Wooing the White Male Vote

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