[ed note: This post is by jconway — for some weird technical glitch I can’t associate it with his name. Gremlins.]
This is a conclusion from respected pollsters including Ruy Teixeira and Stanley Greenberg. They along with 13 other writers have a must read series over at the American Prospect that discusses this predicament and ways to overcome it-progressively. They are all well worth a read. I’ve selected important takeaways and bolded some passages for emphasis.
Highlights from the Greenberg piece:
Working Class Voters of all races soured on Dems:
The Democrats don’t have a “white working-class problem.” They have a “working-class problem,” which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate, including the Rising American Electorate of minorities, unmarried women, and millennials. This decline contributed mightily to the Democrats’ losses in the states and Congress and to the election of Donald Trump.
Too Big to Jail/Fail is an Obama Legacy Too:
Working-class Americans pulled back from Democrats in this last period of Democratic governance because of President Obama’s insistence on heralding economic progress and the bailout of the irresponsible elites, while ordinary people’s incomes crashed and they continued to struggle financially.
Why non-GOP Trump voters are the new swing voters:
Not surprisingly, white working-class women form a big portion (40 percent) of the independents and Democrats who voted for Trump in the end. While Republican Trump voters think of themselves as middle-class, and two-thirds say they would have no problem handling an unexpected $500 expense, these non-GOP Trump voters think of themselves as working-class and would struggle to handle the sudden expense. They are also, in contrast to the Trump Republicans, pro-union.
Greenberg, a former DLC staffer who worked for Clinton, advocates for the party to move far to the economic left while embracing the new cultural center. One that equally punishes those at the top who break the rules and those at the bottom who abuse the system. One that encourages cultural assimilation and stronger borders along with a bath to citizenship. One that encourages corporations to make American products and hire American workers.
Meanwhile Ruy Teixeira is revising his seminal work (The Emerging Majority) to discuss why WWC voters are still vital to that majority:
The idea that the Democrats should or could afford to ignore white working-class voters, particularly at the state and local level, defies basic political math. Although we’ve written extensively about how the nation’s shifting demographics and ideological attitudes helped to fuel the rise of the Obama coalition, none of these trends preclude the need to build cross-racial and cross-class coalitions in more places.
Younger, more diverse, socially liberal, and Democratic-leaning voters are not evenly distributed across the nation, and even with the long-term expected declines in white working-class populations, these voters alone cannot sustain successful Democratic coalitions going forward. Democrats do not need to win FDR-level support among white working-class voters, but they cannot afford to lose them by margins as high as 30 to 40 points in some key states—as they have in recent elections.
This is because the Rust Belt disproportionately matters for the Electoral College and Congress:
he WWC is very well distributed geographically for the purposes of political influence. They are disproportionately concentrated in swing states, as the maps above suggest. But they are also disproportionately concentrated in swing congressional districts. And they are especially concentrated in swing congressional districts within swing states. In Rust Belt states, for example, the typical swing district was 11 points more WWC than the average district across the nation, and 16 points less minority. In short, they live where it counts.
rather than debating whether Democrats should appeal to white working-class voters or voters of color—both necessary components of a successful electoral coalition, particularly at the state and local level—a more important question emerges: Why are Democrats losing support and seeing declining turnout from working-class voters of all races in many places?
This is just a hypothesis, but in an era of widespread political cynicism, economic and cultural anxiety, and distrust of both business and government, the Democrats allowed themselves to become the party of the status quo—a status quo perceived to be elitist, exclusionary, and disconnected from the entire range of working-class concerns, but particularly from those voters in white working-class areas. Rightly or wrongly, Hillary Clinton’s campaign exemplified a professional-class status quo that failed to rally enough working-class voters of color and failed to blunt the drift of white working-class voters to Republicans.
I don’t disagree, but aren’t these the guys who told us the Dems were locked in for the foreseeable future because of changes to American demographics?
What kills me is that such a low fraction of Democrats can effectively communicate about working class issues. Trump did a better job of addressing their concerns than Hillary did. Not that his solutions are better, but he sounded more driven to alleviate their issues.
But we better darn well not kowtow to them – either in terms of their cultural prejudices or humoring any fantasies about certain jobs being savable/returnable! I do wonder if there is any way to convince coal miners that it is their employers, and not environmental regulation, that is giving them a raw deal.
the coal miners know their employers are shafting them-so do all workers in this country. I think if we had candidates willing to say that they’d win a lot more votes. The free market killed coal-but Hillary bragged about her regulations killing it which is an applause line in Nantucket and handed western PA to Trump.
