BLUE RUIN: This is a story of human discernment!

MONDAY, JANUARY 6, 2024

Ways we earned our way out: This is a story of human discernment—a quality which is often in short supply. More specifically, this is a story concerning the ways we Blues have earned our way out.

You'll note that the key word there is plural. The key word there is "ways."

Human discernment being what it is, we humans are routinely inclined to search for the simplest possible explanation for whatever it is we're trying to explain at some particular point in time. And so it has tended to go as we the people of Blue America have tried to explain why we lost the 2024 presidential election.

(Admittedly, we lost by a bit less than 1.5 points. Among the workers on the Fox News Channel, that's now described as "a landslide.")

Four years earlier, in 2020, we won the presidential election, in that case by roughly 4.5 points. In short, our story goes like this, if only in part:

Over the course of the past four years, we Blues went from +4.5 percentage points to -1.5 percentage points. 

On balance, we lost something like six percentage points over the course of four years. And so, an obvious question arises, ripe for explanation:

How did we manage to lose those votes over the course of four years? 

How did we manage to lose those votes? Throughout the week, that will be one of our basic questions. But we'll also be asking such questions as these:

Why was the election that close back in 2020? Why didn't we win in 2020 by even more than 4.5 points? 

Stated a slightly different way: 

Considering the candidate we were running against, why didn't we win that election by a much larger margin?

In short, how did we manage to lose potential votes in the years—indeed, in the five or six decades—before our win in 2020? How have we managed to drive away potential voters over these many long years?

This week, we're finally going to list some of the obvious ways we Blues have managed to earn our way out. We'll be listing some of the ways we earned our way out in the past four years, but also over a longer span of time, dating all the way back to the 1960s.

Briefly, let's be less polite. We're going to list some of the blindingly obvious ways we Blues have managed to throw away votes—and there won't be just one way we did that. As with the Reds, so too with us Blues:

We Blues have managed to drive away voters in a wide assortment of ways.

We've burned away votes in various ways. That said, human discernment can sometimes be quite limited. Among us Blues, as among the Reds, there exists a constant impulse to seek the one lone "answer" to a question—in this case, to seek the one lone explanation for our (rather narrow) defeat in this year's White House race.

We're inclined to present some lone explanation, but we didn't shed potential vote in only one way! Through our incessant human bungling, we Blues have managed to shed potential votes through a wide array of self-defeating behaviors. 

That brings us to a starting point for this week's reports. We refer to a recent "news analysis" piece in the New York Times, and to Kevin Drum's reaction to that piece.

Here are the reports in question. with the Times report going first:

NEWS ANALYSIS  
How the Democrats Lost the Working Class
The theory seemed sound: Stabilize financial markets, support the poor and promote a more secure, integrated world. But blue-collar workers were left behind.

To peruse that analysis piece, click here. This was the start of Kevin's rebuttal:

The working class story is about culture, not economic anxiety

In the New York Times today, Jonathan Weisman tells the story—well, a story—of how Democrats lost the white working class. It's all about economic anxiety.

Maybe so, but even Weisman himself acknowledges the obvious:

It started in 1968 with "hardhats for Nixon." This was long before de-industrialization. It was all about Vietnam and the counterculture...

Kevin's response continues from there. To peruse it, just click this.

In his essay for the Times, Weisman attempts to explain why the Democratic Party has lost votes among "working class" voters (variously defined) over the course of (however many) years.

As we noted yesterday, Weisman goes all the way back to 1964 to track—or perhaps to pretend to track—the loss of those "working class" votes. At the start of his response, Drum says this shedding of working class votes dates to 1968.

In recent years, there's no question! As we noted yesterday, Democratic Party candidates have plainly lost "working class" votes over the course of the past five White House elections.

In 2008, Candidate Obama won something like 53 percent of such votes, according to (imperfect) exit polls. In last year's election, Candidate Harris won something like 43 percent of those votes.

As such, the loss of working class votes helps explain—is clearly part of—last year's (narrow) defeat. So how did we lose those votes over the course of those sixteen years? 

Plainly, that's a decent question. But now, please notice this:

The headline on Kevin's post seems to suggest that there is only one explanation for the loss of those votes. The headline seems to say that we lost those votes for reasons of culture, not for reasons of economics.

That's what the headline seems to suggest. Inevitably, Blue American commenters quickly stepped in, in some cases dumbing things down to the ground. 

As we humans are inclined to do, some of those commenters offered single, sweeping explanations for the loss of those votes. That said, Kevin ended his post with this passage:

The working class story is about culture, not economic anxiety

[...]

So I continue to have problems with the economic anxiety story. I'm not dead set against it, since financial anxiety can manifest itself in lots of different ways. Still, the bulk of the evidence really seems to point much more toward cultural issues than economic ones.

Kevin seems to be saying that there might be more than one reason for the loss of those working class votes. "Economic anxiety" could be part of what happened, he seems to say—but so could "cultural issues," which he thinks mattered more.

In closing, full disclosure:

According to the Cook Report, 155.2 million people voted in last year's election. Just over 77.3 million people voted for Candidate Trump.

Candidate Trump was elected by a very large number of people. Also this:

Given the way our exit polls slice and dice the electorate, 27% of this year's voters reported having income of less than $50,000. Also, 57% of this year's voters didn't have a college degree.

Given the ways we slice and dice, those are the numbers analysts may use to define the "working class." Tens of millions of different people are involved—and no, they aren't all the very same person! 

They aren't all the same person! Some have to ride their bikes to the grocery story because they can't afford to put gas in their cars. Many others don't have to do that.

They aren't all the same! But in comment threads throughout Blue America, we Blues frequently march off in search of simplification. Along the way, through our rude and undiscerning behavior, we may even play a role in the eternal practice of driving away potential votes.

We insult Others in sweeping ways; we say extremely dumb things. This is the eternal road to perdition, and it's one of the ways we Blues have managed to earn our way out over the course of the past sixty years.

It started with Nixon, Kevin says. We'd say that's basically accurate. It also includes the wide array of stupid things we Blues routinely insisted on doing and saying during the past four years.

There's no cure for human, the experts all say. All this week, we'll try to answer a very important question:

Through our lack of perfect discernment, how did we Blues manage to shed potential votes to such an extent that we actually managed to lose to a guy like Donald J. Trump?

The Donald squeaked out a narrow win. How did we endlessly self-impressed Blues manage to help him do that?

There's more than one answer to that question! In our view, a lot of potential votes were shed in a lot of avoidable ways—and yes, it goes back to the 1960s. We ourselves were physically present on the day it started!

Tomorrow: President Biden