Over at Early Returns, Kenny Baer’s blog at TPMCafe, Kenny notes a poll just put out by the new group Third Way, which claims to show that the Democrats have lost the support of the American middle class, notwithstanding the fact that the Dems claim to be the party of the middle class.
But this sounding strikes me as telling us much less than it claims to say.
For instance, given the expansive terms by which we in the US define “the middle class”, any party that loses a national election pretty much by definition loses the middle class simply because it’s close to impossible to win a national election if you don’t win the middle class.
The study goes on to say that the Dems’ weakness with the middle class is obscured by their disproportionate strength among African Americans. But, as I’ve said before, aren’t blacks voters too? I’ve never quite understood this sort of formulation.
The simple fact is that Democrats haven’t been able to win a majority in either house of Congress for more than a decade. So clearly they’ve got to wring more voters from somewhere in order to become the majority party again. But this way of slicing and dicing the numbers seems inherently misleading.
