Ruy Teixeira has a pretty solid record as a political analyst. So while Politico comes out with a gloomy reading of Barack Obama's score with white women, Teixeira has already given his comforting assessment of what Obama can reasonably expect from white working class voters.
First Politico and the Pew Survey assess the changes over the past several months:
Democratic white women’s negative view of Obama increased from 21 percent to 35 percent, while their positive view decreased from 72 percent to 60 percent — roughly the same rate as white women overall.
White men, in general and among Democrats, have shown only a slight drop-off in their perception of Obama — one-third of the shift seen in white women. About 20 percent of Democratic white men have an unfavorable view of Obama, a figure which has remained stable since February.
Pew also found that among self-described Clinton supporters, the negative shift against Obama is more severe among women than among men.
Compare with Ruy Teixeira in an interview the other day with the New York Times' John Harwood. Teixeira takes a longer view -- and he takes issue with Hillary Clinton's smug claim that she has the support of "“hard-working Americans, white Americans."
He dismisses intraparty contests as “pretty poor evidence” of whether Mr. Obama, as the Democratic nominee, could attract the blue-collar support he would need against Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee.
And how much blue-collar support would Mr. Obama need? Not a majority, said Mr. Teixeira. Though blue-collar Democrats once represented a centerpiece of the New Deal coalition, they have shrunk as a proportion of the information age-economy and as a proportion of the Democratic base.
Al Gore lost working-class white voters by 17 percentage points in 2000, even while winning the national popular vote. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts lost them by 23 points in 2004, while running within three points of President Bush over all. Mr. Teixeira suggests that Mr. Obama can win the presidency if he comes within 10 to 12 percentage points of Mr. McCain with these voters, as Democratic candidates for the House did in the 2006 midterm election.
In recent national polls, that is exactly what Mr. Obama is doing. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed Mr. Obama trailing by 12 percentage points with working-class whites; a poll by Quinnipiac University, showed him trailing by seven points. In each survey, Mr. Obama led over all by seven points.
Meanwhile, others, who have been cataloging the swift decline of movement conservatives, believe the Democrats can -- and likely will -- win back blue-collar Americans.
