Can Clinton afford to lose the working Joes?
White male wage earners throwing their support to whoever finds them jobs
SCRANTON, PA.— Like most of the bluecollar men of this struggling postindustrial city, John Drobnicki supported Hillary Clinton when she ran for president in 2008.
Things were different. For her and for him.
Back then, journalists wrote of Clinton’s “cultural affinity” with the white working class. Back then, Drobnicki made a decent living.
When Clinton was scrapping for Scranton votes against Barack Obama, Drobnicki was getting raise after raise on his way to making $19 (U.S.) an hour delivering auto parts. But the company outsourced his job during Obama’s first term. Now, at 65, he earns just $9 an hour. And he’s supporting Donald Trump.
“I still don’t have a hate for Hillary,” he said at the counter of Simon’s Restaurant. “I just don’t think she’s going to take care of the poor guy. I think of eight more years of this insanity.”
There are signs even in this “Clinton Country” stronghold, where her father grew up and her grandfather worked in a lace mill. White men, particularly working-class white men, have deserted Clinton in large numbers over the past eight years.
The question, unthinkable when Scranton was an early-20th-century coal and iron boom town, is whether they matter.
Some analysts believe there’s no longer a mathematical reason for Clinton to worry much about guys like Drobnicki. They argue the Democrats have entered a kind of postwhite-men era in which they can win the presidency by dominating with the “Obama coalition” — single women, young people, gays and lesbians, blacks and Hispanics and Asians.
Whites with less than a college education made up 62 per cent of voters in 1984. In 2008, when Obama felt compelled to suffer through an I’m-just-like-you game of bowling in central Pennsylvania, the white working class was down to 39 per cent of voters. It’ll probably be closer to 30 per cent in November.
White men “can’t be ignored,” said Justin Gest, a George Mason University professor and author of The New Minority, a forthcoming book on the white working class, but they’re “no longer the kingmakers and bellwethers they once were. Because their numbers continue to shrink.” Obama drubbed Mitt Romney in 2012 with the support of just 35 per cent of white men. Clinton has won key states this year, like Ohio and New York, while losing white men to Bernie Sanders by 15 points or more, according to exit polls.
Still, she is doing badly enough with them and Trump decently enough to concern some Democratic and labour leaders.
The unprecedented dreadfulness of Trump’s favourability numbers have obscured the fact that Clinton’s own numbers are exceptionally poor by any non-Trump standard: 39 per cent of Americans see her favourably, 56 per cent unfavourably. White men are a big part of her problem. In an NBC poll this week, a whopping 72 per cent of them viewed her negatively.
Scranton is a northeastern Pennsylvania city of 75,000 where Clinton got three votes to every one for Obama. She retains a loyal local support base, and she’ll almost certainly carry the area over Sanders in the primary on Tuesday. Yet even some of her supporters say something has changed.
“People who went with Hillary last time, I’m seeing a lot of Bernie signs in their yards. And it’s bumming me out,” said JoAnn Szymanski, who works at Simon’s with her husband, founder Simon Lipchus.
Wages in Scranton haven’t recovered from the Great Recession. Clinton is now running as the defender of a president the white working class has never liked. Controversies over her hidden emails and lucrative speeches have taken their toll. But the big difference is the presence of Sanders and Trump, white men targeting the working class with emotional populist appeals.
Turns out “cultural affinity” is relative. “In politics, you are not evaluated in the abstract. You are evaluated in the context of your opposition. And, in 2008, her opposition was a young black outsider who discomforted many white working-class voters,” Gest said.
Drobnicki, a lifelong Democrat, thinks Trump is a “little bit of a lunatic,” but at least he’ll fight to bring back some factory jobs.
Another Trump supporter, retired truck driver Art Peters, said he voted twice for Obama. Clinton is a “liar,” he said, and part of a political class enriching itself as the average Joe suffers.
“All the guys I know are going with Trump because he speaks out of turn, but he’s no politician either,” said Peters, 77. “I bet you I know 25 people who changed. Me, my wife, my kids, my family, we were all Democrats. We all changed.”
Andrew Levison, author of The White Working Class Today, expressed skepticism about whether Trump is actually making deep inroads. His analysis found that Trump has won no more than 30 per cent of the overall white working-class vote in any Rust Belt state.
Unsurprising, a quarter to a third of the white working class, Levison said, is made up of “Archie Bunker types” who hold negative views of immigrants and other races. Trump, he said, has not proven he can appeal to the rest.
“Essentially, Trump isn’t bringing in anything new,” Levison said. “What would be startling to me would be if he was getting 40 per cent, 50 per cent. “You’d say, ‘Oh my God, no Archie Bunker type has ever done that.’ But no.”
Bill Clinton drew about 400 people to a speech at Scranton High in early April. Sam Spadine, a quarry owner and former farmer, said Bill had persuaded him to abandon Trump and support Hillary once more. But Spadine warned of Trump’s appeal to the working people who can no longer find work. “We have nothing now,” he said. “All the small-time people, there’s like hopelessness.”