CHAPTER 14
Why Are Democrats Worse at Connecting with the White Working Class than
Republicans?
“ANYBODY GONE INTO Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?”
Barack Obama asked a baffled Iowa audience during the 2008 presidential campaign. “I
don’t know what it is,” a hospital clinic assistant confided to a reporter. “Maybe it’s a
Hawaiian thing.”^272
It’s not a Hawaiian thing; it’s an elite thing. The class culture gap is a huge driver in
American politics today. Consider: Michael Dukakis had lettuce problems, too, when he
discussed endive on the campaign trail. John Kerry meant to convey youthful fitness
when he released a photo of himself windsurfing; instead he communicated class
privilege. Obama was derided for his awful bowling score.^273
The class culture gap is driving politics in Europe, too. Three Dutch social scientists
found that a pronounced increase in “cultural voting”—voting on family values and other
cultural issues—accounts for most of the working class’s shift to the right both in the
United States and Europe. It is “not so much those with low incomes who are socially
conservative but rather those who are poorly educated,”^274 they conclude, mixing
important class insight with casual class affront.
Yes, politicians on the right occasionally suffer from this sort of class cluelessness as well
—think of Mitt Romney’s clumsy attempts to connect with working-class Midwestern
voters by, for example, mentioning that his wife drives “a couple of Cadillacs,” an
American-made car.^275 But this kind of thing is more common on the left. An Iowa
attack ad famously called Howard Dean a “tax hiking, government-expanding, latte-
drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times reading, body-piercing,
Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show,” which provides a thorough elision of PME
folkways and Democratic politics.^276
How did we get here? It started with a shift in the liberal coalition. The New Deal
coalition, organized around economic issues, won the Democrats the presidency seven
out of ten times between 1932 and 1968. That coalition was anchored by blue-collar
workers, white Southerners, and African-Americans. But after passage of the civil rights
legislation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Democrats and white southerners parted
ways,^277 and Democrats focused on building the other pillars of their coalition. In 1972,
- Why Are Democrats Worse at Connecting with the White Working Class Than Republicans?