Plan B Forum

Working-class whites are flocking to Republicans ahead of next month's congressional elections, a new poll shows, turning a group long wary of Democrats into an even bigger impediment to the party's drive to keep control of Congress.

An Associated Press-GfK Poll shows whites without four-year college degrees preferring Republican candidates by twice the margin of the last two elections, when Democrats made significant gains in the House and Senate. The poll, conducted last month, found this group favouring Republican hopefuls 58 per cent to 36 per cent - a whopping 22 percentage-point gap.

In 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency, they favoured Republican congressional candidates by 11 percentage points, according to exit polls of voters. When Democrats won the House and Senate in 2006, the Republican edge was nine percentage points.
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Republicans are expected to score big gains in the November 2 congressional elections, possibly capturing control of the House of Representatives and, less likely, the Senate from Obama's Democrats.

Governing parties typically lose seats in the so-called midterm elections, which take place in the middle of a president's four-year term. But Democratic losses are likely to be particularly severe because of the weak economy, high unemployment and country's general anti-Washington mood. Also, Republican voters may turn out in higher numbers, energised by the ultraconservative tea party movement that opposes what its followers see as increasingly intrusive federal government.

Compared to better-educated whites, working-class whites tend to be older and more conservative - groups that traditionally lean Republican and are uneasy with the young president's activist governing. Their wariness is reinforced by a prolonged economic funk that has disproportionately hurt the working class and shown scant signs of improvement under Obama and Congress' majority Democrats.

Though accustomed to trailing among working-class whites, Democrats can hardly afford further erosion from a group that accounts for about four in 10 voters nationally. Their Republican preference is in contrast to whites with college degrees, who the AP-GfK Poll shows are split evenly between the two parties' candidates, and to minorities, who decisively back Democrats.

Many of these working-class voters were dubbed Reagan Democrats in the 1980s, when some in the North and Midwest who had previously preferred Democrats began supporting Ronald Reagan and other conservative Republicans. Many never warmed to Obama during the 2008 presidential race, when he said some bitter small-town residents cling to guns and religion for solace. They preferred Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, by two to one and in the general election backed Republican nominee John McCain by 18 percentage points.

In the AP-GfK Poll, working-class whites were likelier than white college graduates to say their families are suffering financially and to have a relative who has recently lost a job. They are less optimistic about the country's economy and their own situations, gloomier about the nation's overall direction and more critical of how Democrats are handling the economy.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/workingclas ... 168ap.html

Bageant mixes a reporter's keen analysis, a storyteller's color, and a native son's love of his roots in this absorbing dissection of America's working poor. Returning to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, after 30 years of life among the elite journalistic class, Bageant sought to answer the question of why the working poor vote for Republicans in apparent opposition to their own interests.

On a broader level, he examines issues of economic class distinctions as he drills below the middle-class claims of his hometown. The reality is that two of five residents do not have high-school diplomas and virtually everyone over 50 has serious health problems in a town—and nation—with poor and failing schools and health systems.

Still clinging to illusions of personal responsibility and the vain hope of someday achieving wealth, Winchester's residents fall deeper into debt, farther behind in ambitions beyond working in the local factory—if they're lucky—and, along with their children, subject to the de facto draft of economic conscription. Through the lives of his friends and family, Bageant explores the importance of hunting, religion, and redneck pride in what he describes as the "American hologram."

A wise, tender, and acerbic look at life among America's working poor.

dales wrote:The mythos of "Rgged Individualism" runs deep in the America collective psyche, Gob.

What was "out west"?

Freedom!

Independence!

Land!

No organized govt.!