Also read the pieces-we aren’t playing to any prejudice other than their hatred of big business and Wall Street-and rightfully so. This is strictly about bringing back Democrats, independents, and union members who voted for Trump. And doing so with stronger and bolder progressive pitches-not weaker ones.
Horsefeathers.
I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that a first result of this is to demand that our next presidential candidate be a white male.
Okay,would you prefer a ticket of Condoleezza Rice with Mia Love as her VP? Would that please you? Who knows, maybe with Michele Bachmann as Secretary of State.
Barack Obama was a better candidate than Hillary Clinton.
I seek a candidate who will maximize turnout of voters who support Democratic Party and progressive values.
The Clintons are not progressives. Never were. Hillary becoming a true progressive is, to use her words on a parallel subject, “something that will never, ever happen” ……because, as they believe and as you hold true, “the money HAS to come from somewhere”..
“Shafted”, heh
Do you really subscribe to that out-of-context Hillary quote, which went on to say what will happen instead?
Probably time to acknowledge that there is a significant portion of the electorate, that might otherwise vote Dem, that has a completely irrational hatred of the Clintons and will believe anything that Breitbart or FoxNews says about them.
It isn’t right, but it is the truth, and must be treated as such.
The greater implication is what this says about this supposedly important slice of the electorate, which is that they’re are, at best, profoundly ignorant about almost everything about the world in which they live.
And, further, that they don’t respond to policies designed to “help” them, but only to policies that hurt others. Even in the articles quoted above, you see that they’re pissed that there were bailouts to banks, rather than punitive measures. Left unstated is that those punitive measures would have harmed everyone by making the recession both deeper and longer.
I put this in the same category as: we dont care if our health insurance is good, so long as blacks/muslims/gays etc. have it worse.
Good luck to those who attempt to “reach” this portion of the electorate, but last November convinced me that there really are no shared values, culture, goals, sense of being “in it together,” or even a common sense of basic human decency with these folks. They will happily harm themselves so long as it pisses off the “libruls.” If “reaching out” is Plan A, I hope that someone is also working on Plan B: defeating them.
I would add that anyone upset about bank bailouts should be with us, but there’s that darn rationality again. Your explanation sadly rings true, I just wanted to make sure jconway himself didn’t buy it.
I would add that the fact that it turns out that pointing out that a guy who (i) is colluding with a hostile foreign power; (ii) has no understanding or interest in how the government works; (iii) can’t be left alone by staffers lest he inadvertently start an international incident; (iv) sacrificed an Israeli agent providing irreplaceable intelligence on the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization, just to brag about how people tell him stuff; and (v) might have provoked a wider Sunni-Shia war in the Middle East, just because– would be unfit to be President was a terrible electoral strategy just proves that these voters are either so stupid, or so downright malevolent that they are beyond reach.
Don’t “reach” them– crush them.
There’s a compelling grain in this … the best defense is a good offense. But how does that work? Can you “crush” ideas without crushing people? Crush them? Us and what army?
I’m sure he means electorally crush them, which would have happened last year if this were the country I thought it was. In a perfect world both major parties would come together to marginalize the deplorables and make it clear we don’t want their vote.
Jeremy Corbyn proved your arrogance wrong tonight-and the Democrats will be a minority if they continue to persist in that condescension. Trump won over 13% of Obama voters while Hillary carried just 5% of Romney voters. He still carried college educated whites. A lot of well educated socially moderate centrists still elected this buffoon over someone who pitched her entire campaign to them. I’d say those are the voters we can afford to ignore-and the traditional Democrats we lost are the ones we can’t.
Fox News calls Corbyn a communist…and then some. That’s the kind of candidate Democrats need to run with. Not a communist, just someone so strongly backing the working class that Fox calls them “a communist”.
To the extent that this is true, it demonstrates why we should focus on changing our culture, from the bottom up. If it means losing some elections, so be it.
The party has never ignored white working class voters. What the party has done instead is insist that we also pay attention to non-white working class voters.
What I see in all these pieces is fancy language and hand-waving that smears lipstick on the pig of racism and sexism. There was no “drift of white working-class voters to Republicans” &8212; that language obscures what happened in 2016.
