Get yer polls, bets, numbers & pretty graphs! Elections 2008

Re the old debate about whether Obama's initial disadvantage among working class voters was a question of his message not appealing to them or their being low-infomation voters who only caught on as the race became everpresent, this is something of a stalemate. He did caught on among non-college educated voters more as time went by, even when the brief mid-February surge faded, but still only closed the gap halfway. So a bit of both - plus, of course, Obama also adjusted his campaign focus and tone over time.

3. SHE LED HIM TO THE WORKING CLASS

If Mr. Obama goes on to win the nomination, one of the signature challenges of his general election campaign will be his ability to win over the traditional Democratic blue-collar voters that have flocked to Mrs. Clinton in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. In a sense, Mrs. Clinton's success with this constituency exposed his vulnerability with it ?- a vulnerability he might not have known existed to such an extent had Mrs. Clinton dropped out early and Mr. Obama breezed to the nomination.

In recent weeks, Mr. Obama started doing more retail events, talked more about his family's economic challenges growing up (to address a creeping rap of elitism, however ill-fitting that label is). He saw what played well (a tough-love opposition to the gas tax holiday) and what needed work (his bowling). He worked to escape the pigeonhole that he was a big arena rock star. He has recently done fewer big rallies and more one-of-you performances (pick-up hoops games in Indiana). He seemed to heed Mrs. Clinton's recurring criticism that Mr. Obama was all about "creating an atmosphere" and "giving great speeches." There have been fewer shots of a larger-than-life Mr. Obama at a podium, more of him face-to-face with workers (or waffles). More listening photo ops, in other words, and fewer talking ones.

I cannot tell you how many times this election cycle I've seen variations of the above -- an article noting that Obama is changing his message, finally rolling up his sleeves, finally doing small events, finally trying to connect with working-class voters. When he's been doing this from the beginning! [..] It was almost all small events, town halls, taking questions. Lots of rural and working-class milieus. Lots of white faces.

In recent weeks, Mr. Obama started doing more retail events, talked more about his family's economic challenges growing up (to address a creeping rap of elitism, however ill-fitting that label is).

He saw what played well (a tough-love opposition to the gas tax holiday) and what needed work (his bowling). He worked to escape the pigeonhole that he was a big arena rock star. He has recently done fewer big rallies and more one-of-you performances (pick-up hoops games in Indiana).

He seemed to heed Mrs. Clinton's recurring criticism that Mr. Obama was all about "creating an atmosphere" and "giving great speeches." There have been fewer shots of a larger-than-life Mr. Obama at a podium, more of him face-to-face with workers (or waffles). More listening photo ops, in other words, and fewer talking ones.

Change Makes a Call on Levittown

New York Times
April 6, 2008

Any longtime resident could lead you to the other sites where the men of Levittown found muscular, good-paying work ?- Vulcanized Rubber and Plastics; Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M); Thiokol, a defense contractor; the big General Motors plant across the river in Trenton. They worked their shifts and came home to their young families and their little patches of green. Many had moved here from the cramped neighborhoods of Philadelphia's blue-collar "river wards" or from coal country in upstate Pennsylvania.

You could call the Levittown experience the American dream, but that does not get to what was best about it: its concrete, earthbound specificity. The union wage. The house you could purchase in the mid-1950s for $8,990, with a down payment of $100. The elementary schools that Levitt & Sons put right in the neighborhoods, so that no young child would have to ride a bus. The Olympic-size public pools and the Levittown Shop-a-Rama, with its department stores and soda fountains and its parking for 6,000 cars. [..]

The dream is vanishing in the same specific ways it came to life. The young men of the community no longer follow their fathers into the mill, because the work force at U.S. Steel has dwindled to fewer than 100. [..] The old 3M plant has become something called the Bristol Commerce Center, and most of the other manufacturers are long gone. The town's main intersection, Five Points, is dotted with check-cashing agencies and pawnshops. The original Shop-a-Rama was leveled. [..]

My parents moved to Levittown in 1955 from their one-bedroom Philadelphia apartment, even though my father's first impression of the new suburb was distinctly negative. A young lawyer and World War II veteran, [..] the freshly built town reminded him of a huge Army camp. Houses sprawled in every direction over bare terrain, with newly strung electrical wires crisscrossing overhead. The baby trees planted by William Levitt's workers were not yet much taller than the Fords, Chevys and Studebakers parked in the driveways.

But Levittown was what my parents could afford. The purchase price of their two-story, three-bedroom house, which Levitt called a "Jubilee," was $11,250. They borrowed their $100 down payment from my mother's father, a grocer, and paid a mortgage of $65 a month.

I was born the following year, the second of three children, and spent my entire childhood in that house. Nearly everything about Levittown seemed normal to me. Even the name of our street, Vulcan Road, seemed normal enough. [..]

