It's worth keeping in mind that Reagan actually didn't do as well with White Working class voters as commonly thought. He failed to win rural white southerners in 1980 (although quite easily winning them in 1984). He also lost large areas of coal country that Republicans, particularly post-Bush [junior] Republicans, tend to win with massive margins.
Many of these "Reagan Democrats" weren't really working class, they were voters who had grown up in a working class background but under the post war economic expansion, had managed to claim a middle class lifestyle, and naturally began to grow a different set of priorities, that the Democratic Party often wasn't particular good at catering to. Combine this with the perception that liberal governance in the 1970s was failing, and the result is a large scale exodus.
However most of these "Reagan Democrat" (at least the stereotypical Northern, Catholic one) largely swung back to Bill Clinton and many likely stuck with Gore, Kerry and Obama. Chances are the last president the Reagan democrats voted for, was a democrat, since they were almost all dead by the time Trump came along (in fact they were probably mostly dead by the time Obama came along).
The reason why these voters tended to be thought off as working class was because the media still tended to think,white ethnic Catholics as working class, even if this was horribly dated by the 1980s, let alone today.
Excellent points.
Looking through the 1972 and 1984 elections, and comparing them with 2000 and 2016, makes it clear that the issues driving long-term Democratic voters to the Republican Party were
not the same in the two cases at all. There exist three major issues that account for the rapid shift of many banner McGovern and Mondale counties in rural coal (and metal-mining and timber) country to Republicans from Bush junior onwards:
- Environmental restrictions by the Democratic Party being viewed as deadly to local job prospects
- The Democratic Party’s support for continued high immigration, which they definitively view as making their wages unable to sustain an adequate livelihood
- The Democratic Party’s support for gun control is intolerable in these areas because guns are embedded in their traditions
In the days of McGovern and Mondale, immigration and gun control were nowhere near the litmus test issues that they are today. It was only in the 1990s that they became important. In fact, the suburban “Reagan Democrats” may not have been opposed to gun control
à la Europe of Australia at all, when the most loyal white-majority McGovern and Mondale counties were fiercely opposed thereto.
As for immigration, Reagan had little or no desire for a restrictive policy, although it is fair to say that played and plays into the hands of big businesses seeking low-wage labor to import from outside the United States. It is highly plausible that coal country (and some politically not dissimilar mining and logging counties elsewhere, especially the Upper Midwest) in the 1970s and 1980s desired
much more restrictive immigration laws than
either major party would even consider.
Turning to the environment, it must be remembered that Nixon’s term preceding the 1972 election had seen the most significant legislation in this field of
any presidential term ever. If in 1972 coal, logging and mining counties saw any fear of legislation affecting their populaces’ livelihoods, they had no incentive to back Nixon.
What was much more important to the “Reagan Democrats” is the perception that the Democratic Party had failed them economically and that it was catering to “fringe” groups like nonwhites, the welfare class and others amongst the very poor, and student radicals.
This perception has constituted a critical component of every Republican election victory since the Voting Rights Act. What
has changed since 1984 is that the middle and upper classes no longer perceive the Democratic Party as an economic failure to anything like the same extent. Hence, the Democratic Party now gains twice the proportion of votes from the richest quintile that Mondale did. Contrariwise, poor whites, who have most to lose from the Democratic Party’s powerful identification with the nonwhite welfare class, whose resources they believe must go to white workers instead, have become the most hostile group in the United States to the Democratic Party. Often, this hostility is not expressed via Republican voting, but via not voting at all, because these poor and underclass whites cannot trust the GOP (especially to rigidly restrict immigration) no matter how much they hate the Democrats. There can be little doubt that Hilary Clinton in 2016 won a substantially smaller proportion of the poorest quintile of white Americans – especially if we count the increasing proportion of nonvoters – that George McGovern did in 1972.
