The Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr once said, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved…. After all we have been through. Just to think we can’t walk down our own streets, how humiliating.”
I am not attempting to equate what I have been through with this event on the same level of fear and outrage, but I think of it when I canvass for Democratic candidates. I was in sales for over thirty years (most of it in industrial equipment), much of that time spent “cold calling”, knocking on doors, ringing doorbells. It’s a tough gig but I managed. You have to have a thick skin. I also dabbled in stand up comedy, again, a time when you put yourself out in the open and hope for the acceptance of others.
About ten years ago, I was asked to canvass for someone running for office and figured I’d be a natural. I was, to a point. Even after thirty years of cold calls, I’d still get that nervous rush before I met the perspective buyer. It was no difference in canvassing. There was one difference that was telling, and one that relates to Reverend Jackson’s anecdote. In my days on the job, when the door opened or the receptionist was willing to call the perspective buyer to meet me in the lobby, there were “tells” that I was in for a possible sale and “tells” that it was going to be rough. In no case was the demographic of the individual at issue.
Canvassing turned out to be a whole lot different. If the door opened and I was met with a women, a person of color, a minority, I knew it would be smooth sailing, a friendly conversation, hand them a flyer and remind them to vote. However, if the door opened and I saw a reflection of myself, mid income, working class male, I braced myself for the inevitable “No thanks, we’re good” or “Sorry, not interested” and occasional “Take your pamphlet, your candidate, get off my property and stay away”.
It’s humiliating as a Democrat to have a door open, see a white male, and be nervous, much less not be able to tell him what our party has to offer on his behalf. Marriage Equality, great! Women’s reproductive rights, of course! Pay Equity for Women, yes! and then……crickets……well yeah, I know “jobs and the economy, break down barriers, taxes, education”…the same things (to him) that he hears from both parties. As I have pointed out before, there is no outreach for this demographic in the state party. As well as Secretary Clinton did in New York yesterday, she did not manage to get even 40% of the white male vote. Yes, sure, she did really, really well with the other demographics. And yes, we all know that this demographic is not as large as it once was and it’s not growing, but it’s still a sizable demographic. Why we do so poorly is a question that no one seems to ask.
…you seem to stop at diagnosing the problem, but what do YOU think we should do differently?
Well done.
My presidential candidate has laid out his plan, as much as is possible considering his plan, position, and timing. Not unlike when JFK told us we’d put a man on the moon. Did he get out his slide rule and graph paper to show us the details? Nope. He had a bold vision, a vision that some, no doubt, ridiculed as a theoretical debate that will never ever happen. Tell that to Neil Armstrong and the rest of the developed nations with health care as a human right.
What should we do differently? TALK to working white males, ASK them what’s important to them and THINK of ways that we might want to alter our platform to accommodate this demographic and be a more INCLUSIVE party.
…you need a thicker skin. I was critiquing a candidacy, nothing personal at all.
worked on appealing to white males. Research has shown–and I’ve witnessed it myself–that many working class white folk will vote for Democrats who take on big money in politics and its effects on government. There is a significant segment of the white working class that will not vote Democratic. They tend to oppose programs for the poor; some are basically racist. These voters are somewhat in conflict with the Rising American Electorate, which is much more diverse.
The Democratic Strategist started a roundtable that has a lot of Democratic scholars and writers talking about working class white voters.
Outreach and organizing are huge investments. It takes money, people, and time. It’s easier if there are organizations that have already done some membership. One group specifically working on organizing the white working class is Working America, an AFL-CIO offshoot, that organizes people and activates them. From what I’ve read, they aren’t organized labor tools, but set choose their own issues and set their own agendas. They are supposedly doing the outreach you’re talking about.
I’m getting really tired of modifying “working class” with “white”. To me it feels like we are condoning or coddling their racial hangups by referring to them that way.
people of color. They are demographically different than white working class workers. It’s not their racial hangups that make them white, working class voters; it’s their experience and point of view. Do some of them have racial hangups? Certainly. Most classes do.
Working class minority votes are often motivated by issues that make them reliably Democratic (though not reliably voting, or permitted to vote). The question on this political blog concerned a different group that is the most challenging demographic blog for progressives. They need a different strategy, which johntmay has often said.
is there no outreach for this in the Massachusetts Democratic Party? I really do appreciate your reply. It’s given me lots to look at.
…because I’m not sure what to do that we aren’t already doing.
Why do we not have a Men’s Outreach Subcommittee?
…by harping on subcommittee titles. The outreach committees are generally for historically underrepresented groups. Honestly, I would raise my eyebrows a bit at specifically men’s outreach; it would almost sound like we’re going after the Promise Keepers.
other than belonging to the party. My guess is that they don’t have the resources. They may not know any better. They may also think it’s best to put their resources where they are more likely to bear fruit.
Christopher has a role in party leadership. He might be able to look into it. When I leave office as a selectman, I hope to do some organizing in my town, which is very working class. As a selectman, my style has been informed by my teaching. My ethic is simple: people should have all the information and reasoning necessary to make a decision, regardless of what I think they should do. I will argue with people who lie or rebut arguments, but people have a right to make the best decision they would make.