In the early years, close to 30 percent of Levittown's population was under 5 years old. On summer nights, we played hide-and-seek in backyards and kick-the-can in the street. When the trees matured, we found that they produced pears, a fruit too exotic to appeal to most of the families [..], so we had great fun throwing them at one another.

Like every boy I knew in Levittown, I learned how to do manual labor and to value work, and workers, of all kinds. During my high-school summers, I cut grass in parks and on the medians of highways, unloaded trucks and walked beside road-paving equipment with a rake to smooth the hot asphalt along the curbs. During a long strike by the schoolteachers, I found a job in one of the area's small steel plants. Even for kids, there was good money to be made. My best friend took a year off from college to mix big vats of chemicals at the 3M plant, where an old-timer told him, "Remember, don't take all your money and buy a boat with it; buy property." When times were good at the steel mill and overtime was plentiful, it seemed as if half of Levittown had Winnebagos or other gargantuan recreational vehicles parked in their driveways. Land boats. [..]

My parents were deeply involved in local politics. They worked the polls every election, and my brother, sister and I stood alongside them, handing out literature and helping keep track of who voted and who needed to be reminded or picked up and delivered to the election site. When I turned 18, my mother instructed me on everything she believed I needed to know about voting. "Just pull the big lever," she said, by which she meant the Democratic lever that automatically cast votes for the party's entire ticket. [..]

The number of adults in Levittown with college degrees was 13 percent, according to the 2000 census, roughly half of the national figure. Its median income was $52,514, a little more than $10,000 above the national level then. Some of that money came in pension payments from old union jobs, and some people worked multiple jobs. "You've got four or five jobs in a household now," Carl LaVO, a longtime Levittown resident and an editor at The Bucks County Courier Times, told me. "The jobs are retail clerks, painters, warehouse clerks, truck drivers."

On one of my days in Levittown, I visited with Janet Keyser, a childhood friend from the next street over who is now chairwoman of the local Democratic Party and the director of the water and sewer authority. "There's not many $25-an-hour jobs anymore," she said. "It's very, very sad in Levittown right now. It's not like it was, where the father got his son a job in the mill, and then when the son got out of high school, he came into the mill full time. We get the list of foreclosures and sheriff's sales at the authority, and every month, it's more. And these aren't bums or people on drugs. They're good people."

And on matters of race Levittown has a particularly shameful history. It was billed as "the most perfectly planned community in America," and part of the plan was for it to be whites-only: 5,500 acres, stretching across three Pennsylvania townships and one borough, closed off to blacks. The first development of mass-produced homes by Levitt & Sons, Levittown, N.Y., on Long Island, which dates from 1947, had the same exclusionary policies. William Levitt weakly insisted that he would love to sell houses to black families but had "come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours."

In 1957, when a black family, the Myers, finally did move into Levittown, Pa., after buying from an original owner, their home was besieged for several nights by a mob that numbered in the hundreds. Rocks were hurled through the windows. In seeking a court order to stop the harassment, Daisy Myers referred to "annoying practices," which included parades of cars rolling by her home as the occupants sang "Old Black Joe" and "Dixie."

That was a half-century ago. Still, by the numbers, Levittown is not much changed. According to the last U.S. Census, just 2 percent of its 54,000 residents are African-American; about an equal percentage are Hispanic. [..]

There were a few small black neighborhoods on the fringes of town, non-Levitt-built houses, and their children attended our schools, but not comfortably. Periodically, brawls broke out between white and black students, and I spent parts of my high-school years with police and police dogs stationed in our corridors to keep the races apart. The word "nigger" rolled off the tongues of many of my classmates, and sometimes I would object, which had no effect other than to give me an adolescent's fleeting sense of superiority.

I felt of Levittown ?- and apart from it. I was always among just a small handful of Jewish kids at my schools, and my father was the rare college-educated person on our side of town. [..] He belonged to the N.A.A.C.P. and A.C.L.U., and he hired into his small firm the first black lawyer in Bucks County [..]. My father became a judge in 1981, and soon after my parents moved away from Levittown and closer to the county courthouse. In the course of researching this article, I asked my parents for their memories of when the Myers family broke Levittown's color line. "That case is very sensitive to me," said my father, who is 82. "I think it represented a show of cowardice on my part."

A small group of Levittowners stood vigil in front of the Myers home in opposition to the mob and in support of the family. My father said he wanted to join them but was running for township commissioner, the equivalent of city council. "My political friends very easily talked me out of going over to that house," he said. "They said it would be a disaster for my prospects to be elected. They were probably right. But I took the easy way out and sat back."

Ersula Cosby became the co-leader of Team No. 7.5 because she seemed to have energy and a talent for organizing. She had worked as a technical writer while attending Temple University's law school at night [..]. The only time that Cosby, a black woman raised in Pittsburgh, betrayed an awareness of the tough terrain they were stepping into was when she mentioned where she hoped to open a law practice. "People have advised me I definitely need to get north of Route 1," she told me, meaning out of Levittown and toward the middle part of Bucks County, which is perceived as being more socially tolerant.

