Good morning. We're covering the country's working-class majority — as well as election interference, North Korean troops and liberal Catholics.
Dayton versus YaleIf you want to understand this year's election, a book published in 1970 turns out to be surprisingly useful. Both liberal and conservative analysts have recently cited its ideas, and the Harris and Trump campaigns have embraced its arguments in different ways. The book's title is "The Real Majority," and it appeared during Richard Nixon's first term. Its authors were two Democrats hoping to save their party from future defeats: Richard Scammon, who had run the Census Bureau under John F. Kennedy, and Ben Wattenberg, who'd been a speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson.
Scammon and Wattenberg believed that their fellow Democrats misunderstood the country's electorate. The energy of the 1960s had led the party to imagine that the typical voter was young and highly educated. As a hypothetical example, the book described a 24-year-old political science instructor at Yale University. In reality, the authors wrote, the typical voter resembled a 47-year-old woman living in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio, who didn't have a college degree and whose husband worked as a machinist. This Dayton voter wasn't poor, but she struggled with rising inflation. She worried about crime, student protests and drug use, polls showed. She felt ambivalent about the Vietnam War. She was one of the "plain people," as Scammon and Wattenberg put it, who had long voted Democratic but was uncomfortable with the party's leftward shift — toward the views of that 24-year-old Yale instructor. Unless Democrats changed course, the authors wrote, "we may well see Republican presidents in the White House for a generation." The book was prophetic: Republicans won four of the next five presidential elections, including landslides by Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The new 1960sThe book also foreshadowed the political dynamics in 2024, when the cost of living is a major issue, foreign wars rage and the Democratic Party is trying to leave behind a period of liberal foment. When "The Real Majority" appeared, that period was the 1960s. Today, it is the late 2010s and early 2020s, when many Democrats pushed unpopular ideas, such as less border security, less policing, long Covid lockdowns, the end of private health insurance and the decriminalization of hard drugs. All those ideas are more popular on college campuses than in places like Dayton. And the country more closely resembles Dayton; roughly 60 percent of voters do not have a four-year college degree.
"There is a natural working-class majority in American politics and those who hope to lead the country ignore it at their peril," Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, wrote in his recent book, "Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the G.O.P." Ruffini cited the Dayton-Yale framework. Timothy Shenk, a progressive historian at George Washington University, also used the framework in his new book "Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics." (You may be interested in Shenk's recent Times Opinion essay about the most effective ways to combat Trumpism, as well as Ruffini's list of the 21 communities that will help decide next week's election, with maps.) Class over ageThe working-class majority holds a complex set of views. It tends to be deeply dissatisfied with the country's direction and to want sweeping change. It leans left on economic policies, like Medicare and Social Security, while worrying about government overreach. It leans isolationist on foreign policy. It tends to be wary of trade and immigration and to feel positively about the military and the police. Donald Trump managed to take over the Republican Party in 2016, and then win the presidency, with help from his gut feel for working-class politics (despite his own wealth). He defied Republican orthodoxy by criticizing trade and immigration while promising not to cut Medicare and Social Security. If he wins again this year, it will be partly by appealing to people whom Democrats wrongly imagined as loyal progressives — including Black, Latino, Asian American and younger voters. Social class, as Scammon and Wattenberg suggested, can be an even better predictor of a person's vote than race or age. Much of Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign is also consistent with their arguments. After adopting fiercely liberal positions four years ago, she has reversed course and changed her positions on immigration, fracking and more. Her ads describe her as "a border state prosecutor." She emphasizes patriotism and economic populism. Still, it's a tricky pivot: More Americans describe Harris as "too liberal" (44 percent) than describe Trump as "too conservative" (32 percent), according to a New York Times/Siena College poll last month. I know that many people find that comparison hard to fathom. "The Real Majority" helps make sense of it. For more: On today's episode of "The Daily," Michael Barbaro and I explain why immigration has become such a sore spot for working-class voters. And in this short Times video, I break down the campaign advertisements of several Democratic Senate candidates who are running strong races in purple and red states — including Ohio.
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Commonweal magazine was founded in 1924 as a sort of Catholic version of the The New Republic, a journal for middle-class, liberal-minded members of the faith. It attracted an illustrious roster of writers, including Dorothy Day, W.H. Auden and John Updike. But a century later, with Mass attendance dwindling and the church's conservative voices growing louder, Commonweal is wrestling with its place. More on culture
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2024/10/29
The Morning: The book that explains the 2024 campaign
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