Democrats Try Wooing Ones Who Got Away: White Men
By JACKIE CALMES MARCH 2, 2014
ROYAL OAK, Mich. — Frank Houston
knows something about the longtime estrangement of white men from the
Democratic Party. His family roots are in nearby Macomb County, the
symbolic home of working-class Reagan Democrats who, distressed by
economic and social tumult, decided a liberal Democratic Party had left
them, not the other way around.
Mr. 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. But over time, Mr.
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 READ MORE
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