The white working class's movement away from the Democratic party isn't a function of Barack Obama's presidency. Recently we looked at exit polling gauging support for each party's House candidate every two years since 1980. Since the value of incomes fluctuates over time ($30,000 now isn't what it was in 1980), it uses responses from non-college graduates and college graduates as a way of approximating class membership. Consistently since 2004, non-college graduate whites have preferred Republicans by a wider margin than have college-educated whites.
The National Journal wonders whether Hillary Clinton might reclaim support from that group when she runs in 2016 (which she is going to do). It's a headline-as-question that readers love so much (see above), but the article leaves it unanswered. Or, rather, it makes clear that one is intended to apply Betteridge's Law of Headlines: That a headline ending in a question mark should be answered, "no."
It's worth exploring the question a little more. First, it seems pretty likely that Clinton will do better with working-class whites than Obama did. In July, CNN ran a poll that pit both Clinton and Obama against Mitt Romney -- allowing us to pretty directly compare the two candidates. The graph below shows how each demographic group did versus the overall split in the poll. So, Obama lost to Romney in CNN's match-up by nine points, but we're comparing how badly Obama lost among whites (by 29 points) to that -9 margin -- meaning he did 20 points worse with whites than the overall margin.
You can see that Clinton does slightly less badly among whites, and substantially better among those making under $50,000 or who have no college degree. (But a bit worse among those making over $50,000.)
But the question isn't "will Hillary do better" -- it's "can she win working-class whites?"
To better answer that, we can look at data from a September McClatchy/Marist poll. The graph below pits Clinton against three possible Republicans: Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.), Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and former Gov. Jeb Bush (Fla.). Clinton beats them all -- but loses among whites in each case.
Note, though, that Clinton wins among those earning under $50,000 a year -- as she does among every other group. What's missing in this data is a split by race and income.
Happily, the good people at Quinnipiac University shared detailed breakdowns of their November polling with The Post, including how Clinton did in head-to-head contests against their battery of Republican contenders. The margins of error are fairly high here, since we're talking about smaller and smaller slices of respondents. (In each subset, the MOE is over 5 percent.) But it's the best data we have. (Note that Quinnipiac's overall splits showed closer races between Clinton and the Republicans; it had her losing to Romney, for example.)
Here's the split by white voter economic group -- and then how each economic group compares to the split among all white voters.
Clinton is leading in Quinnipiac's polling among white voters who earn under $30,000 a year only when she's running against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) -- and then only barely. (She also leads among the wealthiest white voters when running against Cruz.) In general, though, she tends to fare better among lower-income whites compared to white voters overall.
Original post:
The Fix: Can Hillary Clinton win white working-class voters? Probably not.