PEP, January 2005: Election analysis: How Bush duped working people

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

George W. Bush won re-election because millions of working class voters cast their ballots against their economic interest.

As they struggled to make ends meet, these voters re-elected a president who used tax cuts to engineer the most massive redistribution of wealth to the rich in history.

Totally dependent on their jobs, they backed a leader who has overseen the loss of more jobs than any president since Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression.

During the Bush administration, union membership in the private sector — about 8 percent — plummeted to what it was 100 years ago.

Despite Bush’s poor record on the economy, millions of working-class voters were clearly more concerned with non-economic issues, and the Democratic challenger was weak in articulating their economic concerns.

Others wanted to stand behind a wartime president perceived as more resolute than the opponent he painted as a flip-flopper.

Their morals and ours
The so-called moral values voters favored the born-again Bush over the pro-choice Kerry. Some 79 percent of voters who identified “moral values” as their most important issue supported Bush, and three-fourths of evangelical Christians voted for him.

In a country enamored with celebrities, many voters simply chose the “man” (and it has always been a man since the country’s first election).

This working class conservativism helps explain the disconnect between voters’ economic interests and the candidates they ultimately choose. It reflects the collapse of the 1930s New Deal coalition that began with the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s.

Back then, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson reportedly remarked that signing landmark civil rights legislation meant his party had lost the South. Indeed, in the ensuing years, third-party candidate George Wallace of Alabama plugged into the disgruntlement — and in many cases, racism — of white southern voters as well as some blue-collar workers. By 1969, Richard Nixon mobilized the “Silent Majority” to win the presidency.

“I see a battle for the hearts and the minds of working people in the 1970s. The way the right won with culture and the left lost on its economic agenda set the course for today’s situation,” said Jefferson Cowie, who teaches labor and working-class history at Cornell University.

On Election Day, voters with incomes under $30,000 solidly backed Kerry. But Kerry beat Bush by only 1 percent (50-49) among voters earning between $30,000 and $50,000, according to CNN exit polling.

Populist backlash
Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” attributes voters’ failure to support candidates who best represent their economic interest to a sort of populist “backlash” to liberalism. Frank is among the political analysts who argue that the Democratic Party itself is partly at the root of the disaffection of middle-class voters.

Conservatives have successfully tapped into this festering resentment. Thus, the right rails against the condescending biased media, limousine liberals, out-of-touch progressive policy wonks and politicians, trade unionists, socialists and gays and lesbians with loose morals.

This year, with the war in Iraq and the war against terrorism, Republicans used the politics of fear to convince voters to stick with Bush, according to Bill Fletcher Jr., president of TransAfrica and former AFL-CIO education director.

Democrats drift rightward
Compounding the growing cultural divide that has driven millions into the conservative camp, the Democratic Party has moved to the center, blurring the economic platforms of the two major parties. Mr. Frank views Clinton’s approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement as one of the most striking examples of the party’s abandonment of blue-collar workers.

With the Democratic Party failing to present an aggressive, populist economic program, conservatives have exploited cultural fault lines to reach out to white working-family voters. Republicans win their votes using issues like gun control and abortion, and then betray them by supporting privatization, deregulation, free trade, smaller government and tax cuts that tilt toward the rich.

In this year’s national election, gay marriage was a new cultural fault line that Republicans used to reach culturally conservative voters.

Union membership is the greatest mitigating factor against this conservatism of working class voters. Some 42 percent of union voters said jobs and the economy were their top issues. That is why right-wing interests are so anxious to cripple unions, and it is also why expanding and revitalizing the labor movement is critical for shifting the political balance toward working peoples’ needs.

Union members, 14 percent of all voters in 2004, strongly backed Kerry; 65 percent of union voters chose the Democrat. But in spite of the labor movement’s largest mobilization ever, over one-third of union voters backed anti-labor Bush, who cut deeper into the union Democratic vote than he did in 2000.

“The fundamental problem is that the AFL-CIO has not been successful in doing what unions in other countries like South Africa and Brazil have done, which is to raise the level of ideological awareness of their key activists,” longtime labor educator and organizer José La Luz told PEP recently.

Ironically, a study done for the AFL-CIO by Peter D. Hart Research Associates identified the lack of economic education of union members as a major problem for the labor movement 10 years ago.

Social movement unionism
The 1995 study concluded that, “unions today cannot presume rank-and-file support for organized labor’s political perspective.” In addition, it found that, “members do not yet recognize or understand the political threat that organized labor and working people face today. Members also appear to be largely disconnected from their unions’ political action efforts, suggesting that a new stronger relationship will have to be forged if trade unionists are to be politically educated and mobilized.”

Mr. La Luz credited right-wing interests with working tirelessly to create a social movement over the 40 years since Johnson defeated conservative icon Barry Goldwater in 1963. During those years, conservatives used churches, think tanks, grassroots outreach and the media to appeal to middle- and working-class voters.

“These people are framing the terms of the political discourse in this country,” Mr. La Luz said.
To reverse the colossal conservative tide, unions need to embark on a campaign of massive organizing and political and economic education while working to build a new progressive social movement, according to Mr. La Luz.