Working-class white guys are likely to choose the Democratic candidate. Pennsylvania is the next test.

In a historic race between a black man and a white woman, it is ironic that the outcome—in the upcoming Pennsylvania primary as well as in the national race in the fall—might be defined by the votes of white men.

Their votes have become critical in a campaign where most other demographic groups have consistently sided with one candidate or the other: Blacks are committed to Barack Obama, and females and Latinos have gone for Hillary Clinton.

But white men have swung back and forth. In 29 contests, Clinton has won the majority of the white male votes 15 times, Obama has won 12 times, and they have tied twice.

White male voters today account for less than one-third of the 72 million registered Democrats. The younger and more affluent members of that demographic have favored Obama, while older white males have tended to vote for Clinton.

That leaves working- and middle-class white males up for grabs. Those voters will be particularly important in the three Rust Belt states, which have yet to allocate their pledged delegates: Pennsylvania (April 12), Indiana (May 6) and West Virginia (May 13).

David Paul Kuhn, the author of The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma and a political writer for Politico.com, describes this swing demographic as socially conservative, economically liberal and more centrist on national security issues than many other groups in the Democratic Party.

Those characteristics favor Clinton in the next primary.

Like in Ohio, where Hillary won the white male vote by 19 percent (58 percent to Obama’s 39), Pennsylvania is whiter, older, more unionized and less college educated than the national average. Men who earn less than $50,000 per year and don’t have college degrees make up 27 percent of the Pennsylvania electorate.
Average Joes and Janes in Pennsylvania speak out about how they are approaching the election, and who they’d vote for.Christopher Briem, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research, said that the state’s important bloc of older, blue-collar voters is less likely to take a chance on Obama, who seems to them more like the latest fad than an established politician.

The perception of Obama as “the black candidate” also helps Clinton, at least with white audiences who are still ambivalent about the possibility of an African-American president. Briem thinks the Illinois senator remains too much of an unknown quantity: “For all the angst over race and gender, a big factor is sheer familiarity.”

As she did in Ohio, Clinton will probably continue hammering Obama as an untested commander in chief. She will certainly attack him as an untrustworthy economic populist by again bringing up his campaign’s apparent flip-flop on NAFTA, which is broadly unpopular with blue-collar workers.

“Barring a disaster, I think she will win Pennsylvania,” agreed Dean Debnam, president of Public Policy Polling, which released a poll last week showing a 26-point Clinton lead.

Debnam added that the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s comments had badly hurt Obama. “Blue collar workers tend to be more patriotic,” he explained, and many of them associated Rev. Wright’s scathing criticism of the U.S. with Obama.

Obama’s Damage Control

Barack Obama’s March 18 speech on race in Philadelphia was partly intended to counter the impact of the Rev. Wright hullabaloo and partly intended to reach out to disaffected white voters.

Obama acknowledged that many blue-collar whites are being hurt by globalization, are anxious about their futures and resent blacks who they see as competitors for pieces of a shrinking pie.

Many commentators applauded the speech but wondered if the more rural voters he was courting would hear it. Although, it might help him with the affluent suburban voter. “Suburbs are going to be a big battleground,” said UPenn political science professor Rogers M. Smith. “If Obama closes the gap, it is because he gets the votes in the suburbs.”

Obama holds more delegates, but big wins in Pennsylvania and West Virginia could propel Clinton into the lead. It might impress undecided superdelegates that Hillary’s ability to attract white male voters would help in November.

Regardless of the final outcome, the way the Obama-Clinton contest is unfolding might come back to haunt the Democrats. Political analyst Michael Lind, a New America Foundation fellow, remarked: “It is not helpful to the Democratic Party’s prospects...to have white working-class males turning on their TVs to see this narrative of blacks pitted against Latinos or white women. That reinforces their concerns that there is no place for them in this Party anymore.”

Reagan Democrats, All Over Again

Unless the Democratic Party makes a big effort, it might end up losing the blue-collar votes in the November election.

The struggle between Obama and Clinton for the Democratic nomination might only accelerate the long running tendency for working-class white males to defect to the Republican Party in the general election.

Pollster Stan Greenberg famously dubbed these voters “Reagan Democrats” after scrutinizing voting patterns among auto workers in Michigan’s Macomb County, who voted 63 percent for John F. Kennedy in 1960 but 66 percent for Ronald Reagan in 1984.

David Paul Kuhn pointed out that an important part of why Republicans have dominated presidential contests in recent decades is that one-quarter of all working-class white males voters left the Democratic Party in the last half-century, and one-third of all middle-class white male voters left during the same period.

Jimmy Carter in 1976 was the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry a majority of white male voters.

In 2004, John Kerry lost this demographic by a whopping 23 points.

“Democrats tend to talk positively about the ‘gender gap,’” Kuhn said. “But the fact is, the Party has been losing more men than it has been gaining women.”

White voters often feel “crowded out” of the Party because of the Democrats’ emphasis on affirmative action and feminist issues.

With the right candidates, though, Democrats have demonstrated that they can attract this disgruntled, yet still powerful, constituency.

In the 2006 mid-term elections, Virginia’s Jim Webb and Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey, Jr. won Senate seats for the Democrats, in large part by presenting themselves as culturally conservative economic populists.

The AFL-CIO is trying to help the Democrats make the case that their candidate, whomever it might eventually be, will fit that description. The union recently announced a $54 million political information campaign that is strongly anti-McCain, including a website that argues that a McCain administration would merely continue what the union sees as President Bush’s failed economic policies.

But the Democrats may prove to be their own worst enemies in the fall election. A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center indicated that a significant number of Democrats are likely to defect to McCain if their preferred candidate fails to win the nomination.

A quarter of Democrats who back Clinton said they would favor McCain in a general election test against Obama, while “only” 10 percent of Obama supporters say would defect if Clinton was the nominee. Most of the Clinton defectors appear to be white women.