This is the Cato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. The Democrats who helped elect both

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton are up for grabs. But there are plenty of reasons to believe that neither Barack Obama,

nor John McCain, will be viewed as attractive candidates to those fickle if principled voters.

John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government,

draws out the distinction between conservative Democrats and so-called disadvantaged Democrats.

First of all, I should say that these categories are, come from the Pew Center on who does public opinion, a lot of public opinion polling. And this was based on their public opinion polling

from the after the 2004 election.

So it's possible that there are even more of these,

there are certainly more Democrats than there were two three years ago

when this survey was done. Disadvantaged and conservative Democrats are

similar in a lot of ways.

They have, they typically vote for Democrats, they identify themselves as Democrats,

and they're similar in a lot of ways in income and wealth and things like that.

That is, they're, you know, these are people that are in the 30 percentile,

something like that.

Some of them may be in poverty or whatever, but generally speaking they're not like other parts of both parties higher up on the income scale.

They're distinguished, however, by a number of factors, but one of them is their attitudes.

What I discovered and didn't know was that conservative Democrats have, generally if you asked them, they're pretty optimistic

about the relationship between work and success in America.

They believe that if in a traditional sort of way that work leads to success,

disadvantaged Democrats not so much. And again, these are proportions. It's not absolute

one way or the other, but that does distinguish them.

...