Will ‘Reagan Democrats’ revolt?

http://www.msnbc.com/news/980129.asp?0cv=CB10

In this gritty Jersey town, home to chemical plants, two major oil refineries and a General Motors assembly line, no one ever breathes easy. When Franklin Roosevelt visited in the mid-1930s and promised to turn the skies “black with progress,” he was true to his word. Yet Linden did breathe a sigh of relief recently when the United Auto Workers won an agreement from GM to keep the aging Chevy Blazer assembly line open four more years. “It’s a reprieve, not a stay of execution,” says Guy Messina, president of UAW Local 595.

WHEN EVEN good news is greeted with such pessimism, there is trouble afoot. Political analysts say the fatalism gripping workers here and in countless other American manufacturing towns is a threat to George W. Bush’s re-election and a sign that the vaunted “Reagan Democrats” who crossed party lines a generation ago may be shopping around again.

Since Reagan’s 1980 election victory, the votes of manufacturing workers and their families, unionized or not, have trended increasingly Republican in presidential races. This predominantly male, Roman Catholic, Rust Belt constituency cheered the New Deal but rejected the Democrats in droves during the 1970s and 1980s. Endowed with a deep skepticism for the kind of bespectacled intellectuals so dear to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, these so-called Reagan Democrats have regularly crossed lines ever since to support the GOP candidate and throw states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan into the GOP column.

This year, however, after a loss of millions of manufacturing jobs over the past several years and no indication that the economic recovery is reversing that trend, political analysts on both sides of the aisle believe the Democrats have a shot at winning back the hearts and minds they lost to Ronald Reagan.

“I think to so-called Reagan Democrats are more up for grabs now than at any time since the 1970s,” says Lee Edwards, a conservative political analyst at the Heritage Institute. “I don’t see an easy way out of this for Bush.”

but it sounds like even more are up for grabs now. I hope our nominee can make serious inroads there.