TNR's Noam Scheiber is a great writer whose work I frequently cite. But his new online piece about Hillary Clinton's appeal to downscale voters is, I think, too clever by half.
In addition to taking for granted the questionable premise that Hillary is more experienced than Barack Obama, Scheiber offers an elaborate rationale for why she outpolls Obama among less educated voters:
Pretty much every poll taken since the beginning of the year has shown two things: First, that Hillary Clinton enjoys a sizeable cushion among working-class voters (a Gallup poll out Monday shows Hillary with a ten-point lead among voters with "some college" and a 23-point lead among voters with a high school education or less). And second, that Hillary has a huge advantage on questions about which candidate has the "best experience" to be president (66 to 9 over Obama in an early June Washington Post poll).
These two details are not unrelated. In fact, it's pretty clear that working-class voters favor Hillary over Obama largely because they value experience. But it's the reason they value experience that's so interesting: Working-class Democrats, and particularly unionized Democrats, tend to see seniority as the only acceptable way of divvying up sought-after work. (And what is the presidency if not the most sought-after job on the planet?) For them, the problem with an inexperienced candidate isn't that he or she is unprepared to be president. It's that such a candidacy flies in the face of their basic sense of fairness.
...In the eyes of working-class Democrats, Hillary is someone who's paid her dues--first in the White House, where she weathered a terrific, eight-year assault from conservatives, then as the scrupulously dependable senator from New York. If, after all this, Hillary doesn't win the nomination, then the system they've bought into their entire working lives will have been turned upside down.
Obama's base, by contrast, consists primarily of his sociological peers: highly educated achievers who get paid to think abstractly and believe that compensation should reflect performance. Nothing makes these meritocrats shudder like the thought of having the sharpest insight or the best proposal and yet still having to cool their heels while their less able, less creative elders plod ahead.
I'm afraid this is speculative David Brooks-style pop sociology - provocative but ultimately unconvincing. Who knows what's really going on in working class voters' minds?
A more plausible (and simple) explanation is that less well educated Democrats tend to have less political information, so they don't know very much about Obama. These voters also tend to have less well developed ideological views and more of an emotional connection to the Democratic Party. As such, it's not surprising that they back Clinton strongly -- they have loved her and her husband for years. By contrast, upscale voters know more about Obama and are more likely to respond to his appeals for change.
This pattern is analogous to the way that downscale Democratic primary voters tended to back Gore over Bradley in 2000 and Mondale over Hart in 1984. It's possible that these voters are expressing their views on the appropriate role of seniority, but it's more likely that they just tend to stick with the default choice.
Comments