What happened, instead, is that in three states — MI, WI, and PA — aggressive anti-minority government policy (such as draconian voterID legislation) coupled with active, explicit, and intentional racist and sexist pandering by the Donald Trump campaign caused enough racist and sexist white Trump voters to turn out, and caused enough minority voters to stay home, that the election was turned.
Consider this excerpt:
Any minority, unmarried woman, or millennial who either (a) chose to not vote or (b) voted for Donald Trump is not going to swayed by the things cited here.
The sad fact remains that too many white working-class rust-belt voters remain resolutely racist and sexist. THAT is what needs to change. We do not change that by running candidates or campaigns that appeal to those attitudes.
The working class got screwed by the Obama Administration. That’s why some white working class voters voted for Trump and some black working class voters stayed home and did not even bother to vote.
The working class has been being screwed by US policy since 1980.
The working class did MUCH BETTER under Barack Obama than it did under George W. Bush or than it would have done under John McCain or Mitt Romney. Whatever happened to the working class under Barack Obama is a thousand times worse under Donald Trump. These facts are clear and apparent to anyone, of any class, who does even a modest amount of looking.
Working class voters who stay home and don’t vote in states like MI, WI, and PA are just as responsible for the chaos we now face as the most racist, sexist, and “deplorable” Donald Trump voters.
We go around and around on this. Yes, the Democratic Party should put wealth and income concentration front-and-center in its campaign. No, the Democratic Party should NOT pay more attention to white working-class voters.
More like since 1973, with the help of many Democrats. Barack Obama bailed out the banks, but not the foreclosures. Okay, maybe the homeless shelters the evicted people went to were better than the ones that Bush would have provided, but I am sick and tired of defending Democrats simply on the basis that “Republicans would have screwed you worse!” defense.
Yes, the Democratic Party should put wealth and income concentration front-and-center in its campaign.
Yup, and at the state convention this weekend, it was not mentioned.
Senator Markey gave the standard misleading and divisive statistics that women make 77 cents on the dollar and Black and Latino women make even less when compared to white males. but again, that’s just pitting us against us and labeling the white males as the enemy. It’s all bogus misleading statistics used to pit the labor class against itself without drawing attention to the real thieves in this, the .1%.
Banks were bailed out while GWB was still POTUS, but Obama did bail out the auto industry, as he should have.
Name one person on Wall Street that the Obama administration prosecuted for fraud.
You win a once in a lifetime opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an amazing new fund that guarantees profits every quarter, no matter how the rest of the market is doing!
You win the prize of telling the truth. Bernie Madoff is all there is. No one from Goldman Sachs, Leahman Brothers….and on and on….no one.
Demonstrably not true. Almost $50 billion of the TARP program was directly for families struggling to avoid foreclosure. It wasn’t a particular success, but not for lack of trying on the part of the Obama administration.
How about you try defending Democrats in the present tense: as in, “Republicans are actively trying to screw you and we are actively try to stop them.”
THEY LIED TO PASS THE BAILOUT
Mind you, there are a few Democrats here and there who openly and honestly defend the working class. Elizabeth Warren is one of them. I just wish there were more like her.
I like you John. I really do. I think you’re earnest in your anger, if not righteous in your rhetoric. This is why I keep trying. But arguing with you is like trying to catch a greased weasel on the pitching deck of a boat I’m trying to sail singlehandedly through a typhoon. Everything is fluid and without warning what I think is over there, suddenly is here, or vise versa. Up suddenly becomes down and side-to-side, for no reason I can discern, suddenly becomes a function of Pi. The violence of the discourse might be satisfying to you, in the same way a typhoon has to expend its energy, but that doesn’t mean truth is got at.
In this manner we can go from discussions of the future of ‘white working class’ voting patterns to accusing Barack Obama of having told Hank Paulsons lies. Bewildering
So, I’m going to stop here, having seen such violence done to the act of debate that I think attempts at unwinding it here are not with much affect… , with just a bit of advice, from a friend: nobody is going to have much reason to take you seriously if you continue on in this manner.
Stop anytime you want. I’m getting tied of you and those like you who keep defending the neoliberals and telling working class people like me that the crap sandwich were are being served by the Democrats is, at least, fresher and has more fiber that the same crap sandwich that the Republicans are serving. Hey, our’s is organic and better for the environment! Great. It’s still a crap sandwich.
Sure, Obama was not as bad as the Republicans and yeah, he made a few efforts to help the working class. But bringing up those few items in the face of reality is what you keep doing, and it frustrates me.
