If Joe Biden leaves a legacy, it will take a lot of hard work. Some presidents have done it. Others have tried and failed. E.J. Dionne writes:
Franklin Roosevelt did it. Ronald Reagan did it.
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, gifted politicians in their different ways, plausibly hoped they could create coalitions that would outlast them. The achievement eluded both.
A new report by Aliza Astrow points to what Biden will have to do:
The report is both a warning and a promise. As long as Democrats stay weak among non-college-educated voters, she argues, they will have trouble holding, let alone strengthening, their control over the House and Senate. And they will continue to face agonizing fights to win the electoral college, even with large leads in the national popular vote. But modest shifts toward the Democrats among voters without a college degree would change the game.
The two models she cites of Democrats who succeeded in winning non-college-educated voters in states Trump carried represent different wings of the party: moderate Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina and progressive Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Both, she said, campaigned on jobs for blue-collar workers, job training and infrastructure. Those who heard Biden’s speech last week will notice something familiar.
Moreover, Astrow is careful to discuss Black and Latino non-college-educated voters, not just Whites. While Democrats carried non-White voters without a college degree by large margins in the past four presidential elections, the party’s share among non-college-educated minority voters has slipped since 2008. (Their performance among non-college-educated Whites declined even more.)
Biden recouped some of the party’s 2016 losses with these groups — enough to win the key states that gave him his electoral college victory — but did not hit Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 levels. As Astrow reports, Obama won 53 percent of the non-college-educated vote in 2008 and 51 percent in 2012. Hillary Clinton took 44 percent in 2016, and Biden bumped the Democrats’ share back up to 48 percent in 2020.
Biden's task is to unite voters who see others as their foes. He's hoping that he can find economic common ground between them:
But Biden’s intuition is that economic questions unite less economically privileged voters across racial lines — and that many non-college-educated voters think the Democrats have stopped talking to them altogether. By addressing their concerns explicitly and sympathetically, as he did last week, Biden hopes first to close this communications gap and then deliver tangible benefits.
Tom Wicker thought that was the way of the future in the 1960's. Back then, unfortunately, race trumped economics. Donald Trump proved that -- at least for four years -- it still did.
Perhaps things have changed.
Image: The Kinder Institute For Urban Research
2 comments:
Justin taught us what befalls those who get their hopes up. Biden is certainly on the right path but his razor-thin control of the House and Senate is in peril with a couple of congress folks already planning to resign. That said, the American public seems to have taken to Biden and that could dampen Republican chances of recovering control.
Biden's goals remain at the mercy of Congress. Trudeau's failings, during his majority term, such as social licence, electoral reform, First Nations reconciliation were primarily the product of his own hesitancy and fecklessness.
Sometimes wisdom comes with age, Mound. Let's hope -- for the world's sake -- that Biden will be wiser than Trudeau.
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