George Will was upset, responding with great sarcasm that Sullivan's view is that all these lost voters suddenly became racists in the last four years. Even Gywn Ifill pointed out that John Kerry lost the white vote.
What neither Will nor Ifill want to acknowledge is that the problem with the ability of Democratic presidential candidates to attract white voters--while a very real phenomenon--is one that is almost entirely confined to the South.
I pointed out in an earlier blog that a poll taken in August showed that
Among white working-class voters in the South, Romney held a commanding 40-point lead over Obama (62% vs. 22%). However, neither candidate held a statistically significant lead among white working-class voters in the West (46% Romney vs. 41% Obama), Northeast (42% Romney vs. 38% Obama), and Midwest (36% Romney vs. 44% Obama). - from Beyond Guns and God: Understanding the Complexities of the White Working Class in America by Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox
Additionally, a paper presented in 2004 by Larry Bartels shows
White voters in the bottom third of the income distribution have actually become more reliably Democratic in presidential elections over the past half-century, while middle- and upper-income white voters have trended Republican. Low-income whites have become less Democratic in their partisan identifications, but at a slower rate than more affluent whites – and that trend is entirely confined to the South, where Democratic identification was artificially inflated by the one-party system of the Jim Crow era.
As Bartel's data shows, between 1954-2004 the percentage of white, working-class voters outside of the South that voted for Democratic presidential candidates fell by a whopping 1%. The loss of Democratic support among whites since the 1950s has been almost exclusively a Southern phenomenon.
Andrew Sullivan was right.
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