Annunziata, the former council president, was probably the most politically astute of the volunteers. "It's silly to ignore it or pretend Obama's race isn't a factor, especially for some of the older people," he said. Annunziata lives in Levittown with his 78-year-old father, Carmine, but said he had not yet been able to make him an Obama voter. "I have to realize that this is a big change for him," he said. "So far, the best I've been able to do is move him from Hillary to undecided."

Neil Oxman is a political consultant in Philadelphia and may know Pennsylvania better than any political professional. [..] "Pennsylvania is like a home game for Hillary," Oxman told me. "In places like Levittown, he was cutting into her demographic. The blue-collar males were available to him partly because they did not like her. But about four or five days before the Ohio and Texas primaries, she turned the election from a referendum on change to a referendum on experience, and he lost them." [..]

Near the end of our visit, Keyser asked me if I remembered the milk trucks that came around and dropped bottles into boxes we had in front of our houses. She rhapsodized about the schools that we could walk to, the now-closed public pools and the Woolworth's and W. T. Grant's at the old shopping center. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama is bringing back any of that. But Hillary Clinton evokes memories of eight years of better times, and she would bring back Bill ?- who, here in Levittown, is not a damper on her campaign but rather a security blanket. [..]

The cascade down the job ladder ?- with one job not as good as the last ?- is a particularly working-class syndrome. It is the sort of slide that makes a person less likely to take a chance and more prone to cling to the familiar. Marty Clark, whom I knew in high school, worked at the mill and then as a longshoreman and now has a nonunion job driving a truck. "I don't know Obama that well," he said as he sat at the bar at midafternoon on St. Patrick's Day. "It seems to me like he's got no experience. She'd be the way I'd go."

Obama's lofty rhetoric did not move these men, but neither did it go over their heads, exactly. They heard it, and it seemed to have the opposite of its intended effect. It bothered them. All insisted that his race had nothing to do with their coolness to him. "The guy does a lot of talking, but I haven't heard him say anything great yet," said Dennis Haines, a 38-year-old self-employed electrical contractor and a Democrat who thought he would vote for Clinton in the primary but probably for McCain in November.

The real language of Levittown is arithmetic. The hourly wage. The mortgage payment. How to make ends meet or, better yet, get ahead. Another of the men in the bar, Brian Foley, was a Teamsters truck driver. He explained to me the difficult math for a driver who owns his own rig: "Diesel fuel is up to $4.19 a gallon. Let's say you're fully loaded at 80,000 pounds. You get four miles a gallon, five max. You tell me how that works?" [..]

Steve Woods sat drinking a Coors Light and talking with his buddies. A Philadelphia Phillies spring-training game was on TV, and he glanced up at it every time the audio picked up the crack of the bat. I asked him if the presidential campaign interested him. "Absolutely," he said. Rapid fire, he told me the issues he cared about: "No. 1, gas prices. It's killing everybody. No. 2, immigrants. They should go back to Mexico. Three, guns. Everybody should have the right to bear arms. In fact, everyone should have a gun in this day and age."

I wondered if he was a Republican. "Are you kidding?" he said. "I'm a Democrat all the way. I hate Republicans."

Woods, who is 32, said that he had been trained at the local technical high school as a land surveyor but had been working only sporadically. He had been picking up "side jobs," a term I heard over and over again in Levittown. It refers to temporary labor: carpentry, landscaping, junk hauling.

Woods was for Hillary Clinton, and if Obama was the Democratic nominee, he said he would vote for the Republican, John McCain, in November. "Hillary all the way," he said. "We need Hillary. She knows the game. Obama has no experience. He talks about change, change, change. Everybody says he's new; he's refreshing; he's charismatic. I don't think he's got a clue."

maporsche wrote:

I don't know if someone else has already replied to this, but what she means is that if the delegate allocation were 'winner take all' like the republican primaries, Clinton would have won and had a greater margin than Obama currently enjoys.

If there were no proportional delegate system, Clinton would be the winner.

Your analysis, sir, was not correct. Here is an extensively researched one. Obama wins under Republican rules as well.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/5/13/01832/3725/56/514556

I guess Obama wasn't expected to win West Virginia, but he is getting seriously stomped big time. Not even getting 30% of the vote with more than 3/4 counted. Is this the sign of a winner in November?

I guess Obama wasn't expected to win West Virginia, but he is getting seriously stomped big time. Not even getting 30% of the vote with more than 3/4 counted. Is this the sign of a winner in November?

But Obama didn't even get 30% of the vote. That is pretty bad, and demonstrates how bad he could lose in November, if he loses a number of swing states. The only problem the Republicans have is our candidate is running like a liberal on some issues, and so will our voters stay home? If they don't stay home, and if a significant portion of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party votes McCain, it won't be pretty for Obama. And I think there could be more shoes to drop on Obama before November.