I plan to prepare some courses to teach useful civics that would improve their understanding of what happens. My town just voted an override of 7.7%. A lot of work by a lot of people went into it, but I had a lot of influence because people had the facts and the reasons to make what they thought was the best decision. I supplied those facts and reasons.
Organizing people is harder. Do you go door to door? That takes an army. And what do you talk about? What should the Mass Dems do for outreach? I plan to use the fact that people in the community know me to organize projects that show results and then somehow work in the organizing part. I don’t know if that happens in a speech or what.
We need more leaders like you.
I worked with a state wide network of young people whose 5 year campaign finally failed. Go ahead ask a person under 30 what are the three branches of our Government, and then ask them what’s in the 1st. Amendment? Betcha they forget the right to lobby. No peeking.
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…is sometime back I saw a poll asking if we should amend the Constitution to add the language that in fact constitutes the 1st Amendment. I don’t remember the percentages. Some said we should; some said we shouldn’t; but it was the smallest of the three groups that said hey wait a second – that’s already been done!
It failed by not focusing on the concepts behind the branches of government such as balance of power and representation. It might have laid the groundwork for me because of my interest.
Our governments are set up in a particular way to provide representation, but also to balance power. I can’t tell you how many people think our select board is in charge of everything in town. If they are angry at the planning board, they want us to do something. But we have no authority over the planning board, which is elected.
The town I work in (but don’t live in) just went from a select board/town meeting form of government to a town council/town manager form. The people I talked to didn’t know the benefit of either form. They just new that they had problems with the existing people. They couldn’t separate the form of government from the quality of people serving. The most recent board had ethics and OML violations, an allegation of bribery, and stupidity above and beyond the call of duty. A previous board had a board member (also my former student) convicted of attempted voter fraud with absentee ballots.
My feeling was that the Town could have used a lesson in representative democracy at the local level before voting.
“stupidity above and beyond the call of duty”:)
We have several committees that are titled X Outreach, but I don’t know how active they are. My wheelhouse tends to be more internal administration. We did have a goal earlier this year of 1965 new registered Dems of any background in honor of the 50th anniversary of the VRA. IIRC we exceeded that goal.
If angry white working class voters are so resistant to outreach, then one could ask whether it is worth the trouble of doing so. It’s not like we have 100% voter participation among any other demographic group. If other groups are receptive, why shouldn’t we be spending the effort with getting them involved rather than beating our head against the wall with people who don’t want to hear from us?
Ultimately, the only way to reach people who are totally fed up and feel their needs have not been addressed is to actually address their needs to some extent and THEN go back and try to talk to them. Outsiders like Trump and Sanders get consideration because they are outside (or appear to be outside) the system, but that trick only works once. Once an outsider wins office, they become part of the system.
The Episcopal Church wasted a decade attempting to “reach out” to angry straight congregants who didn’t like ordaining openly gay priests and bishops, and who didn’t like ordaining female priests and bishops (the latter was the true motivation for the bulk of the American resistance).
The entire effort was a waste of time. The “Anglican Communion” (or whatever they call themselves) left anyway. They were never receptive to change or compromise, and the effort to accommodate them was an exercise in utter futility — very much like Mr. Obama’s efforts to “reach out” to GOP officials who were explicitly intent on destroying his presidency from day one.
The primary outcome of the “lost decade” was to, in fact, simply reinforce the very prejudice and arguments that the institution correctly chose to leave behind. It was strikingly similar to the failed attempts of scientists to “debate” Creationists — the exchange benefits the Creationists far more than the scientists.
In my view, the obligation of the Democratic Party is to welcome all who choose to join us, while being clear and candid about our values and priorities.
Using a broad brush to paint them all as homophobic racists is, I find, often the reaction of Democrats when I bring up this dilemma. “Who needs them!” is the reaction.
This is an error that hurts our chances of winning elections. It makes it easy for a guy like Charlie Baker to win. Do I need to bring up Scott Brown?
We need to speak to issues that worry these guys and it’s not homophobia. It’s wages that have been flat for 40 years.
It’s lower life expectancy for many in this demographic. It’s working more hours. Yeah, equal pay for women” is a noble goal, but to the guy working 60 hours a week and unable to keep his head above water, well, he’s got problems of his own that are taking his attention.
The Democratic Party and its candidates HAVE been talking about flat or even declining wages. Both presidential and many downballot candidates have made addressing this a priority.
I fear you miss the point.
We Democrats have been talking about flat wages and a dark future for years. Yet here is the data YOU provided in your own thread-starter:
Some portion of those who exhibit the reaction you describe do so because of various biases and prejudices. Some other portion do so because they don’t know about our positions (apparently).
I’m not suggesting that ALL of those “mid income, working class male” people that you describe are “homophobic racists”. I am instead suggesting that we already do reach out to virtually every other aspect of their resistance.
