About the "Republican" White Working Class...

[Antonio the Sixth]

In light of the recurring "lulz dumb white trash voting against their interests lulz" line that seems to pop up every once in a while in the posts of a few of our resident enlightened liberal posters and the... discussions it has sparked, I figured out it would be nice to actually know what we're all talking about.

I happen to have the cumulative data-file of the American National Election Studies (the main scientific survey of US elections, with data going back to 1948) so I decided to take a look. I isolated respondents who identified as non-Hispanic White and who were in the bottom third of the income distribution for any given year, and looked at how they voted in each Presidential election since 1948.

Here's what it looks like:


Usual caveats about small sample sizes and possible bias apply, but still a few things seem obvious:
- Most Working-Class Whites Don't Vote. The numbers on the chart already speak for themselves, but reality is actually even worse, since turnout is significantly overreported in ANES data. Thus, the average 40% who claim to abstain are probably more like 55-60%.
- Working-Class Whites are about evenly split. No, they're not voting for Republicans in droves like most forumites probably assumed. Most of the time, they seem to just vote for the winner (only exceptions are 1960 and 2012). And quite a few times, Democrats did really well with them: Mondale came close to winning them, and Clinton won huge landslides both times.
- There hasn't been a clear trend to the right. Sure, Romney narrowly beat Obama in 2012, but that's hardly a major swing. Obama won them by a comfortable margin in 2008 and they were about evenly split during the Bush years, just like they were back in the 60s and 70s.


And finally, perhaps most crucially, Working-class Whites are the most left-wing Whites. Middle- and Upper-class Whites keep voting for Republicans by much, much wider margins. Here's a chart tracking the Democratic percentage of the two-party vote for Bottom-33% and Top-67% Whites:



If anything, the gap between rich and poor Whites has widened in recent years. Middle- and Upper-class Whites clearly love the GOP (the only times a Democrat won them were 1948, 1964, and 1992). By contrast, Working-class Whites are still perfectly fine voting for a Democrat - yes, even a black one.

This probably won't stop certain people from stereotyping, but it's still good to know.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Unfortunately, the ANES samples are far too small to allow a cross-study of the effect income and education. The subsamples for low-income Whites in some years are already of about 100 respondents, which makes estimates very dubious.

That said, a book I read some time ago made exactly that argument: controlling for both simultaneously, a higher income tends to make people more right-wing (because of economic "class" voting) while a higher education makes them more left-wing (because of cultural "values" voting). I think there's a good deal of truth in that account.

Good post, and you're also totally right for calling out our forum's "enlightened" latte liberals on comments in the "LOL dumb white trash votes R, gets Right To Work..." category -- though you yourself have said similar things on European working-class whites on identity-related issues ("need to get their votes drowned out by immigration", or something like that).

Uh, no? I never singled out the working class in those posts. Yes, European Whites (regardless of their socio-economic status) are awful xenophobes - I said it then and I'll say it again.

[Antonio the Sixth]

That's interesting, but why are you using such a narrow definition of working class?

(Though I agree the whites without college degrees as a proxy for white working class has its limitations).

When I think of the populist right constituency, I think it's largely made up of white men without degrees but they're usually not poor and they're often petty bourgeois rather than working class.

It's simultaneously too narrow and too broad.  A lot of the "poorest" white people, measured purely by income, are going to be college students (or similarly un/underemployed people) from comfortable backgrounds*. And the working class (measured by culture and/or financial stability) extends a fair amount beyond just the bottom third.  You could even argue that "working class" should cut off the bottom 20% or so, with those in full-on poverty being an entirely different class.

Obviously labels like "working class" is something we can argue endlessly about, and obviously income (like most variables used to measure concepts we're interested in in social sciences) is only an approximate measure of it.

Still, if you're interested in how the poorest White Americans vote (which, let's face it, is what a lot of people have in mind when they talk about this), that's the best you've got. And I will argue strongly against stretching the term "working class" too far up the income ladder.

[Antonio the Sixth]

That's interesting, but why are you using such a narrow definition of working class?

