Whither the White Voter?

The 2016 US presidential election prompted many people to wonder if working-class white voters had finally shifted their allegiance to the Republican Party. For decades, the Democratic Party had been the party of the little man, right? But has that really changed?

Not entirely. What's really been happening is that the white working class has become fickle, open to persuasion by the political party that can best articulate the right combination of economic and noneconomic concerns. So says a 2019 article in the social science journal Politics & Society by two political scientists, Herbert P. Kitschelt of Duke University and Philipp Rehm of The Ohio State University.

Professors Kitschelt and Rehm were able to reach those findings by grouping voters by both education and income, rather than just one or the other, as other studies tend to do. They then compared the groups of voters with respect to views about welfare programs and views about civic and cultural liberties, race, and immigration. 

What they find is that there has been a profound switch. The two groups that used to be swing voters are now tried and true Democrats or Republicans: high-education/low-income voters are today loyal to the former, and low-education/high-income voters now support the GOP. By the same token, the old reliable constituencies are now swing voters: low-education/low-income voters who used to reliably vote Democrat, and high-education/high-income voters who used to reliably vote Republican, are both up for grabs.

The lesson for those seeking office is that voters cannot be treated as simple actors who care only about a small number of issues. As the authors write, "Politicians in a knowledge society will not enjoy the luxury of reducing the political-issue space to one dimension." 

The article by Professors Kitschelt and Rehm is titled "Secular Partisan Realignment in the United States: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of White Partisan Support since the New Deal Era" and appears in the September 2019 issue of Politics & Society.