Can Democrats Win Back Working Class Whites?

On A Problem With An Answer Nobody Will Like

“It is an additionally twisted version of exceptionalism to ignore the global evidence and pin the suburban swing on Trump alone.”

I wrote that sentence in December, when I was crashing as a writer at Lak’s site, but it’s increasingly and increasingly being proven correct - whether it’s the continued suburban dominance of the Canadian Liberals to the way the suburbs didn’t revert in the New Mexico 1st special election to the way that Gavin Newsom outperformed 2018 in 7 of the 8 counties with 40% of more of the population having Bachelor Degrees, the suburbs aren’t moving right. Or, more specifically, well-off white social liberals aren’t moving right, because that’s what we actually are talking about when we talk about the suburbs.

The other side of that coin, then, is whether or not the Democrats can get their 2012 support - or something approximating that, or something substantially better than 2020 or 2016 - amongst working class, non-degree, culturally conservative whites. A certain ex-Vox writer has these visions of Democrats managing to pull off the reversion there, so is it possible?

Short answer: it is, but it’s not a price anyone would find acceptable.

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In 2015, the Australian right got rid of the anti-gay marriage Tony Abbott as Prime Minister and replaced him with Malcolm Turnbull, the leading social liberal on the Australian right, and a leading proponent of gay marriage. Turnbull was no panacea, but he was the closest thing to the sort of “acceptable to liberals” conservative that the world has seen in recent years, taking the title that used to be David Cameron’s before Cameron lost the EU referendum. Turnbull would lose the party leadership in 2018, and in the 2019 election, the Australian right was led by a man who said he did not recognize his country anymore when Australia voted for gay marriage. How did the politics play out? Well, Turnbull did really well in the urban electorates, and went over like warmed over piss in the regional cities, losing seats like Lyons and Braddon in Tasmania and Herbert and Longman in Queensland. In 2019, all but one of those seats flipped back, and the only one that didn’t, Lyons, was in part because the Liberal candidate was disendorsed mid-campaign (I believe over offensive social media posts).

Now, you could say it was also climate policy that led to Turnbull doing badly in these areas, and then Morrison doing better in them - Morrison is much more relaxed about the need for action than Turnbull, and Turnbull had lost the Liberal leadership in 2009 over doing a deal with Kevin Rudd on a carbon price - but the fact that the right lost no seats in mining-heavy Western Australia is a bit of an argument against that. Turnbull’s social liberalism, and specifically his policy on marriage, shrunk the gap on social issues between him and Bill Shorten, and people then voted for the economic prospectus they preferred - and in many cases, picked Shorten’s Labor plans. Without that consensus, the country split along their social views, with cultural conservatives backing the right and Labor gaining with socially liberal whites, and gaining especially so with wealthy ones. It’s not like we’ve seen this pattern anywhere else in the world, have we?

Why did Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour get 53% of the vote in Tony Blair’s old northern heartland seat of Sedgefield in 2017 and 36% two years later? Oh, wait, because in 2017 he was running on an explicitly Brexit message, and there was cultural consensus on the big question of the day. The problem for Labour was they were pushed into a Remain position in 2019, and those economically Labour-minded voters voted for the Tories because of it. That said, play the counterfactual where they hold their pro-Brexit position out, and the Lib Dems get 20% of the vote and pick off Labour incumbents all throughout the south. There was no easy answer for Labour in that election, to be clear, but they made their choice and the collapse that ensued was the consequence of their choice. 

In much the same way, Democrats made their choice when they became a pro-gay marriage party. In all the places that have swung left since 2012, that choice has been incredibly helpful to us, because the people who live in those places - Southlake, Forsyth, the white parts of Maricopa, the Milwaukee and Philly collar counties, Orange County - are the kinds of people who have no aversion to homosexuality. I don’t need to feel like I can’t be myself when I’m in these places or speaking to people from these places - I don’t have to hide that I’m a gay man, I don’t have to make the stories I’m telling ambiguous to hide that I was with a boyfriend when it happened, I don’t have to pretend that the man I got dinner with was just a friend. In all the places trending away from us, you’d have to have lost your mind to think I’d ever be open about my homosexuality. I’ve been in these places, as everyone who knows the story of my lunch at a Ross County, Ohio Applebees will be able to tell you, and boy oh boy was I not safe. Shockingly, these people aren’t going to vote for the party that supports gay marriage and LGBT rights more broadly.

The question this piece claims to answer is whether these voters can be won back in any holistic way, and the answer is yes, but it will never happen. The answer would be for the party to nominate an anti-marriage equality Democrat who wants to tax the rich and repeal Obergefell  and Windsor. Do that, and you’ll win back wide swathes of votes in the rural and regional areas - hell, it might even be better for the Senate map, honestly. But absolutely nobody would propose doing that, and because of it, the path to widescale reversion doesn’t exist. Changes on the margins matter, and doing a little bit better with rural whites might be the difference between 50 Senate seats next year and 53, given the narrow margins all three of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina rest on, but don’t kid yourself. Democrats have made their choice, and until the GOP nominates a proper social liberal - someone who will nominate pro-Obergefell justices to the Supreme Court and who would have no objection to marching in a Pride parade - Democrats have to exploit the division they have in front of them. They have a path to power in both the short and medium term through Blacks, socially liberal Hispanics, and educated, well-off white social liberals. Any attempts to turn back the clock to win cultural conservatives will fail, and piss off the very same white social liberals who just gave us the Senate. Be careful what you wish for.