White Men Vote. Let's Act Like It.
A big-tent Democratic Party can't be this small.
I remember talking to my dad once in the early 2010s. The term “white privilege” was moving from academic circles into the broader public’s lexicon, and he took issue with it. “I rent my house. I don’t have any savings. My parents were dead from alcoholism by the time I was 30. What kind of privilege is that?” I explained that, as a white person, he had certain societal advantages, even if they weren't immediately apparent to him. My dad’s question and my dismissive response encapsulate the Democratic Party’s relationship with white working class voters in recent years, especially male ones: condescending, tone-deaf, unhelpful. If Democrats want to start winning elections again, we need to talk to white men like we’re actually trying to earn their vote.
Before I get into this, I need to clear the field of several straw men:
I do not believe that white people or white men are an oppressed class in our country.
I do not believe that our country has defeated prejudice (one need only look at the persistence of the racial wealth gap to confirm this).
I am not redpilling!
I’m not pulling a Tulsi Gabbard. I love the Democratic Party.
I believe that our party must continue to be the party of the disadvantaged, the downtrodden, and the disenfranchised, to include minorities of all kinds.
I believe that our party must also be a party for all Americans.
I believe in a pluralist, big-tent Democratic Party.
I believe in the vision of a post-racial America that the Democratic Party and civil rights activists articulated in the 1960s.
All right now back to trying to make a nuanced point on the internet. (Oh, god)
For decades we have been committed to welcoming and defending minorities of all kinds – racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, gender. For a while it won us elections, and in many ways, we are a victim of our own success. Affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act, the Equal Pay Act; these progressive programs were passed by Democratic Congresses and signed into law by Democratic presidents in the 1960s. They sought to codify a vision of a more equal, post-racial America. In the sixty years since, a more tolerant America has emerged: The prevalence of racist views by White Americans is down considerably; most Americans accept the right of gay people to marry; the share of Americans who think men are better suited for leadership than women has plummeted. This progress is a long-term strategic victory for Democrats. It should be celebrated.
Yet we as Democrats are stuck on identity, and our strategy has not adapted to Americans’ more tolerant attitudes. The 2024 Democratic Party platform mentions the word “white” seven times, and only in negative contexts (for example, before the word “supremacist”) or in comparison to other races. The word “Black” appears 31 times and “Latino/a” 21 times. When it comes to gender, the gap is even starker: “woman” or “women” appears 86 times, while “men” appears only four (half of these proceed the phrase “and women”). The equivalent Republican document mentions “men” three times, “women” 6 times, and makes no mention of Blacks, Latinos, or whites.
Of course addressing the needs of marginalized groups via the party platform is important, but surely we should make some mention of the needs of the male half of the electorate. However, no portion of the platform makes any appeal to problems specifically affecting men, such as their declining post-secondary educational attainment.
This doesn’t mean white men are invisible to Democrats. It is acceptable in leftwing spaces to attack white people and men solely for being white or male. Some Democratic politicians adopt this kind of prejudiced rhetoric and receive no pushback from party leaders. For some reason, even though we call out other instances of intolerance, it is okay to carve out an exception for white men.
Of course I’m sympathetic to why this happens: White men have been the dominant group in our country’s history and some of them are responsible for its greatest problems, starting with slavery. However, it is not these white men – the overwhelming majority of ordinary ones alive today who live in electorally consequential states – who are to blame for those problems. When most white men hear Democrats singling them out – by excluding them from cheap home loans, by denying them access to vaccines, by refusing to give them interviews – they react like my dad did: “What kind of privilege is that?” If you are a white man in America – 34% of the electorate – would you feel at home in today’s Democratic Party?
In 2024, Trump has claimed not only white working class voters – who chose him by a 2-to-1 margin – but also chunks of Black and Latino voters. Many don’t necessarily want to vote for him, but he agrees their eggs are expensive and doesn’t lecture them or assume things about them in the process. Trump won’t actually help them, but he also isn’t calling them racist. This is part of a conscious strategy years in the making, and the party’s most recent platform reflects this deliberate avoidance of identity politics.
