The Democrats' biggest problem

 As I've been noting in recent days, the electorate in this past mid-term was significantly older, whiter, and more Republican than in 2008 or even the previous mid-term.  The GOP was energized to vote and the Democrats weren't.

That's one problem, but an even bigger one for the Democrats is this note in E.J. Dionne's column today which cited the research of Ray Texeira and John Halpin: 

The most significant shift against the Democrats occurred among the white working class. Congressional Democrats lost this group by 10 points in both 2006 and 2008. Yet this deficit ballooned to 29 points in 2010--a deficit even larger than Democrats experienced in 1994 (22 points). That created an awfully big hole for Democrats to crawl out of, especially given relatively depressed turnout among Democratic-leaning constituencies.

Dana Milbank may have read the same study.  He notes that it was to precisely these voters that Hillary Clinton had considerable appeal:

Back then, Clinton's populist appeal to low-income white voters, union members and workers of the Rust Belt was not enough to overcome Obama's energized youth vote. But Clinton's working-class whites were the very ones who switched to the Republicans on Tuesday.

Some people seem not to care about this very much.  In 2008, David Axelrod said that the working class had been voting Republican anyway--implying, so what? 

Can you imagine Roosevelt or Truman or Kennedy having such an attitude?

Comments

[Hypatia]

Gee, Dana Milbank wrote something I mostly agree with. Not sure how I feel about that.

Yes. Hillary appealed to older white people, as she accurately if tactlessly observed once, and it’s precisely that demographic that ALWAYS goes to the polls. Obama appealed to younger people (sorry, an 18 year old is not a “youth”) and African-Americans, two notoriously unreliable groups of voters. They came out for Obama, but the personality cult aspect of his popularity virtually guaranteed that we wouldn’t see a lot of those voters again until 2012 (if then).

I’m not knocking them. It takes years to develop the habit of voting, and I don’t blame blacks for looking at your average candidates and thinking, There’s not much in this for me. But it is something for everyone else to consider. Older voters’ mistrust of Obama has hurt him, during the health care debates, for example. And they vote. Consistently.