A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.

20 November 2015

White working class voters sabotaged health care in Kentucky

Kentucky has a pretty good (on a relative scale) health care system, but much of it is likely to be repealed, gutted, or sabotaged once Republican Governor-Elect Matt Bevins takes office. He promised to cut Medicaid and get rid of Kentucky’s Kynect health insurance exchange — and was elected by a convincing margin.

Who voted for him? The very people who need and benefit from Medicaid and Kynect!

Here’s a long, mind boggling, passage from the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Lisa Botner, 36, belongs to both camps [voted for Bevin, benefited from Kynect]. A Kynector — a state agent representing Kynect in the field — recently helped Botner sign up for a Wellcare Medicaid card for herself and her 7-year-old son. Without that, Botner said, she couldn’t afford the regular doctor’s visits and blood tests needed to keep her hyperthyroidism in check.

“If anything changed with our insurance to make it more expensive for us, that would be a big problem,” Botner, a community college student, said Friday at the Owsley County Public Library, where she works. “Just with the blood tests, you’re talking maybe $1,000 a year without insurance.”

Yet two weeks earlier, despite his much-discussed plans to repeal Kynect and toughen eligibility requirements for Medicaid, she voted for Bevin.

“I’m just a die-hard Republican,” she said.

Owsley County Judge-Executive Cale Turner, a Democrat, said the election results didn’t surprise him. His constituents wanted to express their opposition to Democratic President Barack Obama and what they perceive as “the liberal agenda” on social issues, Turner said.

“To be honest with you, a lot of folks in Owsley County went to the polls and voted against gay marriage and abortion, and as a result, I’m afraid they voted away their health insurance,” Turner said. “Which was their right to do, I guess. But it’s sad. Many people here signed up with Kynect, and it’s helped them, it’s been an absolute blessing.”

Cale Turner's analysis is supported by New York Times contributing editor Tom Edsall, who recently reported:

Democrats in recent years have done well in presidential years with an agenda focused on “values conflicts” and cultural liberalism. But the party, if its aim is to mobilize those on the bottom rungs of the ladder, whites as well as blacks and Hispanics, will face some bitter conflicts, because these target voters are often the most hostile to the left-leaning social rights agenda.

An April 2013 General Social Survey report on “Trends in Public Attitudes about Sexual Morality” found, for example, that

The largest educational differences occur on attitudes toward homosexuality. The college-educated are much less likely than those voters with high school or less to say that homosexual sex is always wrong, and much more likely to approve of gay marriage.

College graduates were 22.9 percentage points more liberal on homosexuality than those without high school degrees, and 24.8 percentage points more liberal in their views on gay marriage.

The same class differences have been found in views on abortion, school prayer and the survey question: should women should be the equal of men. [Links omitted.]

Edsall is not the only political analyst calling attention to the Democratic Party’s inability to bring white working class voters back into the tent. Reports Andrew Levison in his book,The White Working Class Today:

Hostility to government is an immensely powerful sentiment in white working class America. In part it reflects conservative critiques that portray the government as imposing alien, elite programs and values, but for many other white working class Americans it actually represents a new kind of “class consciousness” — a sense that the rich and powerful control the government while ordinary people are left without any real influence at all. The intensity of anti-government sentiment is impossible to overstate. It is central to the world-view of many white working class individuals.

That hostility produces a cognitive disconnect that prevents these voters from recognizing and pursuing their enlightened self-interest. Some white working class voters are so intolerant, misinformed, and set in their beliefs they never will vote for a Democrat. They’re the unrepentant and irredeemable. But others can be saved if Democrats can find a way to reach them.

Notes Levison:

…white workers will need substantially more independence and autonomy within the Democratic Party and the progressive/ democratic coalition than will other current elements of the Obama coalition.

The reason is that white working class people are sociologically and culturally quite distinct from the other segments of the Obama coalition. In a major mall or intown neighborhood in an American city it is possible to see all the sectors of Obama’s base coalition walking by — African-Americans, Latinos, gays, students, young women, young urban professionals. Although demographically and ideologically very different, all these groups share the urban environment and feel able to coexist comfortably within it.

White working class people, on the other hand, live and work in a very different world — in the urban fringe or in small towns where factories have migrated. They live, shop and socialize separately from the current Obama coalition. They are geographically, socially and culturally part of Red State America not Blue State America.

The consequence is that working class Americans will need their own separate organization and identity within the progressive/ democratic coalition. Within the Democratic Party the labels “heartland Democrats” or “traditional values Democrats” suggest the ways to define a separate space and identity for these voters — a way for them to assert that they have their own unique values and identity even as they participate in progressive social and political coalitions.

This distinctive “heartland” or “traditional values” identity would identify a distinct outlook that is culturally traditional, moderate on social issues and mildly progressive on economic issues. To build this independent identity these “heartland Democrats” will have to proudly and clearly assert their cultural traditionalism — not in an antagonistic way, but as a means of defining a separate cultural identity with which other white working class voters can identify.

Amazingly, some Democrats don’t want to make an effort to bring white working class voters back into the Democratic coalition. Writing yesterday at the Washington Monthly about Stan Greenberg’s new book, America Ascendant, and Nancy LeTourneau’s review thereof, Martin Longman noted:

There’s a feeling among many progressives, regardless of color, that with the spectacle of the Tea Party and Trumpism, there just isn’t any way to get through to white working class folks and we’re basically idiots if we keep attempting to do it.

But Greenberg’s research suggests otherwise. Remember, we don’t need to win a majority of the vote among white working class folks. We just have to avoid getting slaughtered. And we’ve learned from the hard experience of the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, that the Democratic coalition of voters is not big enough to avoid catastrophic off-year defeats in federal, state, and local elections.

I agree.

Incidentally, starting Monday LeTourneau replaces Ed Kilgore as the primary blogger at the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal. If you love identity politics, you’ll love Letourneau. She’s a master of phrases such as “white male hetrosexual,” and consistently heaps righteous scorn on the notion that single payer health care might be a good thing. She wants Democrats to win elections, but I’m pretty sure she wants to win them without the votes of “white male hetrosexuals” and their white female heterosexual wives.

That attitude, LeTourneau’s attitude, that the Democratic Party is for women and racial and ethnic minorities, but not for “white male hetrosexuals,” is why the Republicans won big in 2010 and 2014. If Democrats want to stop losing, they’d better find a way to win back the votes of at least some of the white working class.