[Marxism] class- and race-based analysis of the election

["acpollack2@xxxxxxxx" <acpollack2@xxxxxxxx>]

Below is a very precise, county by county analysis of the Minnesota vote 
showing the class and race factors behind the outcome. It mirrors what we've 
seen in the county by county shaded maps on which one can pick out the 
urban/industrial concentrations.

I would just add a piece of evidence to his claim about the uselessness of the 
DP a quote from an anonymous AFL staffer the day after, complaining bitterly 
about how the AFL did all the legwork for the DP and the latter sat on their 
asses.

Well, duh! Get out of the friggin' party!

http://www.laborstandard.org/Election/Election_2004_by_Riehle.htm

Election 2004

by Dave Riehle
--------

This article is addressed mainly to readers in the Minnesota labor movement. 
The author is active as a trade unionist in St. Paul , Minnesota . The general 
point of the article, however, is applicable nationwide?that is, where unions 
are weak, Bush won out; where unions are stronger, Bush went down. Conclusion: 
make unions stronger; organize the unorganized.?The Editors

The just-concluded presidential election is now grist for the mill of the 
pundits and professors who are happy to tell us what it really meant. As if the 
nearly two-year-long presidential campaign wasn?t punishment enough!

The dominant theme of the editorial page wiseguys is that ?moral values? were 
the touchstone of the voters, and that ?social conservatives? prevailed. An 
important, and ominous, underlying message (let us assume that in this case the 
wish is father to the thought) is that organized labor has lost its ability to 
influence its constituency.

According to this version, the old blue-collar Democratic Party of FDR and 
Harry Truman has been replaced by an effete cadre of peace-mongering, 
gun-hating, and gay-marriage-promoting urban liberals. The union leaders, the 
pundits say, are out of touch with their members. The union leaders supported 
John Kerry, the losing candidate, and the banner carrier for such irrelevant 
concerns, which equals, in this analysis, four political flat tires for labor. 
The fact that Kerry?s positions on these and other issues were virtually 
indistinguishable from those associated with President Bush does not deflect 
these ?analysts? from their appointed conclusions.

A closer review of election statistics now and in the past, I believe, presents 
another picture with far different, and far more optimistic, implications and 
possibilities for labor.

The larger assumption in the pundits? pundificating is that in every election 
the voting (and nonvoting) public presents a clean slate to the candidates, to 
be filled in with ?moral values,? or some other slippery category. This is a 
gross oversimplification, not to say an outright distortion of the actual 
dynamics of voting in the U.S. In this election, at least according to official 
results, the popular vote was 51% for Bush and 48% for Kerry. The undeniable 
statistical conclusion is that a 2?3% shift in the vote would have changed the 
outcome of the election, almost as though the final decision were to be made by 
a toss of the coin. This hardly adds up to a decisive referendum on ?moral 
values? or anything else.

First, the truth is that both major parties have large and relatively stable 
blocs of voting supporters. That is why they are ?major parties.? In recent 
decades the outcome of presidential elections has been determined by a shifting 
?center? of 5?10%, often less, with the major parties retaining their core 
support election after election. Most of these generalizations about what the 
election ?meant,? then, concern the preoccupations and moods of an unstable and 
numerically marginal ?center? group whose votes are influenced by factors like 
?moral concerns,? mostly manufactured out of whole cloth by the media, the 
politicians, and the big money behind them. Of course the size of this ?center? 
vote fluctuates up and down by degrees along with whatever portion of the 
eligible electorate actually turns out to vote, usually between 50?60% 
nationally. The ?center? could easily be outvoted if one of the Big Two got 
another 3?5% of their regular supporters out to vote. That was obviously 
organized labor?s strategy. The AFL-CIO reports that 24% of the electorate this 
time around were union members?double the representation in the population at 
large?while the Republicans sought to sandbag those they saw as potential Kerry 
voters, and to whip up their latent ?moralists? to get out and vote down gay 
marriage.

The big engines in elections, however, remain the two major parties and their 
permanent supporters. Underlying this rather obvious factor are others, more 
related to economics and class that should especially concern the labor 
movement.

