Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Democrats commissioned a poll from Expedition Strategies, and the resulting report, “House Majority PAC White Working Class Voter Project,” is well worth reading.

First let’s cover the methodology:

1000 total interviews in targeted House districts with a sample of likely 2018 voters. All of the voters were White, over the age of twenty-four and did not have a college degree or higher education. The interviews were conducted June 27–July 13, 2017. The margin of error for overall results is ± 3.10% and higher among subgroups.

Next, let’s see where those interviews were conducted by regional breakdown:

The Midwest (MW) is 40% of the electorate and is defined as those living in Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota or
Wisconsin.

The Northeast (NE) is 35% of the electorate and is defined as those living in Maine, New Jersey, New York or Pennsylvania.

The South/West (SW) is 25% of the electorate and is defined as those living in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida or
Texas.

Notice the ways those samples were constructed? MW includes four swing states plus heavily Democratic Illinois. NW includes one swing state (Pennsylvania) and three heavily Democratic states. The SW (an odd way to combine two quite disparate regions anyway) includes two solidly Republican states (Arizona and Texas), two swing states (trending blue Colorado and trending red Florida) and heavily blue California. Why, it’s almost as though they cherry picked the state targets to give the appearance of fairness while oversampling heavily Democratic states. (It also suggests Democrats already think that most of the South and West are gone and aren’t coming back anytime soon.) To learn how badly this skews the poll I would need to know which congressional districts they were targeting.

Which makes the poll results all the more damning for Democrats. Let’s take a close look at some of those results

White voters without a college degree made up 34% of the electorate in 2016. Their share was stable since 2012 but our
margin got 12% worse.

12% worse in this case means going from -25% to -37%. That is indeed “worse.”

A majority (57%) said a college degree would result in more debt and little likelihood of landing a good paying job, while 43% said a college degree was a necessary step to get ahead. 83% said a college degree was no longer any guarantee of success
in America, while 17% said people who have a college degree are able to get ahead.
➢In short, when these voters hear people tell them that the answer to their concerns is college, their reaction is to essentially say –don’t force your version of the American Dream on me.

So it appears that the white working class has figured out that “Step One: Put yourself $100,000 in debt” isn’t a surefire path to success. Good for them.

While Democrats have a small advantage on health care with this group, Republicans have major advantages on middle class
tax cuts, ensuring people are rewarded for hard work, and improving the economy and creating jobs. We have a small advantage on health care despite the unpopularity of the GOP health approach, but our deficit on the economy and jobs is overwhelming.

I wonder just how much of an “advantage” Democrats have on health care, and what language was used to achieve that advantage. I doubt terribly many people whose premiums have doubled under ObamaCare would agree…

A narrative about villains did not test as well nor did the Wall Street Republican negative–this reinforces the need to emphasize solutions over villains. Our most important villain–Congressional Republicans. It’s worth keeping in mind, Democratic leaders will be a significant villain highlighted by the GOP.

Translation: The old scaremongering isn’t working any more, and Nancy Pelosi is less popular than Ebola.

Despite a majority of these voters being pro-choice, they are more concerned about cuts to infrastructure than cuts to Planned Parenthood.

I’m betting the “pro-choice” finding is oversold, thanks to this lying frame: “Democratic concerns that the Republicans significantly cut federal funding for Planned Parenthood that supports breast-cancer screenings and contraception.” It’s well documented that Planned Parenthood doesn’t perform breast cancer screening. So they even have to lie in their polling questions to get remotely close to the results they want. And even with that lie Planned Parenthood cuts are less of a concern for those polled than infrastructure spending.

The poll also contains bad news for the Democratic Party’s powerful ecoweenie faction: “The Democratic candidate for Congress opposes building new oil and gas pipelines and opposes fracking for natural gas: This was the only positive that made a majority (54%) of voters less likely to support the Democratic candidate for Congress.” I still bet Democrats will brag about bankrupting coal and preventing fracking, because they just can’t help themselves. (See also: Tom Steyer.)

This was moderately popular among the targeted demographic: “The Democratic candidate for Congress supports punishing Federal contractors who are caught cheating taxpayers by putting them in a penalty box–banning them from any federal contracts for five years.” Note that they didn’t ask about penalizing companies caught hiring illegal aliens. I bet they didn’t dare…

Then they did the pollster testing thing: “Sure, you say you hate us, but what if we told you [insert finely-honed, focus-tested Democratic talking points here]?” After all that, all that demographic sample cherry-picking and question slanting, they manage to produce a 40%/40% tie. They finally get in positive territory with “What if we told you Republicans want to murder your baby and bath in its blood?” type questions.

But their conclusions were suitably bleak for Democrats:

We suffer from the lack of an identifiable positive agenda. Without it, voters will turn to Trump for progress. With it, we can make significant gains.

Our economic deficit is devastating. Voters don’t see special interests as the problem we need to fix.

Success means better jobs that pay well, not a new campaign finance system. Let’s not confuse the end and the means.

Success means when you work hard you should be able to: get medical care and afford prescription medicine
and have a secure retirement. And when you work harder than your co-workers by doing overtime, you should
get paid for that overtime.

Translation:

Anyway, there’s a lot more to digest in that report, so take a look, if only to confirm that Democrats are finally starting to realize they have a problem.

(Director Blue has additional thoughts on the same report.)