What’s the Matter with White Dudes?

White working-class men don’t vote for Democrats anymore, and the New York Times is on it. According to this week’s fast-breaking news analysis, these voters are “the ones who got away.”

It’s true. White working-class men, and white men, and men in general, aren’t too keen on the Democratic Party, and haven’t been since it became a party of gay nancies and minorities and organized labor collapsed. This all began, oh, approximately fifty years ago. Thomas Frank explained it in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, literally ten years ago. But the Times recently dispatched Jackie Calmes to talk to a bunch of white dudes in Michigan to provide some “texture” to a relatively unknown political trend the most significant American political trend of the last five decades.

Her story features Frank Houston, one of those “white men” you sometimes hear about, but this particular white man is a local Democratic Party official. Houston is “finding out how difficult it can be to persuade other white men here to support Democrats, even among the twenty or so, mostly construction workers, who join him in a rotating poker game.” Sure, it’s difficult work, converting these living, breathing stereotypes into Democrats, but he and the party have just the ticket to make it happen. Let’s guess what it is. Data? Oh God, it’s data:

So Mr. Houston and like-minded Democrats are working to deploy new, data-driven targeting tools to get the message to white men that the party is more in sync with them than they might think. “We can tell you to the number how many we need and where they live,” said Matt Canter, the deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

This paragraph happens to answer the question as to why the Democratic Party can’t win back the white working-class men they lost so many years ago: it’s because of people like Matt Canter. The party seems more fascinated by technological election-time capabilities (and they sure are fancy!) than by making broad policy statements that would make the sophistication of its data modeling a secondary concern. When you talk a lot about “new, data-driven targeting tools” that will discover “how many we need,” it sounds just a little bit like you’re trying to trick some people into voting for you.

Instead of spending all its resources on “targeting” individual working-class voters with laser-strapped supercomputers, or whatever, there are other ways the Democratic party could “target” the working class in general. For instance, there’s that Trans-Pacific Partnership that the Obama administration has been pushing hard for fast-track approval in the Senate. (It looks like that’s stalled for now as, out of pure dumb luck, Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s one of the few remaining anti-free trade Democrats remaining.) The Obama administration could perhaps “target” not just white working-class men, but all working-class people, by, say, not exerting all of its might to push through this massive new trade agreement. The administration could also seek to renegotiate NAFTA, which was an explicit promise Obama made on the campaign trail. He has not “moved” on that, needless to say.

But if this high-tech micro-targeting is where Democrats want to invest all their resources, there’s really little point in targeting the white working-class male demographic. National demographics are now such that the party can reach its 51 percent without them. If it wants to try to create a broader coalition including everyone, rather than one that hinges on identity politics, it will have to broaden its policy horizons.