Analysis of Fetterman's win in Pennsylvania: the working class and rural vibes

This is from Trip Gabriel's story in the New York Times on Sunday, which was headlined "Democrats See a Blueprint in Fetterman’s Victory in Pennsylvania."  The subhead was "John Fetterman flipped a key Senate seat in part by attracting white working-class votes, including in the reddest parts of his state."  

“It was enormously beneficial,” Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, said of Mr. Fetterman’s red-county incursion. “It’s really what Democrats have to try to do. I know we’ve had a debate in our party—you work to get your urban and suburban base out and hope for the best.” But Mr. Fetterman showed that a Democratic win in a battleground state could also run through rural Republican regions, Mr. Casey said.

Mr. Fetterman’s 4.4-percentage-point victory over Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent, outpaced Mr. Biden’s 1.2-point win in Pennsylvania in 2020. Mr. Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, who posed for his official portrait in an open-collar gray work shirt, won a larger share of votes than Mr. Biden did in almost every county.

In suburban counties, where the Oz campaign tried to undermine Mr. Fetterman with college-educated voters by painting him as an extremist and soft on crime, Mr. Fetterman largely held onto Democratic gains of recent years, winning about 1 percentage point more of the votes than Mr. Biden did in 2020.

Mr. Fetterman’s biggest gains were in deep-red counties dominated by white working-class voters. He didn’t win these places outright, but he drove up the margins for a Democrat by 3, 4 or 5 points compared with Mr. Biden.

Gabriel quoted Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania:  

Pennsylvania elections are about margins, and he cut into the margins Republicans had across the counties that they usually control.  He got a lot of looks from voters who aren’t very open to looking at Democrats right now.

The story continues: 

In almost no county did Mr. Fetterman improve on Mr. Biden’s margin more than in Armstrong County, in the northern exurbs of Pittsburgh, where more than 97 percent of residents are white and fewer than one in five adults has a four-year college degree.

“I expected him to win, but I didn’t think he’d do that well,” said Robert Beuth, 72, a retired factory worker in the county who voted for Mr. Fetterman, speaking of the statewide result. “I think the biggest drawback for a lot of people about Oz is that he moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to run for election. To me that’s not right.” He added that he hoped Mr. Fetterman and other Democrats in Congress would “come up with some ideas” to help “poor people working two or three jobs just to get by.”

To be sure, Dr. Oz carried deep-red Armstrong County, whose biggest employers include Walmart and a coal mining company, with 71 percent of the vote. But Mr. Fetterman’s 29 percent share was 5.4 points higher than Mr. Biden’s support two years ago.

I've written a lot about Fetterman in the last six months, and my most recent post is here.  My August Politico piece about his rural efforts is here, and my Daily Yonder piece on the same theme is here.  

Postscript:  This is from a NYT piece titled, "How Democrats Can Create a Fetterman 2.0" by Michael Sokolove, who also wrote about Fetterman just after he won the primary.  Here's the bit most salient to Fetterman's rural strategy:

Rural voters in Pennsylvania, as elsewhere in America, have been increasingly beyond the reach of Democrats. So why bother when you can just mine the deep trove of Democratic votes in the cities and close-in suburbs?

But Mr. Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor and an unconventional politician in almost every way, did not waver. And the results showed that he had substantially cut into the huge margins that Donald Trump ran up in Pennsylvania’s deep-red communities in defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016 — and again four years later in losing the state, just barely, to Joe Biden.

* * * 

One lesson from Mr. Fetterman is that he showed up, repeatedly, in places that Democrats rarely visited. He began during his run for Senate in 2016, when he lost in the primary. After he was elected lieutenant governor in 2018, a job with few official duties, he traveled the state constantly.

The essay then quotes Jeff Eggleston, chair of the state's Democratic Rural Caucus: 

He has physically spent more time in rural Pennsylvania than any candidate I’ve ever seen,He got to know people. He spent time in our backyards. He made real, meaningful relationships, so people were willing to make a huge sacrifice in order to get him over the finish line.

And here's the bit most salient to his Working Class vibe:

Mr. Fetterman’s style and appearance are the first things that set him apart. Neil Oxman, a Philadelphia consultant who has run more than a dozen statewide races, including those of the two-term governor Ed Rendell, said that “you can’t discount the look” — his signature outfit is a Carhartt hoodie and cargo shorts. Mr. Oxman noted: “It’s an entry. He can talk to blue-collar people in a way that other Democrats have been failing at.”

Finally, Ezra Klein talked a lot about Fetterman on his podcast last week, including how Fetterman literally embodied a working class vibe.  (Same sort of stuff I wrote in my two essays above in Politico and the Daily Yonder).  There was a particularly memorable line about Fetterman not only being at the bar, but being in the bar fight.  

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Edsall on Democrats' uphill battle in 2022, 2024, with attention to the white working class

The headline for Thomas Edsall's column is "Democrats are Making Life too Easy for Republicans," and an excerpt focusing on the white working class follows:  

At the moment, there is widespread pessimism among those on the left end of the political spectrum. Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, replying by email to my inquiry, wrote that for predictable reasons, “Democrats face an uphill battle in both 2022 and 2024.”

But, she went on, “the problems are much deeper. First, the white working class that used to vote Democratic no longer does.” Sawhill noted that when she

studied this group back in 2018, what surprised me most was their very negative attitudes toward government, their dislike of social welfare programs, their commitment to an ethic of personal responsibility and the importance of family and religion in their lives. This large group includes some people who are just plain prejudiced but a larger group that simply resents all the attention paid to race, gender, sexual preference or identity and the disrespect they think this entails for those with more traditional views and lifestyles.

Messages coming from the more progressive members of the Democratic Party, Sawhill warned, “will be exploited by Republicans to move moderate Democrats or to move no-Trump Republicans in their direction.”

Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is highly critical of the contemporary Democratic Party, writing by email:

Misguided focus on unpopular social policies are driving voters away from the Democratic Party and are mobilizing Republicans. Democrats used to be the party of the working class, but today they are instead seen as a party defined by ostensibly legalizing property crime, crippling the police and injecting social justice into math classes.

As a result, Westwood continued,

It is no surprise that this doesn’t connect with a working family struggling to pay for surging grocery bills. By abandoning their core brand, even Democrats who oppose defunding the police are burdened by the party’s commitment to unpopular social policy.

The traditional strategy in midterm elections, Westwood wrote, is to mobilize the party base. Instead, he contended, Democrats

have decided to let the fringe brand the party’s messaging around issues that fail to obtain majority support among the base. Perhaps the most successful misinformation campaign in modern politics is being waged by the Twitter left against the base of the Democratic Party. The Twitter mob is intent on pushing social policies that have approximately zero chance of becoming law as a test of liberalism. Even if you support reducing taxes on the middle class, immigration reform and increasing the minimum wage, opposing defunding the police or the legalization of property crime makes you an unreasonable outcast.  (emphasis mine)

In other words, Westwood is blasting purity tests. 

I have highlighted the column's comment about the rural-urban dynamic in a post at Legal Ruralism.