In a story about attempts by Democrats nationally to recruit working class white males to vote for the party, The New York Times focuses on Frank Houston, chair of the Oakland County Democratic Party.
Houston grew up in the 1980s liking Ronald Reagan but idolizing Alex P. Keaton, the fictional Republican teenage son of former hippies who, played by Michael J. Fox on the television series “Family Ties,” comically captured the nation’s conservative shift, writes Jackie Calmes. But over time, Houston left the Republican Party because “I started to realize that the party doesn’t represent the people I grew up with.”
Now, as chairman of the Democratic Party in Oakland County, Michigan’s second largest, Mr. Houston is finding out how difficult it can be to persuade other white men here to support Democrats, even among the 20 or so, mostly construction workers, who join him in a rotating poker game.
Mr. Houston is part of an internal debate at all levels of his party over how hard it should work to win over white men, especially working-class men without college degrees, at a time when Democrats are gaining support from growing numbers of female and minority voters.
Even in places like Michigan, where it has been decades since union membership lists readily predicted Democratic votes, many in the party pay so little attention to white working-class men that it suggests they have effectively given up on converting them.
Not Mr. Houston. “There’s a whole cadre of us — of young, white men political leaders in Oakland County — who are saying, ‘We can’t just write off 30-year-old to 40-year-old guys, let alone anyone who’s older.’ ”