(Though I agree the whites without college degrees as a proxy for white working class has its limitations).

When I think of the populist right constituency, I think it's largely made up of white men without degrees but they're usually not poor and they're often petty bourgeois rather than working class.

It's simultaneously too narrow and too broad.  A lot of the "poorest" white people, measured purely by income, are going to be college students (or similarly un/underemployed people) from comfortable backgrounds*. And the working class (measured by culture and/or financial stability) extends a fair amount beyond just the bottom third.  You could even argue that "working class" should cut off the bottom 20% or so, with those in full-on poverty being an entirely different class.

Obviously labels like "working class" is something we can argue endlessly about, and obviously income (like most variables used to measure concepts we're interested in in social sciences) is only an approximate measure.

Still, if you're interested in how the poorest White Americans vote, that's the best you've got (which, let's face it, is what a lot of people have in mind when they talk about this). And I will argue strongly against stretching the term "working class" too far up the income ladder.

Many of the "poorest white Americans" are in fact privileged college students.  You think people have the campus of Georgetown in mind when they talk about the white working class?

"Many" of them, really? How many out of the maybe around 40-50 million people that would fall in this category would be College students? I doubt it's enough to skew the results too strongly.

Also, I'm not entirely sure so don't take my word for it, but I think the ANES measures family income, which should filter out college kids with wealthy parents.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I want to say I hope that the trained survey researchers at the ANES would try their best to correct such an obvious problem with their measure (and yeah, the skew could be significant indeed, although I should point out that since minorities are overrepresented in younger cohorts I would assume that the number of white in that category might not be quite as large as you say), but considering other serious problems with the ANES that hope might be unwarranted.

I could try to look for an "occupation" variable, and if there is one, filter out college students. On the other hand, the ANES codes individuals from the 33rd to the 67th percentile in a single income category, so there's not much I can do there.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I could try to look for an "occupation" variable, and if there is one, filter out college students. On the other hand, the ANES codes individuals from the 33rd to the 67th percentile in a single income category, so there's not much I can do there.

The vast majority of people in the middle third are working class, IMO.

So people who make more money than 2/3rds of their fellow Americans are "working-class"? Sounds really strange to me.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Here are the occupational categories that the Census Bureau recognizes:
           1 MANAGEMENT OCCUPATIONS
           2 BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL OPERATIONS OCCUPATIONS
           3 COMPUTER AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCE OCCUPATIONS
           4 ARCHITECTURE AND ENGINEERING OCCUPATIONS
           5 LIFE, PHYSICAL, AND SOCIAL SCIENCE OCCUPATIONS
           6 COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL SERVICE OCCUPATIONS
           7 LEGAL OCCUPATIONS
           8 EDUCATION, TRAINING, AND LIBRARY OCCUPATIONS
           9 ARTS, DESIGN, ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS, AND MEDIA OCCUPATIONS
          10 HEALTHCARE PRACTITIONER AND TECHNICAL OCCUPATIONS
          11 HEALTHCARE SUPPORT OCCUPATIONS
          12 PROTECTIVE SERVICE OCCUPATIONS
          13 FOOD PREPARATION AND SERVING RELATED OCCUPATIONS
          14 BUILDING AND GROUNDS CLEANING AND MAINTENANCE OCCUPATIONS
          15 PERSONAL CARE AND SERVICE OCCUPATIONS
          16 SALES AND RELATED OCCUPATIONS
          17 OFFICE AND ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT OCCUPATIONS
          18 FARMING, FISHING, AND FORESTRY OCCUPATIONS
          19 CONSTRUCTION AND EXTRACTION OCCUPATIONS
          20 INSTALLATION, MAINTENANCE, AND REPAIR OCCUPATIONS
          21 PRODUCTION OCCUPATIONS
          22 TRANSPORTATION AND MATERIAL MOVING OCCUPATIONS
          23 ARMED FORCES

Which ones would be "working class"? 19, 20, 21 and 22? I would assume a good chunk of people in those categories can reach a "middle class" standard of living. What about 13-17, many of whom are actually poorer?