Connecting with Poor Whites

How many white people without a college degree did you see speak at the Democratic Convention? I don’t remember any. 

One-third of voters are whites without a college degree. That’s a lot of votes. If Democrats had wanted to appeal to those voters, it would have made sense to highlight poor white speakers. Doing so would have communicated respect and a commitment to listen to their concerns.

According to FiveThirtyEight, non-college voters supported Mitt Romney 62 percent to 36 percent, which makes them “the bedrock of the Republican coalition.” According to The Atlantic, “The single best predictor of Trump support in the GOP primary is the absence of a college degree.” 

According to Federal Safety Net, 86% of Americans over 25 years of age who in poverty do not have a college degree. Poor people tend to be without a college degree and people without a degree tend to be poor.

Compared to 1990, non-college, working-age whites are less likely to be fully employed and they earn much less when they do work, according to the Hamilton Project. 

Inequality is worsening not only because the top are taking more. In addition, those on the bottom are getting less.

One consequence is an explosion of substance abuse in rural America. Other than income, that may be the number one problem in poor communities. But the Democratic Convention had little to say about that issue. 

They could have presented a multi-racial group of recovering addicts and called for an increase in federal funding for drug treatment, as did President Obama in his Dallas speech, when he said:

We ask the police to do too much and we ask too little of ourselves. As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools.  We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment.  We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs....  then we tell the police “you’re a social worker, you’re the parent, you’re the teacher, you’re the drug counselor.” 

As governor of Indiana, following massive, intense pressure, Mike Pence finally approved a needle-exchange program to reduce the spread of H.I.V.. Shortly thereafter, a health worker

was soon traveling the streets of Austin, in Scott County, in an S.U.V., distributing needles to those who did not feel comfortable coming in to get them. At first, the drug users were skeptical. Then, one day, she and a colleague pulled up in front of a house, and a girl rose from her seat on the front porch and walked down to accept a clean syringe. 

“When we looked up, there were people coming from every house on the street,” Ms. Combs said. “They swarmed the van.”

The flood of new H.I.V. cases slowed to a trickle, as has happened elsewhere.

Substance abuse is only one example of the pressing need for more human services. In-home caregivers, nursing home aides, child care workers, after-school recreation, environmental cleanup, teacher’s assistants, and mental health counselors are other examples of work that does not require a college degree that needs to be done. And we have enough money to pay people a living wage to do it. 

By developing the human-service economy, we could assure everyone a living-wage job opportunity. Yet, when it comes to direct job creation most of what we hear concerns the physical infrastructure, not our social infrastructure. 

Both Clinton and Sanders have talked mostly about the middle class and said little about building a cross-class, multi-racial alliance that reverses the dominant divide-and-conquer strategy. The reasons are unclear. 

They may fear that supporting poor whites would alienate middle-class Americans who look down on “white trash,” a term that “has been adopted for people living on the fringes of the social order, who are seen as dangerous because they may be criminal, unpredictable, and without respect for authority.” 

For the same reason -- a focus on winning the next election -- they may want to avoid promoting their “brand,” the Democratic Party and its platform (as I discussed in "The Convention: What Was Missing").

If either is the case, they’re like corporations that concentrate on short-term profits and neglect the long-term. 

This year, the Democrats need to win by a landslide, declare a progressive mandate, and come close to taking back the House, or do so. Winning the next election is not sufficient. We also need massive, grassroots pressure to transform this nation into a compassionate community. It’s not either/or. Rather, it’s both the near term and the long term. To do that, Democrats need to gain more support poor white people. 

The Democrats can win even if they continue to fail to appeal to white poor people. But if they take that approach, that decision will be morally unjustifiable and will undermine the unity we need.