After writing my Wednesday Examiner column on the white working class vote, I thought it would be interesting to look back at the 2008 exit poll and see how white noncollege voters performed in the presidential election. I was inspired also by this interview with Andrew Gelman, a political scientist who argues that low income people vote pretty much the same across the country, while high income voters vote very differently. He’s right about the latter point, but the former point requires some serious qualification. Yes, low income people in the Northeast, South, Midwest and West may vote pretty much the same. But that’s because a large percentage of them are black or, in some cases, Hispanic in most states. White noncollege voters vote very differently in the different regions. And it’s in states with very low black percentages where they tend to vote most Democratic.
Barack Obama carried white noncollege voters in 15 states and the District of Columbia (I’m assuming: the sample size was too small for the exit poll to show a percentage) with 124 electoral votes. Perhaps to your surprise, California and New York are not among them; neither is New Jersey, Pennsylvania or Ohio. They do include all six New England states, plus Delaware and D.C. in the Northeast; the two Pacific Northwest states, Washington and Oregon; Hawaii; and five states in the Midwest, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa. In the New England states white noncollege voters are probably from Democratic-leaning ethnic groups; in the Upper Midwest you have Scandinavians and also a union tradition, particularly in Michigan; the Pacific Northwest has (in Oregon) Yankee roots and (in Washington) a significant Scandinavian tinge, plus a strong union tradition. When I started out writing my Almanac of American Politics, in the early 1970s, in Michigan and Washington about 40% of workers were union members, the highest in the country; this was of course before the heyday of public employee unions.
White noncollege voters are much less likely to vote Democratic in the South: in 2008 only 9% in Alabama and 11% in Mississippi and Louisiana voted for Obama. That’s a lot different from the 57% he won among this group in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Low income voters may be similar across the country; white noncollege voters are not.
