On Democrats' (mostly overlooked) rural gains in the 2018 midterms

I overlooked the rural angle of this Thomas Edsall column when it was published in June, 2019, but I want to acknowledge and highlight it now.  It goes to the perennial tension between race and class--and specifically, how much talk about race is wise on campaign trail.  

The title is "There Are Really Two Distinct White Working Classes."  The subhead is, "One is solidly Republican and will stay that way; the other leans Democratic. And then there are the in-betweeners."  It leads with a reference to this comment by then presidential candidate Joe Biden

Several Democratic presidential candidates sharply criticized Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday for invoking two Southern segregationist senators by name as he defended himself over accusations of being “old-fashioned” and fondly recalled the “civility” of the Senate in the 1970s and 1980s.

Mr. Biden, speaking at a fund-raiser at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City on Tuesday night, stressed the need to “be able to reach consensus under our system,” and cast his decades in the Senate as a time of relative comity. His remarks come as some in his party say that Mr. Biden, the former vice president, is too focused on overtures to the right as he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination.

Edsall's column then takes up Nancy Pelosi's reaction to the Biden comment, as she sought to steer journalists (and Democrats) away from too much focus on race.  A reporter asked Pelosi: 

There’s been a back‑and‑forth between Vice President Biden and some of the candidates. Do you think that it is helpful to the party to sort of fight that fight over who best represents the party when it comes to sensitivities about race?

“That’s not what this election is about,” Pelosi answered in a severe tone. “This election is about how we connect with the American people, addressing their kitchen table needs.”

Edsall then talks about various polls that reveal differences between working-class Democrats, working-class Republicans, and the various categories of voters in between.  

According to data provided by Third Way, the new Democratic districts are predominately upscale, with higher than average percentages of well-educated, well-off whites and lower than average percentages of less-well-off whites.

However, the demographics of these districts mask the significant gains Democrats made in 2018 among non-college, less affluent whites. This becomes clear in an analysis of the 2018 election by Yair Ghitza, chief scientist at Catalist.

“There has been a lot of attention paid to the Democratic victories in suburban areas, but we find that Democratic gains were actually largest in rural areas,” Ghitza wrote:

These gains weren’t enough to get over 50 percent and win seats in many rural districts, so they have escaped much of the mainstream election analysis to this point. These changes are nonetheless important, particularly because they were large in many of the Midwest battleground states that will no doubt be important in 2020.

Ghitza provided further support for the Democratic strategy of going after white non-college voters by noting that 2018 Democratic gains were “largely driven by voters who voted for Trump in 2016 and voted Democratic in 2018.”

It is no wonder, then, that Pelosi is not the only party leader warning Democrats to be wary of the danger of focusing too much on social and cultural issues in the heat of the primaries. Such counsel also comes from African-American Democrats.

Take Representative Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, who suggested to the Washington Post last week that there should be less attention paid to Biden’s stumble on race: “African-Americans are worried about the safety of their families. They’re worried about jobs. They’re worried about health care, diabetes, cancer, and they’re worried about how to pay for kids’ college.”

Richmond was joined by Representative John Lewis, who said he didn’t think Biden’s remarks were “offensive,” before adding, “During the height of the civil rights movement we worked with people and got to know people that were members of the Klan — people who opposed us, even people who beat us, and arrested us and jailed us.”

I find this interesting not least because I've noticed a trend among scholars of race.  Several decades ago, they tended to express sympathy for poor whites (not to suggest that the worst segregationists were all poor--quite the contrary) and to see what Black folks had in common with them.  That is now rarely the case.  The last time I saw that was in Sheryll Cashin's book, Place Not Race (2014).