The Politics of Race

A Huffington Post forum raises some interesting points about white men and their role in American politics.

It seems to be politically incorrect to discuss white men and their issues, even though we welcome discussions about the needs of women and blacks and Hispanics, and they are, to be sure, important voting blocs that each candidate must consider. Few people seem to mention white men, yet they represent a clearly significant bloc of the electorate.

Whites still make up about 80% of the population, as Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation observes, and that makes white men close to half of the voting population. Based on that alone, Vanden Heuvel and I agree that a candidate ignores this group at his/her peril.

I'm a member of that group. And I've seen more and more white men turn from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in the last three or four decades, particularly here in my native South. White men, who once formed the backbone of a coalition of voters who elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, haven't given a majority of their votes to a Democrat since Jimmy Carter's successful bid for the White House in 1976. Four years later, they began to move in the direction of Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, and there most of them have remained.

There are many reasons, and winning them back will have to be an incremental achievement. As forum member David Paul Kuhn of The Politico says, Democrats need to "be pragmatic instead of dogmatic." Even a small gain can mean dramatic results. Kuhn points out that John Kerry could have won the 2004 election if he had merely narrowed his deficit among white men.

Thomas Schaller, from the political science department at the University of Maryland, doesn't think white men are a significant group. Maybe it seems that way in Maryland, where the governor, both senators and six of the eight House members are Democrats (and two members of the House delegation are black). Not to mention the fact that 55% of the registered voters in Maryland are Democrats and nearly 28% of its population is black.

But I'd like to hear how he explains the shift here in the South. When I was growing up, Democrats held most Senate and House seats from Southern states, and most governors were Democrats -- in fact, winning a Democratic primary was the equivalent of being elected in most races.

But, following the quixotic campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the emergence of the "silent majority" to which Richard Nixon appealed in 1968 and the "states' rights" speech Ronald Reagan gave in Mississippi in 1980, white men gravitated to the Republicans and have been responsible for the GOP's victories in seven of the last 10 presidential elections.

And Republicans have captured most of the Senate and House seats in the South as well.

Michael Lux, CEO of Progressive Strategies, makes a worthwhile point when he says that Democrats should be asking themselves two questions about white men: "(1) [A]re there some sub-groups within that demographic that are base-voting Dems that need to be identified and turned out to vote?; and (2) are there swing voters to be found within that demographic?" Lux contends the answer to both questions is yes.

It's an important discussion, and it holds the key to success next year. Unless the Democrats can stop the bleeding, they will never regain even a sliver of the support they've lost.