Submitted by Trevor on June 27, 2011 – 7:52 am EST
Teixeira was an identified member of the US’s largest Marxist group Democratic Socialists of America in the early 1980s, the time Obama himself began his long and ongoing association with that organization.
Writing in the leftist The New Republic Teixeira opines:
There will be a lot of white working class voters showing up at the polls next November, and the degree to which they support (or abandon) President Obama could very well make or break his reelection…
In 2008, during his otherwise-solid election victory, Obama lost the white working class vote by 18 points. In 2010, however, things got much worse: Congressional Democrats’ experienced a catastrophic 30 point deficit among the same group. While the first number is a figure Obama could live with repeating, the second could very well prove fatal.
Indeed, if Republicans can replicate that 30 point deficit in 2012—a margin which seems increasingly possible given the recent bad news about the economy—Obama will have little to no room for error among his other constituencies…. In such a scenario, Obama would have to hold essentially all of his white college graduate support from 2008 (47 percent, a historic high for Democrats) to be assured of victory.
These tactics are likely to pay big dividends both nationally and, even more importantly, in the states where the election is actually decided. Consider the case of Ohio, a state the GOP must take back to take down Obama. White working class voters could end up representing as much as 56 percent of Ohio voters in 2012, judging from Census voter supplement data. Anything close to a 30 point deficit in 2012 will almost definitely sink Obama in this state, no matter what happens with the friendlier portions of the Ohio electorate.
Or take Florida, Nevada, and Colorado, other states that are vulnerable to a white working class collapse. Florida’s 29 electoral votes would assure Obama’s re-election, assuming he manages to carry the 18 states, plus the District of Columbia, that Democrats have carried in every presidential election since 1992 (which, together, represent a total of 241 electoral votes). Compared to Ohio, Florida’s white working class is smaller (a projected 42 percent of voters in 2012), but a 30 point deficit would still torpedo Obama’s chances, putting this must-win state for the GOP firmly in their column. Nevada (42 percent white working class in 2012) and Colorado (46 percent), meanwhile, would also be put in serious doubt should Obama’s support among this group crater in 2012…
But how likely is such a white working class surge toward the GOP in 2012? From the standpoint of Obama and the Democrats, scarily so. It’s important to remember that this is the group that has been the bulwark of every GOP victory going back to Richard Nixon in 1968. And it is the group recently termed by journalist Ronald Brownstein as, “[T]he most pessimistic group in America.” In a recent Pew Economic Mobility Project poll, only one-third of working class whites thought today’s children would live better than they do, far below the levels of confidence expressed by minorities and college-educated whites…
These views are obviously rooted in the bleak economic situation confronting most members of the white working class...
To be sure, the good news for Obama is that the level of support he needs from this group of voters is not terribly high. While a 30 point deficit might sink him, he could survive pretty easily on a 23 point deficit, John Kerry’s margin in 2004. That Obama would likely win with this very large deficit, while Kerry lost, indicates just how much the demographics of the country have changed in the 8 years since Kerry’s defeat. But while the bar for Obama may be lower, he still needs to clear it, and at the moment, that’s looking like a real challenge.
Ruy Teixeira’s socialist arrogance blinds him to one important fact.
America’s “working class” does not reject Obama’s socialist values because they are suffering economically (though they are), or because they have less “confidence” than “college educated whites.”
American working people, of all colors reject Obama’s values, simply because they are the main reservoir of real American values.
America’s working people fight the wars, build the small businesses and farms and pay the taxes that preserve those values. They better understand the principles that built America than do many, if not most college graduates.
If America is saved, it will be America’s extraordinary working people and the leaders that spring from their ranks, the likes of Sarah Palin, Allen West, Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart and Michele Bachmann, who do the saving.
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