Let?s look at Minnesota. Six counties tallied votes of about 60% or more for 
Kerry. Ranked in percentile order of their Kerry vote totals, they are: (1) St 
Louis County, (2) Ramsey, (3) Carlton, (4) Mower, (5) Lake and (6) Hennepin.

What do these counties have in common, other than that they are all in 
Minnesota? Two adjacent counties, Hennepin and Ramsey, of course make up the 
core of the Twin Cities metro area, which contains an absolute majority of the 
state?s population. Three others are also contiguous to one another, St. Louis, 
Lake, and Carlton counties. The state?s third largest city, Duluth, is in St. 
Louis County. And then there is Mower County, all by itself down by the Iowa 
border.

Let?s try putting on a labor filter and taking another look. Each of these six 
counties has an exceptionally strong union base among its population, and, more 
than that, they have generations-old traditions of labor political action.

Carlton, St. Louis, and Lake are overwhelmingly rural counties that essentially 
encompass the heavily unionized Minnesota Iron Range and the industrial cities 
of Duluth and Cloquet. Cloquet unions have celebrated Labor Day with a picnic 
and parade for some 80 years, a longer unbroken stretch than any other 
Minnesota location. This should not be minimized as simply the persistence of 
some quaint and charming tradition from a different time. Fundamentally what 
underlies this is the undoubted fact that the labor movement there has 
continuously intervened in public life in these northeastern counties in a 
demonstrative way for most of the past century.

The Twin Cities urban areas, besides having the state?s largest concentration 
of union membership, also contain by far the largest minority groups, both in 
terms of percentage and absolute numbers. Among African Americans, the 
proportion of union membership is nearly double that of the majority 
population, and the mass institutions that enroll African Americans?union, 
civil rights, religious?are usually closely aligned on social and political 
issues.

Then there is Mower County. Do Geo. A Hormel and Local P-9 ring a bell? The 
mighty struggles of the Hormel workers, from their original sit-down strike in 
1933 to the landmark strike in 1985-86, have done their work over generations 
in forging an indelible labor political consciousness in that mostly rural 
county. Next door, in Freeborn County, packinghouse workers at the Wilson Co. 
built a sister union in Albert Lea, beginning in the 1930s. That county went 
for Kerry with 55%.

Other counties with a similar pattern are Winona and Blue Earth counties, 
anchored by the regional centers of Winona and Mankato, also with strong and 
active labor movements.

Western Minnesota counties such as Norman, Lac Qui Parle, Swift, and Stevens, 
with traditions imbedded in the struggles of militant farmers, from the 
Non-Partisan League, to the Farm Holiday to the National Farmers Organization 
in the 1960s, also delivered majorities for Kerry.

Surely these counties, both heavily urbanized and rural, did not vote in their 
majorities the way they did because of some harmony of outlook on ?moral 
values,? religion, the Second Amendment, or, it is probably safe to say, the 
war in Iraq.

What these votes expressed is the impact of those sectors of the population 
most influenced by the recommendations of the labor movement (and certain farm 
and agricultural organizations as well), and the broader sections of the 
population that they in turn affect. This is not to say that other factors did 
not impinge on the outcome of the election, too. A large and active stratum of 
urban liberals weighed in heavily for the Democrats, especially in the Twin 
Cities. And a substantial number of workers and union members voted for Bush.

The AFL-CIO reported, for example, that Kerry lost nationally among white men 
by 61?38%, yet among white male union members he carried by 21%. In the Black 
metropolis of Washington, DC, Bush lost by 89?90%.

The Minnesota regional and county voting pattern has persisted for many 
generations. It is not ephemeral and it is not fundamentally disrupted by 
changing political winds. And it has analogs in every state.

Much has been made, for example, of the remarkable conformity of a map of the 
pre-Civil War free and slave states to an overlay map of 2004 voting 
patterns?the states that went for Kerry are almost an exact duplication of the 
free states and territories of 1860, and the old South and the territories that 
were open to slavery went to Bush. This is in fact quite a striking 
juxtaposition of images, and, further, one that is not accidental. But what 
does it mean? That the South is more ?backward?? That it is less educated?

