Who Turned My Blue State Red?

[yallerdawg]

We have got to vote!!!

Why poor areas vote for politicians who want to slash the safety net.
Source: ProPublica, by Alec MacGillis


It is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.

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It’s enough to give Democrats the willies as they contemplate a map where the red keeps seeping outward, confining them to ever narrower redoubts of blue. The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own interests.

But this reaction misses the complexity of the political dynamic that’s taken hold in these parts of the country. It misdiagnoses the Democratic Party’s growing conundrum with working-class white voters. And it also keeps us from fully grasping what’s going on in communities where conditions have deteriorated to the point where researchers have detected alarming trends in their mortality rates.

In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.

The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.

The complete story, and much more at: http://www.propublica.org/article/who-turned-my-blue-state-red

[Freddie]

1. Excellent article

Also on Huffpo.
Great insight into the politics of resentment, combined with the fact that the folks who need the safety net tend to not vote. And since these people tend to move often or not drive, repug voter ID laws are designed to make sure they can't vote.
I'm in a fairly blue state (PA) yet I hear this crap all the time--"I work hard and here's people sitting on their cans getting food stamps"--I just don't feel like arguing with them that the majority of food stamp recipients are WORKING at jobs that don't pay well enough to afford food and rent.

[Kyblue1]

2. The Rethug propaganda machine has convinced the masses that Dems are immoral, socialists

Traditional Dems have been indoctrinated by the flood of money spent by the repub's out of state masters and their super pacs to vote based on wedge issues, i.e., gay marriage, guns, and race. The influence of religion and money in politics is destroying our democracy. It is disturbing how many candidates hasten to mention that they are Christian in their ads, as if nothing more need be said. A party that openly opposes programs for the "have nots" while allowing the top of the economic pyramid to accumulate more and more wealth could not be representative of the man who gave the sermon on the mount. Yet being a repub and claiming to be Christian is all that some voters need to hear. And whether you agree with Pres Obama or not, there is no doubt in my mind that many middle and lower class voters will blame the black president for everything that is wrong in this country.

[ranger2]

3. The South(ern Democrats) will rise again

What drives me crazy is how today's Democratic Party ignores the South, writing it off as dumb rednecks. The Democratic Party can win over not just southern minorities and youth, but even southern whites. Let's not forget that the South voted for FDR, Truman, Carter, Clinton, and even part of it voted for Obama.

The idea that the South simply shifted to the GOP after 1964 ignores the following decades of Democratic rule in the South. It wasn't until 1995 that most Southern congressmen were Republicans (by a slim majority) and it wasn't until 2003 that most Southern governors were Republican. It wasn't until 2003 that Georgia had its first Republican Governor since Reconstruction. And it wasn't until 2010's shellacking that Democrats lost most southern state legislatures.

The reason why even after 1964 so many Southerners kept voting Democratic was because the Democratic Party was more diverse ideologically, and because it never kowtowed to Wall Street and big business the way the GOP has. Furthermore, the Democratic Party has always taken a more proactive approach to helping those in need. George Wallace and Orval Faubus were monsters, but they were fiscal liberals, modernizing Georgia's healthcare system and Arkansas' education system respectively. Take out social issues, they would easily fit in among progressives today.

Republicans have done a horrible job serving their constituents. They campaign on three bullshit issues: God, gays, and guns. They don't lift a finger for economic revival. But for many people in the South, you have a party that ignores you (Democrats) and a party that only pays attention to you for bullshit issues (Republicans) and many choose the GOP for that reason. Democrats need to retake the South by focusing less on identity politics, getting out of the urban, northern bubbles, and focusing on taking a proactive approach to serving the people. That's the Democratic Party principles that kept the South Democratic for years to come.