Define "White Working Class".
The author appears to define it simply as "whites with less than a four-year college degree", with no other economic component. (And presumably excluding white Hispanics, though this is never explicitly stated).
Terrible definition.
Just curious, what is your specific definition? Levinson's was quite simplistic, but I'd like to know which economic component you factor in your view of the white working class. Other commentators, like the New York Times' Thomas Edsall, define white working class
in the same manner as Levinson.
Here is Edsall's general definition:
I'd imagine that Hillary Clinton would perform better among the white working class than President Obama did. Seeming as she crushed Obama in this demographic during the primary.
That's probably true, keeping in mind Clinton's strong performances in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and (of course) Arkansas during the 2008 Democratic nomination. That was six years ago, but it might still have some application to 2016.
Honestly, this map isn't much different than if we just had it as "whites" in general.
Whites with a college degree may be somewhat more Democratic than whites without one, but income disparities make it pretty close to even.
I suppose the white working class map wasn't that different from whites as a whole.
Honestly, I wish that the map I included could have been broken down state by state for a better comparison. Separating the white working class into five regions as opposed to fifty states doesn't do as much justice to this topic as I'd like, but since the media is not carrying out exit polls in every state, I suppose this is the best we can do.
There were some differences between the white vote and the white working class vote, for instance, perhaps Colorado and Iowa shouldn't have been grouped with the states they were put in. I do know that
Obama won whites overall in Iowa in 2012, but the margin was thin (51/49), so perhaps Obama overperformed just enough with college educated whites to outweigh a loss with white working class voters.
Also, according to the article, Obama won only 40% of "large metro" whites w/o a college degree. I wonder if these people actually live within city limits, as Dems do pretty well with urban whites.
That's a reasonable concern. I can't imagine that Obama actually did that poorly with the white vote in large metro areas.