AFL-CIO: Brown Win Is "Working-Class Revolt"
Photo: Liz Lynch, National Journal
But even as they read the results as a warning sign that Dems are not addressing needs of a core constituency, labor officials and pollsters insisted that Brown's come-from-behind victory was not a referendum on Pres. Obama, health care reform or national Dems' agenda.
"This was fundamentally a working-class revolt that took place in Massachusetts," Hart Research pollster Guy Molyneux said on a conference call to discuss the poll results with reporters this p.m.
According to the Hart telephone survey, which sampled 810 voters on election night and had a margin of error of +/- 3.8%, Coakley lost non-college voters to Brown by a 20-point margin -- a "40-point net swing" from WH '08, Molyneux said, when Obama won the same group by 21 points.
Brown won non-college men by 27 points, thanks to a heavy-on-pickup-truck populism. But the real warning sign lies in Brown's victory over Coakley among non-college women, a demographic he won by 13 points. Overall, Coakley won among women by only two points, a gender gap that was "considerably smaller" than the 24-point gap in '08, Molyneux said.
"The real story here was much more about class than gender, with just a collapse of working-class support," he added.
Brown won despite facing serious political obstacles that, in any other state, might have doomed a GOPer. Asked who has the right policies for fixing the economy, 47% chose Obama, while just 1 in 3 picked Congressional GOPers.
A 61% majority of those polled said the federal government has helped Wall Street but hasn't helped "average working people," the poll showed. Meanwhile, 47% say they are worried Dems haven't made enough changes, while 32% said the party in power is changing things too quickly.
AFL-CIO officials said that the polling data show that voters' core goals haven't changed, and that voters still support Obama's agenda.
"Voters, and particularly working-class voters, were responding to the fact that no one was really addressing their needs," AFL-CIO pol. dir. Karen Ackerman said. "They rejected the status quo, they want results, and they didn't see anybody really fighting for them."
But even as they acknowledged voter frustration, labor officials stressed that the election results did not indicate a rejection of Obama or national Dems. They pointed to data showing that by a 61%-33% margin, voters said they were "picking the best candidate" to be sen., rather than "sending a message to Washington."
Asked to reconcile the two, Ackerman said that voters didn't see Coakley's campaign as addressing the needs of working families, creating jobs or successfully explaining the benefits they would receive from health care reform.
If other Dems repeat that same model, then they face the same fate as Coakley, Ackerman said.