Romney, Obama fight to capture blue-collar support
With all the talk lately in the U.S. about Mitt Romney’s problems with American women — the only woman he knows, apparently, is the one he married — it’s easy to forget President Barack Obama is facing his own gender gap heading toward the November election.
Among white men, particularly blue-collar white men, Obama is more unpopular than ever.
The depth of displeasure with the Democratic president was evident in a Washington POST/ABC News poll this month that showed Obama trailing Mitt Romney by 29 points — 61 per cent to 32 per cent — among white males without a college degree.
Think about what that means for a moment.
Obama is down 29 points to a Republican candidate who knows more NASCAR team owners than NASCAR fans, who leans on Jeff Foxworthy and Ted Nugent for white guy street cred, and who has never had to scrape the dirt from under his fingernails after a long day at work.
What’s more, Romney consistently lost the bluecollar vote during the GOP primaries to grandson-of-a-coal-miner candidate Rick Santorum in Rust Belt states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
For Obama, this should be cause for worry.
As a group, the workingclass white male is not nearly the most powerful voting bloc in the U.S. Suburban whites, women and Hispanics all carry more clout in determining the next president than Joe from Scranton, or Bob from Toledo.
But in a close election — and there’s every potential the 2012 result could be a squeaker along the lines of 2000 and 2004 — a lopsided loss to Romney among noncollege white men might be enough to tip the balance in the traditional battlegrounds of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Lose those states, and Obama likely loses the presidency.
Can Obama do anything to close this so-called ‘Bubba gap?’ It’s a tall order, given that the first impression he made without blue-collar whites wasn’t precisely the best.
During the 2008 campaign, Obama infamously told a well-heeled crowd in San Francisco that workingclass folks “cling to guns and religion” during tough economic times. It killed him in the Pennsylvania primary, which he lost to Hillary Clinton. The perception of Obama as an Ivy League elitist was cemented when he bemoaned the rising price of arugula during a visit to an Iowa farm.
But all may not be lost. As Romney rises with working class white men, Obama seems to be doubling down on class warfare. He drew a not-so-subtle contrast with Romney during a stop this week in Ohio, reminding voters: “I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”
The president’s recent campaign to impose a minimum 30 per cent tax on Americans earning $1 million a year is aimed straight at lowermiddle-class white voters, who feel overwhelmed by rising gas prices, declining home values and live in daily fear of losing their jobs, if they have one to begin with.
“I think what the president has to do is to convince workingclass men and women that he has made the recession better,” says Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.
In visits to Michigan and Ohio, Obama emphasizes the practical success of the 2009 auto industry bailout. He also stresses efforts he’s made to boost assistance for college tuition and extend unemployment benefits.
While blue-collar white men are often culturally conservative and identify with the Tea Party movement — with its limited government ethos — polling also shows they are more amenable in tough times to government assistance and entitlements.
According to Madonna, these voters are less concerned about debts and deficits and more concerned about “kitchen table issues” such as retirement and job security.
“In recessions over the past, they typically come back to Democrats because of the need they often have in their families,” Madonna says. “But voters want a sense that what you did worked. They want to feel optimistic.”
Romney is working hard to help voters remember the national sense of economic pessimism during the first three years of the Obama administration.
Last week, he toured an Ohio factory that closed during the Bush administration and failed to reopen under Obama. His point was simple. “Had the president’s policies worked it would be open again,” Romney said in the Washington Post.
The former Massachusetts governor’s grasp on the blue-collar vote, however, is not especially strong. His decision to oppose the General Motors and Chrysler bailouts may come back to haunt him in Ohio, where auto industry jobs are coming back.
“I refer to him as ‘the dif- fident aristocrat.’ He is kind of aloof from people,” Madonna says. “We’ve elected a lot of rich guys who seem to empathize with the people. I don’t think it’s just all life experience. I think it’s also part his temperament and part his personality.”