Those who left the Episcopal Church because of its stances towards who it ordains did so because they rejected that stance. However you wish to characterize those who left, they DID leave and they left over THAT issue. The church did intellectual gymnastics over more than a decade to do all in its power to avoid the schism — and it failed.
You would apparently have the Democratic Party do something similar — I want to know what we’ll do differently from the Episcopal Church in dealing with a similar set of reactions.
I’ve been speaking out against wealth and income concentration for most of my life — here and publicly. We Democrats are ALREADY doing a great deal to address the concerns of the demographic you describe.
Some portion of that demographic you describe react as they do because they DO oppose our policies towards diversity and inclusion. Not all, but SOME. If that portion is vanishingly small, then you and I have no difference of opinion at all.
If it is NOT small, then I suggest we adopt a stance of “pastoral empathy” towards those who DO remain attached to their biases and prejudices — we acknowledge their pain, we share our own similar faults, we articulate our position, and we welcome them to join us when and if they are ready to accept our position even as they acknowledge their own (and our) flaws.
That’s as far as I’m willing to go.
I grew up right in the middle of a segment of this demographic. My Dad had five siblings, all male. In the early 60s, they were all reliably Dem voters because of labor issues. By the 80s, some were Reagan worshipers while others were still on the Dem side (my Dad was one of those to never go to the dark side 😉 ). It came down to two things: Racism and a sense of not having the opportunities to get ahead that they had in the 50s and 60s.
All but two are gone now, and I don’t think either of those uncles would be “reachable” anymore. However, I think people like some of my late uncles are – but not by some “outreach” effort. They need more than the usual rhetoric. They need to see results.
…and parties with big tents. The GOP base is frustrated with their elected officials too.
shut down action federally. When it comes to jobs, it really has to start with the federal government. The Republicans, however, refuse to budge.
As I mentioned above, the split I observed was well underway long before Mr. Gingrich first started taking hostages and way before our current crop of tea party types. The Dems have essentially lost an entire generation due to lack of focus on working class issues.
Between that and Dems being gunshy about the politics there hasn’t been much opportunity to return to the Great Society.
The sense of “not having the opportunities to get ahead that they had in the 50s and 60s” is a sad reality of modern life. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can change that. It is not because of blacks, women, gays, Mexicans, free trade agreements, or any of the other bugaboos offered.
It is because a single worker can produce orders of magnitude more steel today than he or she did in 1955. We have been multiplying productivity for generations. That means more product for the same hours of work. It simply is not possible to consume the flood of product that would result from hiring back the same number of factory workers. We wouldn’t want to live in the environment that results from the attempt. Even if we COULD hire them back, we couldn’t possibly pay them similar inflation-adjusted wages.
In my view, the premise that EITHER party can change that in any substantive way is fundamentally flawed.
What can and must happen is that we must find ways to claw back the wealth that is being concentrated at the very top of the pyramid and distribute it throughout the economy — we must find something other than hours/days/months expended as our basis for that distribution.
It doesn’t take many person-hours to figure out that a robot can be programmed to change the patterns of the shirts it produces. It doesn’t take many person-weeks to create a robot that is controlled by those programs. Once that’s done, the robot can accomplish “mass customization”, so that each shirt is made to order — it takes milliseconds to accomplish that.
The value created in today’s economy is NOT created by “labor” in the sense of people in a physical location performing some activity.
I don’t believe that either of today’s parties will even discuss, never mind implement, these kinds of changes.
that a significant segment of white working class voters are reachable. Stan Greenberg has been researching them as a voters for 40 years.
and I’ve never considered his analysis very convincing.
In short, his research comes down to: “on survey questions, members of the white working class support things like the minimum wage, overturning Citizens United, regulating Wall Street, getting government to work for regular people rather than corporations,” etc.
That’s all true, but we also know that people don’t vote for parties based upon a tallying up of a rank-ordered list of specific policy positions that they may agree with. The connection for many is more visceral, like “so-and-so hates political correctness and wants America to kick ass! He’s got my vote!!!”
Those are the people that Democrats will never win back. It includes many, though certainly not all, of the white working class. Democrats have long supported the positions supported by much of white working class, like raising the minimum wage, and it doesn’t matter one bit.
Democrats have the reputation of being weak on guns, foreign policy, war, and “traditional values.” To the extent that people care about those issues, they will outweigh the rank-ordered list of economic and “government reform” issues. Given that, we shouldn’t jettison commitment to one set of issues just to try and appeal to a shrinking portion of the American electorate.
The problems with discussions about demographics is that we confuse some with all. Dems are never going to get those anti-PC, minority-hating people. Greenberg knows that. He thinks Dems can win a significant portion of the white working class, not all of them.
His research is not limited to surveys, he has done focus groups and other sorts of more qualitative research. My conversations with the working class people among whom I live and with whom I’ve grown up back up Greenberg’s findings.
This weak on guns, foreign policy, war, etc., it’s all old hat. That weakness crap worked in the 1980s and 1990s, but it’s done.
That was then. The kids coming up are more liberal. Tolerance is their tradiational value.