Class Dismissed: Obama faring better with white working class than Gore or Kerry

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT op-ed: Class Dismissed
By MARK MELLMAN
Published: May 29, 2008

Washington

DOES Barack Obama have a problem with the white working class? Despite the ubiquity of the term during this presidential campaign, it’s hard to say what, exactly, “working class” means. If you define class by education, which is polled more consistently than occupation or income, Mr. Obama certainly seems to have trouble with these crucial swing voters. In almost every Democratic primary, he has lost white voters who didn’t graduate from college to Hillary Clinton. But that doesn’t mean those voters will snub him in the fall.

First, there is no relationship between how candidates perform among any particular group of voters in primaries and how they do with that segment in the general election. In 1992, Bill Clinton lost college-educated voters to Paul Tsongas in the early competitive primaries, but he went on to win that group in November by the largest margin any Democrat ever had....

Second, Democrats running for president have been losing white, non-college-educated voters since before Mr. Obama was elected to the Illinois legislature. Al Gore and Mr. Kerry each failed to win a majority of this bloc in the general election. With these voters, the size of the losing margin is what matters.

Mr. Gore lost them by 17 percentage points while winning the national popular vote. Mr. Kerry lost them by 23 points and the country by fewer than two and a half points. The last Democrat to win white, non-college voters was Bill Clinton, who carried them by a single point in the three-way races in 1992 and 1996. By comparison, Mr. Obama is only two percentage points behind John McCain among these voters in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Another recent survey shows him down seven points.

In other words, Mr. Obama is faring better today with the white working class than did either Mr. Gore or Mr. Kerry....

(Mark Mellman is a Democratic pollster whose clients include the majority leaders of the House and Senate. He polled for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/opinion/29mellman.html

[The Magistrate]

1. This Is An Excellent Article, Ma'am

And right on the money as a piece of analysis.

[stray cat]

2. Nice to see such a logical post - thanks

[amandabeech]

3. Very nice article. It would be better if Gore or Kerry had resided in the White House.

Obama will have to find support elsewhere, and hope that the autumn barrage of exceptionally nasty Pubbie ads will not get the attention of those voters who are now busy going about their lives.

Don't get me wrong: I'll vote for Obama.

But I think that the race will be very close once again.

A percentage point here or there might make the difference at it, and fraud, made in 2000 and 2004.