Obama’s Strategic Dilemma

By Gary Andres
Published September 15, 2008 1:25pm ET
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The Obama campaign continues to struggle gaining significant support among white working class voters. Ron Brownstein writes in his most recent piece:

In the Diageo/Hotline daily tracking survey this week, Obama was winning just 30 percent of white men without a college education, even lower than the meager 35 percent share that exit polls recorded for John Kerry in 2004. Among white noncollege women, Obama was attracting just 37 percent, down from Kerry’s 40 percent. Among “waitress moms” (married white women without college degrees), Obama was polling just 33 percent in the Diageo/Hotline survey, no improvement on Kerry’s anemic 32 percent.

Anemic popularity with blue-collar whites could haunt the Democrats through November. Do you tone down liberal cultural rhetoric and policy to attract a greater share of moderate-to-conservative low-income white voters? Or do you just minimize losses among the blue collar voters and try to convince upscale swing voters McCain/Palin are out of touch? Brownstein captures the dilemma:

Economic hard times may indeed allow Obama to regain some ground among working-class whites by November. But given Obama’s previous difficulties with that group–and the power of the cultural connection that Palin is establishing–some analysts wonder whether he might be better served by shifting his focus toward upscale voters more likely to recoil from a Republican ticket that wants to ban abortion and has praised the teaching of creationism.

The folks who write at The Democratic Strategist provide a window into their party’s thinking about how to handle this problem in the remaining weeks of the campaign:

In the long run there is no question that Democrats must develop a strategy for winning a substantial group of working class voters if they wish to create an enduring Democratic majority. But, in the next six weeks, it may be that the heaviest emphasis should be put on winning the growing number of thoughtful middle of the road voters who were initially attracted to John McCain but who are increasingly appalled by the kind campaign he has chosen to run.

The angry and vocal left exacerbates this problem for Obama. Instead of building a winning coalition, it appears the Democrats are plagued by zero-sum politics when it comes to appealing both to liberals and lower-income whites. Successful elections are about addition, not subtraction. Strategic dilemmas like this are difficult to fix in the last seven weeks of a campaign.

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