I really recommend you read I really recommend you read the excerpt from Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland on the main site today. It describes the so-called “Hard Hat Riot” of May 8, 1970, in which hundreds of New York City construction workers , organized by the AFL-CIO, brutally attacked students protesting the killings at Kent State University. President Nixon seized upon the flags plus hard hats imagery of the event as a way for the Republican Party to win over traditionally Democratic union voters. Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman wrote in a note to himself, “Patriotic themes to counter economic depression will get response from unemployed. … Then no one would be a Democrat anymore.”
Ah, yes. The genesis of a thousand George W. Bush and John McCain campaign advertisements. And also the genesis of Democratic paroxysms over the Jeremiah Wright controversy and Barack Obama’s “bitter” comments. But how instructive is the hard hat riot today? For starters, it’s difficult to imagine contemporary union members whipped up into such a violent frenzy, and we know that union members continue to vote Democratic in presidential elections.
As for the voting patterns of white, working class men at large, political scientist Larry Bartels has proven that their decline in support for the Democratic Party is due almost entirely to shifting allegiances in the South, which, with the exception of a few outlier states, is highly unlikely to support either Obama or Hillary Clinton in the general election. That’s not to say that cultural issues have no salience in Northern states — of course they do. But the swing voters Democrats should be looking toward today aren’t primarily working class white men, who have declined sharply as a proportion of the electorate. The Nixon coalition was so effective in 1972 because there were just a lot more white working class voters back then.
One group, incidentally, that has replaced the hard hats is married white women. They supported Bush by 11 points in 2004, but have since turned strongly against the war. In the 2006 midterms, they favored the GOP by only 2 percent.
—Dana Goldstein
Update: Rick comments below that the hard hat riot was likely spontaneous. Indeed, there's been historical debate on the topic. I regret the error.
