – to the point where there may even be more interracial then interparty marriages taking place today.
But to me this second assertion in particular, about progressive voters, just makes common sense based on observations I’ve made over the years. And there is some circumstantial evidence to back me up on that. For example, if college-educated men were voting for their own personal and particular male interests, then what exactly are those interests, and where are those interest being debated in the political arena? If those men are voting on issues that are of particular interest to men, then which of those issues are part of the political debate today?
Sure there are important general interest issues which are relevant across a wide spectrum of voters – such as the economy, climate change, and immigration and border security. But what are the issues that affect men in particular, the way issues like sexual assault and abuse, reproductive rights, and affirmative action, are important to college-educated women.
Because to me, the fact that most of us are unable to name any such issues for men, pretty much proves my point – that college-educated men do not take into account their particular male interests when marking a ballot. How could they, when there are none being presented or even discussed?
Somewhat conversely, I also think Hillary Clinton was right in suggesting that Trump’s working-class women predominantly vote with their men. And that may be purely because they are more likely to come from traditionally male-dominated communities and households. Nothing is absolute of course. There are certainly many female-dominated households in this demographic, just as there are plenty of politically male-oriented households among the progressive college-educated elite. But we’re talking about generalities and scale here. And common sense tells me that this factor explains why Hillary Clinton couldn’t convince working-class women to vote for her – or their working-class men for that matter.
Of course in that case, there was a difference in how she approached those two groups. Because the record shows that she was at least trying to appeal to those women, whereas she made no real effort to go after the men, even while doing very poorly with them. However, after being repeatedly criticized for that, she did finally relent. And after the 2016 Democratic convention she reluctantly decided to give it a try.
So during that brief period, what was her message to those men about the issues that concern them? It was essentially that, women’s issues are men’s issues. And that was it. That was all she had to say to them. So she of course lost the male vote. And partly because of that, she lost the election.
And according to the numbers cited in this Liberal Patriot report, that is going to be Biden’s fate – unless he can turn things around with working-class men. And if my theory about female working-class voters holds true, every one of Trump’s male voters which Biden can bring to his side, will give him two votes, while of course resulting in two less for Trump. Which in sports parlance means, the battle over working-class voters is a four point game. Whereas in physics and engineering that is called a mechanical advantage of four – meaning you can lift four times the weigh with the same amount of effort.
That is the advantage of appealing to working-class male voters, and doing it in a positive sense, instead of using the approach that seems to be dominating the current election cycle – that of trying to make voters hate the other guy more than your guy. But for Biden that means appealing to working-class men in a way that has not been done since… well, maybe ever. On the other hand, who has more natural appeal to working-class men, than the kid from Scranton PA – who has considered himself a working-class Joe all his life.
Now as I say that, I can hear Biden’s progressive staffers screaming, “How can you expect the president to go out on a limb like this, ignoring his base, and indirectly disparaging college-educated members of the electorate?”
I’ll answer that question in a second installment on this topic, in which I elaborate on another recent report on the nature of the current electorate.