Forgotten Middle Class Is Keeper of the Key to White House in 1996

James Carville, President Clinton’s senior campaign strategist in 1992, says it is “the whole ball of wax.”

Mark Gersh, a leading Democratic expert on congressional elections, says it is “the reason why the Democratic Party is the minority party.”

Stanley B. Greenberg, one of Clinton’s pollsters, wrote in a recent internal memo to the President that it is “the principal obstacle standing in [the] way” of his reelection.

“It” is the desertion of the Democrats by white voters without college degrees--the very people Clinton had in mind when he pledged as a candidate three years ago to champion the “forgotten middle class.”

These voters supplied the critical votes for the Republican congressional sweep in 1994. They constitute the backbone of the potential support for Ross Perot, who took a first step toward another presidential bid with his high-profile political conference in Dallas over the weekend. And they will probably decide who sits in the White House after 1996.

White voters without college educations have become the most volatile bloc in the electorate, a group without strong attachment to either party.

Americans without college degrees have good reason to be disaffected. Over the past 20 years, they have suffered the most from the structural changes transforming the U.S. economy. For all high school graduates, average hourly wages were nearly 15% lower in 1993 than they were in 1973; for men with a high school education, the drop was even steeper--20%. Hourly wages for workers with some college education fell by nearly 12% over the same period.

From 1932 through 1968, these voters--primarily blue-collar workers at first, increasingly service workers and technicians as time went on--constituted the heart of the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition. But the developing strain on their economic status, magnified by cultural conflict over issues such as crime, welfare and racial preferences, broke the alliance. Beginning with Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968, Democrats found it increasingly difficult to command the loyalty of the white working class in presidential elections. In 1994, the problem extended to the congressional level, as white working-class voters moved massively toward the GOP.

In 1992 and 1994, African Americans remained consistent in their congressional voting patterns, casting about 90% of their votes for Democrats. Over the same period, college-educated whites, who tend to be skeptical of taxes and government spending and reliably Republican in their voting habits, also shifted very little, according to an upcoming study of exit poll data by Ruy Teixeira, a political analyst at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. A slim majority of white voters with postgraduate degrees, who take more liberal positions on social and environmental issues, voted Democratic in 1994, as they have consistently in recent years.

The big changes came further down the education scale, Teixeira found. White men with high school degrees cast just 37% of their votes for Democratic congressional candidates in 1994--down a breathtaking 20 percentage points from their total in 1992. Democrats also suffered double-digit falloffs among most other categories of white voters without full college degrees. Given that whites without college degrees accounted for more than 50% of all voters, these losses meant that the party suffered a meltdown in the demographic center of the electorate.

Among voters who backed Perot in 1992--a group whose importance to both parties was suggested by the parade of politicians through Dallas over the weekend--these trends were even more pronounced. Perot’s constituency is really two constituencies--one that is in play for 1996 and one that is not.

About one-fourth of Perot’s 1992 vote came from upscale, college-educated Americans who are fundamentally Republican in their attitudes (although more socially liberal on issues such as abortion); these Perot supporters voted strongly Republican in 1992 and ’94 congressional elections and are likely to cast the overwhelming majority of their votes for the GOP presidential candidate next year if Perot doesn’t run.

If Perot stays on the sidelines, the piece of his constituency that’s realistically up for grabs is the portion without college degrees--about three-fourths of his vote in 1992. (Greenberg and some other pollsters believe that Perot’s constituency is growing even more downscale as his college-educated supporters return to the GOP.) These voters have been open to Democrats in the past, but turned to the GOP last fall. In 1992, Perot supporters with only a high school degree cast a majority of their votes for Democratic congressional candidates; in 1994, just 28% of men and only 25% of women in that category voted Democratic for Congress, Teixeira found.

For Clinton, these results represent a profound political repudiation. From the moment of his emergence as a national figure, he focused his appeal directly at these economically pressed voters. Clinton talked about the strain on living standards more candidly than virtually any presidential candidate before him, and sought to recapture working-class voters with an agenda built around both economic populism (a program of “investment” in training and education financed partly by taxes on the rich) and cultural populism (welfare reform, support for the death penalty).

In office, however, Clinton almost immediately blunted both points of his populist message. His image as a cultural populist was eclipsed by the controversy over gays in the military and his initial failure to pursue welfare reform, but reinforced in rural areas by his battle to ban assault weapons. His image as an economic populist was effaced when his investment package took a back seat to deficit reduction during the congressional debate over his 1993 budget plan. “On the one hand,” Teixeira says, “Clinton has been a captive of the Wall Street wing of the party; on the other, he is the captive of the social welfare liberals.”

In his internal memo, which was first obtained by CNN, Greenberg writes that if Clinton is to make electoral gains, such gains “will have to come within the [white] downscale electorate.” That argument is based on Greenberg’s belief--shared by Carville and Gersh, among others--that while Clinton may be able to improve his image with college-educated voters (by emphasizing issues such as environmental protection and deficit reduction), he’s unlikely to persuade many more of them to ultimately vote for him. Nor is his African American support, already overwhelming, likely to increase much, Greenberg’s memo suggests.

Since November, Clinton has increased his efforts to speak to white working-class voters through such initiatives as his proposed middle-class tax cut, his call for an increase in the minimum wage, and his pressure on Japan to buy more American autos and auto parts. White House aides plotting Clinton’s campaign put more hope in recapturing white working-class women than men, but most of the damage done in the Administration’s first two years may be permanent. With some downscale voters, Clinton’s proposal to regulate tobacco may even widen the cultural disconnect.

Many Democrats believe Clinton’s best hope of recapturing these voters is a backlash against the Republican Congress. As the GOP pushes for cuts in Medicare and student loans, and slashes funding for regulation of occupational and food safety, “they are disqualifying themselves as a place for these voters to go,” says Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux. Republicans are likely to counter these arguments next year by emphasizing cultural issues such as affirmative action and welfare, and pointing the finger at government for the economic strains on middle-class life.

The greatest likelihood is that these working-class voters will remain cool to both parties so long as their basic problems--stagnant incomes and a sense that the society’s moral fabric is unraveling--remain unresolved. And as long as that’s the case, the door will remain open for Perot, or another independent with greater personal credibility, to press the argument that both parties have reneged on their promises to the families that work hard and play by the rules.

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Shift Toward GOP

White voters with a high school degree or some college education (but not a full four-year degree) constituted just over half of the total electorate in both 1992 and 1994. In those two elections, their allegience sharply shifted--fueling the sweep that gave Republicans control of Congress. What follows is a look at the vote for Democratic Congressional candidates cast by whites at the various education levels:

WHITE MEN

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1992 1994 Change High school dropout 64% 53% -11 High school graduate 57% 37% -20 Some college 46% 31% -15 College graduate 43% 37% -6 WHITE WOMEN High school dropout 58% 53% -5 High school graduate 54% 44% -10 Some college 50% 40% -10 College graduate 50% 52% +2

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Source: Calculations by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers based on exit polling in 1994 and 1992.