Parties have recovered from realignments in the past. Democrats’ adoption of civil rights issues had the side effect of driving southern white segregationists (previously a Democratic constituency) into the Republican Party. The GOP responded by remaking itself from the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Reagan and won seven of the next ten presidential elections from 1968-2004. We as Democrats must now decide how to respond to this shift if we want to stop the Party of Trump at the ballot box.
I believe it starts with deemphasizing identity in the way we talk to Americans and especially not demonizing white men. Our Democratic leaders need to respond to this kind of intolerance toward white men just like they would any other group: by calling it out as unacceptable and banishing it from the Democratic Party.
We also need to rejoin the fight for the votes of white men. Trump never set out to win Black or Latino voters, but he did try to peel off enough of them to force Democrats onto the defensive. If we can speak to some white men out there – not all of them – it can make a big difference in elections.
It is important, however, that we not talk to them as white men, but, borrowing from the GOP playbook, as part of a larger group of Americans who are struggling economically. We have some advantages here: Republicans are not natural stewards of their working class constituency. Though their rhetoric has shifted, GOP policies are still breathtakingly pro-business and anti-union. When voters see the oligarchical capture of the GOP for what it is, they will look to Democrats for solutions.
I hope you’ll join me in building them.
I generally enjoy your work, Keith, and don’t think you’re wrong that Democrats need to remain a big tent party, but this is so poorly researched and argued. For instance, you link to FAIRs website regarding Washington State’s use of racial preferences for the Covenant Homeownership Program and categorize it as “excluding white men from cheap homes.” If you did five seconds of research, you’d find that there are several first time homebuyer assistance programs in Washington State that do not have any sort of racial preferences (see, for instance, the Home Advantage Program) and that the Covenant Homeownership Program was established to specifically address government sanctioned housing discrimination against certain racial minority groups in Washington State (see https://wshfc.org/covenant/WSHFCWACHPFULLSTUDY32024.pdf#page14). To say that you mischaracterize the situation is an understatement. Similarly, you suggest that NY State Department of Health’s guidelines for prioritizing patient treatment of COVID-19 with Paxlovid and other anti-COVID-19 antivirals was “denying them [white men] access to vaccines” when the guidelines simply said race could be considered as one factor among many when determining who to prioritize for said treatment. Even if you disagree with those guidelines, that is not at all the same as “denying” white men vaccines.
But the bigger problem with this piece are two arguments you make:
First, you make it seem as though Democrats have abandoned their attempts to court white male voters altogether. The Harris-Walz Campaign (same with Hillary and Obama) did intentional, targeted outreach and advertising to white men throughout the campaign. You may argue that their attempts to sway or activate white male voters weren’t effective, and I’d certainly agree if you argued that those efforts weren’t the core focus or message of their campaign (although I don’t think that’s a bad thing given that white men haven’t been the base of the Democratic Party in many, many years), but that’s quite different than arguing that Democrats aren’t acting as if white men vote. Additionally, the examples you highlight of politicos excluding or vilifying white men (to the extent that they’re accurately conveyed in those articles) are from people who represent one wing of several within the Democratic Party. As a sidenote, given the headline and argument for this piece, it’s kind of rich to link to a story about Bowman… who lost to a white male Democrat in the primary.
Second, you state that Republicans deliberately avoided engaging in identity politics— a hilariously laughable proposition. Did you forget Trump claiming Harris suddenly became Black? Or his denigration of “Democrat run cities” as bastions of crime and chaos? Or his comments about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, OH? Or his rhetoric that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of this country”? Or the ads claiming that Harris supported taxpayer covered surgeries for transgender people in prison? I refuse to believe that you’re so naive as to believe that those examples (and many others) do not constitute the deliberate engagement with identity politics. Their campaigns and rhetoric may not speak to your identity or mine, but they are absolutely crafted and deployed with the intent of angering, activating, motivating, etc. white voters, and white male voters in particular.
I believe you are right and Dems need to make room in the tent for low-income working class white me who are struggling to feel any of that 'white male privilege' when they can't both feed their family and pay the bills. They are not going to vote Dem as long as their struggles are dismissed and instead they are blamed as causing the struggles for everyone else. Maybe we should hone the message against the obviously privileged and oligarchy and welcome in the men who BE allies if they HAD allies.