Not really. It reflects the more circumscribed influence of the labor movement 
in the former Confederacy. Looking at a national map of 2004 election patterns 
in the deep South, it is obvious that a majority vote for Kerry?that is, the 
vote the unions campaigned for?is focused primarily in two areas: along both 
banks of the Mississippi River as it flows between Arkansas, Tennessee, 
Louisiana, and Mississippi, where petro-chemical and other unionized industries 
are concentrated, and through the industrial and mining belt in central 
Alabama, again an area with a history of industrial unionism extending back 
through the last century. Kerry?s counties in Louisiana lay almost entirely 
along the banks of the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a dense 
concentration of refineries and shipyards.

The problem in the South is not that they are dumber than we are.  The 
continuing oppression of Black and white labor (the South is uniformly 
?Right-to-Work?) is expressed vividly in the statistics for union density (the 
percentage of union members among the employed nonagricultural population). In 
Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, and South Carolina the numbers are 6.1%, 
9.8%, 3.7% and 3.7%. Yet North Carolina has the highest proportion of 
industrial workers to the general population of any state.

By contrast, in Minnesota, which had the highest voter turnout in the country 
(77%), union density was 18.4% in year 2000. In national ranking of union 
density Minnesota is in a three-way tie for fourth place among industrialized 
states.

In terms of labor strategy it is crucial to realize that the working class 
voting pattern discussed here is only superficially a ??Democrat? vote?rather 
it is a class and trade union vote, that is, a vote that follows the 
recommendations of organized labor. What has diminished it in terms of exacting 
electoral majorities is not the weakening of the ability of organized labor to 
influence its constituency, but de-industrialization. Minnesota?s union density 
in 1964 was more than double what it was in 2000. It went from 37% in 1964 to 
18.4% in 2000. Michigan went from 44.8% to 21%. Alabama went from 21% to 9%. 
The message is unmistakable?we have to organize the unorganized to strengthen 
labor. Anything else is putting the cart before the horse.

The class nature of 20th century voting by workers (and working farmers) is 
very clear especially when viewed through the lenses of Minnesota?s unique 
political history, because the dominant party among workers in this state for 
25 years during the middle 20th century was not the Democratic Party?it was the 
Farmer Labor Party (FLP). Only after the unions participated in the merger of 
the Farmer Labor Party into the state Democratic Party during World War II did 
workers shift their political support.

In 1932, when the FLP?s Floyd B. Olson swept to victory in the governor?s race 
(the same year Franklin Roosevelt was first elected), the Democratic 
gubernatorial candidate got only 16.1% of the vote cast. This was the 
consistent pattern from 1919, when the Minnesota State Federation of Labor 
struck out on the third party path by creating the Working People?s 
Non-Partisan League. For the next quarter century the Democrats were a feeble 
third-place party, rarely getting over 10% of the vote in statewide elections.

So which is the tail and which is the dog? Who is the wagger and who is the 
waggee? It should be quite clear, to borrow another animal metaphor, that 
without organized labor the Democratic Party would be a dead donkey. Yet, 
although labor is formally independent of the Dems, most in labor are convinced 
that labor can only prosper if its political ?friends? (Democrats mostly) are 
in public office. ?Reward your friends and punish your enemies,? recommended 
Samuel Gompers, the master of a pungent phrase.

But the problem is, our enemies are punishing us, and our ?friends? are 
standing by with folded arms, as we hope, pray, mobilize, and vote for a savior 
to lead us out of the wilderness. If there is one thing that ought to be clear 
from the election, it is that is not going to happen.

Labor?s fate has always been decided on the picket lines and in the streets, by 
workers muscling in on the prerogatives of the bosses. Back in the late 1930s 
the New Yorker magazine ran a famous, and often reprinted cartoon, as a wave of 
worksite occupations rolled across the country after the great victory by the 
autoworkers at Flint, Michigan. It shows a fat capitalist in his nightgown at 
his bedside, kneeling down for his evening prayer and imploring, ?Please don?t 
let them sit down in my factories!?

What we need more than ever is a movement, confrontational, aggressive, and 
inspirational. History, properly understood, should teach us that course of 
action won?t isolate us, which is what they want us to think?it will bring the 
unorganized to their feet. And the outlines of it are right there on the 
election map, if looked at through the right prism. The best-kept secret of 
Election 2004 is not that ?America? is moving to the right, but that workers 
are stickin? with the union.


_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism