“Casey Democrats”
Today’s Washington Post has a column by Mark Stricherz on “Casey Democrats,” thus described:
Like [former Pennsylvania Governor] Casey, these voters — blue-collar and religious, often Catholic — are liberal on economic issues but conservative on cultural ones. Where they once looked to union leaders and their fellow union members for political guidance, they now look to their religious leaders and fellow churchgoers. And in the last decade, to the dismay of Democratic strategists, they’ve been voting for Republican presidential candidates. According to Democratic pollster and strategist Stan Greenberg, they made up the 10 percent of white Catholics who identify with the Democrats but didn’t vote for Sen. John F. Kerry for president in 2004. And if Sen. Barack Obama can’t do better with the Casey Democrats, his presidential bid may fare no better than Kerry’s.
Interesting piece, but one of the curveballs–or at least a pitch I’ve never been able to hit–is the fact that these “Casey Democrats” are a lot like African-American Democrats. They are economic liberals and cultural conservatives–churchgoing, against gay marriage, don’t like abortion–and yet black voters go overwhelmingly for Dems. So what explains the difference?
Much of the difference lies in the factor you just identified: race. Starting in the mid-1960s (well before Roe v. Wade) at least through the early 1990s, perhaps the biggest factor driving white Catholics away from the Dems and toward the GOP, at least in national elections, had nothing to do with their being Catholic and everything do to with their being white. It was the same racial backlash—including issues tied to race like crime, welfare, and taxes—that the GOP successfully used to appeal to white voters, Catholic and non-Catholic, nationwide.
David: African-Americans haven’t always been Democrats; when Republicans were the party of Abraham Lincoln, many were Republicans–though they couldn’t vote in some states. I’ve always thought Nixon playing the race card succeeded in getting some white, working-class Catholic Democrats into the Republican party, while driving African-Americans out.
Stricherz’s piece is interesting, though I wish he’d interviewed and quoted someone under 80. What are the under-80s thinking in Western Pa.?
Perhaps blacks do not become Republicans for the same reason they rarely become Catholics. They were not really accepted by either. Another factor that may elude is that many working class democrats side with Republicans now because they associate that with power and making it rather than need.
Of course, George Bush is giving everyone pause. We shall see if the democrats can take advantage. I am not sure about the race factor, but Obama is certainly a better campaigner and more politically astute than Gore or Kerry who lost races they should have won.
So far, it also seems that Obama has a better campaign staff than Gore or Kerry did. But the underlying question: Will Obama have to do and say some very specific things to address older, white, working-class people in WVa,KY, Etc. and allay their fears? And if so, what would he have to say and do?
Thank you for the comments about my story.
… And I will take this opportunity to respond to a few of the comments:
David Gibson wonders why blacks don’t vote like Casey Democrats given their similar profiles. Here’s my explanation: the two groups have different political opponents. Blacks vote against the candidate supported by white Southerners; many white Catholics vote against the candidate of Planned Parenthood, Hollywood, and the gay rights lobby.
David Cochran offers an alternative explanation: race. It’s true that many white Catholics have been concerned about racial issues. But I think this thesis is overstated. It doe not explain why Catholics gave 59 percent of their votes to Humphrey in 1968, a year when the white South defected from the presidential wing of the Democratic Party; and gave 55 percent of their votes to Carter in 1976, the era of the forced busing controversies. My thesis, and one I develop in Why the Democrats are Blue, is that many white Catholics abandoned the presidential wing of the Democratic Party after the latter embraced the abortion-rights feminist and gay rights agenda. Except for Bill Clinton in 1996, white Catholics have never given a majority of their votes to a culturally liberal or secular liberal Democratic presidential nominee (McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry).
Margaret O’Brien Steinfels wishes that I had quoted younger voters in my story. That’s a fair criticism. I would only that I needed a person who illustrated historical voting trends.
I should make a larger point, too. My hope in writing Why the Democrats are Blue was that Catholic Democrats and independents would start a discussion about their relationship with the Democratic Party. I consider myself a Casey Democrat and have written for many liberal and Catholic publications, as well as conservative ones. Yet so far only conservative publications have given me a hearing, despite my best efforts. This has been frustrating and disappointing.
Mark Stricherz thank you; those are certainly food for thought. Given your interpretations, etc., what do you predict for November?
Thanks for asking. I like McCain’s chances. His personality is a big plus, as is his moderately conservative stand on cultural issues. Of course, Obama has a real shot at winning, for obvious reasons. But Obama has too many problems, in my humble opinion, with Catholic and white working-class voters.
MS,
Your book is on my reading list for this summer and I look forward to it. I do think that while the movement of Catholics away from the Democratic party is a complex phenomenon with lots of factors contributing, I don’t think the key role of race can be easily dismissed. Abortion, homosexuality, feminism, Vietnam, and other factors did and continue to be part of the story, but again and again race turns out to be an overriding factor in voting studies, especially before the Roe decision when much of this shift actually occurred but continuing for several decades afterward, at least into the 1990s. I’m sure you’ve seen work done by David Leege and his colleagues, most notably in The Politics of Cultural Differences, which digs deep into the data for the most in-depth look at these trends. Lots of factors matter, but race seems to emerge as the most significant variable in these shifts (as it does for voters nationwide in the decades following the civil rights revolution of the mid-1960s).
FWIW, according to studies I have seen, the voting patterns of white men, at least, for Democrats have remained relatively stable for nearly 50 years, except in the South. Almost all voting realignment from D to R can be explained by Southern shifts (unlikely to be correlated with Catholic voting patterns) — while Northern patterns remained relatively stable, until the last couple of election cycles, where NE and other northeastern and western states appear to be moving fairly solidly from R to D. Wikipedia has an outstanding entry on presidential elections that lets you look at voting patterns for each election since at least 1960. By looking at states with large Catholic populations you can see how the Catholic vote might have changed over time.