I was at the state convention this weekend and watched as Senator Markey went down the typical divisive rhetoric that Democrats like him use. He recited how “Women make 77 cents on the dollar and black women make less than that and Latino make less than that”…all in an effort to court those demographics by using white males as the other side of the argument. These distorted and cherry picked “facts” are nothing more than propaganda to get these identities to support an economic policy that, in the end, continues to exploit them. It continues to use this political strategy to divide the working class and remain tethered to the big money on Wall Street and the rest.
Never did he mention the growing wealth divide between the .1% and the working class. He did not bring up the reality that while the USA has the highest official corporate tax rate, our effective rate really far less than that and that the corporate share of the tax burden has been shrinking year after year after year……while Massachusetts cannot afford to rebuild a bridge to a homeless shelter but we can give General Electric a tax exemption.
You always lose me here John. I’ve nevertheless understood why advancing pay equity is somehow cheapening working class solidarity or labor for all. I’m against all forms of structural inequality. I don’t understand the reticence of many of my friends on this site to tell it like it is and talk about class inequality. It’s incredibly important. I’ve never understood you’re reluctance to talk about racial and sexual inequality. All inequality is wrong and linked together and we have to smash both.
I am all for pay equity, but I object to the cherry picked data and serious omissions that accompany it with so many who harp on it. Solidarity is weakened when “white males” are portrayed as a cabal, working to strip others of their worth. All inequality is wrong and it is disingenuous to focus on one aspect of it without including the entire picture.
Yes, males, as a sex, are paid higher wages than females. Males also accept more dangerous work and work where the wages are less secure. Males spend less time with friends and family, more time at work, feel more social pressure to be the breadwinners, live shorter lives and are more likely to commit suicide. Are the “Equal Pay” people willing to take on all of the down side of making equal money?
In my opinion, we need to work on both sides of this, not just the pay side. Yes, women have lower wages but they get to spend more time with friends and family, feel less pressure to be the breadwinners, are less likely to be identified by their job, and live longer lives.
In addition to “equal pay for women”, how about equal family and friends time for men, equally long lives for men, equally less pressure to be the breadwinners…..and so on?
Work/life balance for all ought to be part of the discussion, and it is not.
Tom-nobody here is arguing that the Republicans and Trump make better policies for the working class. But simply being better than Mitt Romney isn’t enough anymore. Business friendly liberalism is always better than business friendly conservatism. But worker friendly liberalism is better than business friendly liberalism and is the only way to beat worker friendly conservative rhetoric
You can point to a million ways where Trump has screwed the working class and I would argue the Democrats did not and are not doing this. Right now it’s all about Russia and the general election was about calling him mean for our kids. Even his cancer charter was a shell game to steal money from cancer patients-time to make ads about that and link it to AHCA .
No need to add the word “white”. Democrats cannot win without turning their attention to the real and perilous plight of EVERY working class American citizen.
The word “white” is the core meaning of this whole meme — whether or not you admit it. The other word, besides “white”, that needs to present to accurately characterize this proposal is “male”.
We Democrats ALREADY pay “attention to the real and perilous plight of EVERY working class American citizen”. We have not done nearly enough to attack wealth and income concentration.
We should NOT promise coal workers in Western PA that we’re going to “bring back their jobs”. We SHOULD talk about the thousands of jobs being created in alternative energy industry — jobs the Mr. Trump and the GOP are killing RIGHT NOW.
Maybe for you professional class liberals “working class” means “white”, but no, not with me, not with ordinary working class people. We’re in this together. And NO, Democrats DO NOT pay attention to the real plight of ordinary working class citizens. If they did, that clown would not be in the White House and Baker would not be in the corner office.
For the record I never argued we promise to bring their jobs back-I do think bragging about laying them off was a Romney esque gaffe along with calling them deplorable. The fact is a lot of people dislike Trump and voted for him since they were angry at the Democrats for abandoning them on trade and immigration.
Dick Morris-who we must remember wasn’t first employed by the Clinton’s scoffed a true labor and said “where will they go?”-well many of them went to a Republican who bothered to campaign in their halls and feel their anger and their pain over someone who choose to summer in the Vineyard.
Neoliberals parties are being repudiated on the right and left on both sides of the pond-Blairite Labour finally died tonight as a real Labour candidate exceeded any of his vote totals and an unprecedented campaign of actual internal sabotage and a biased media.
Populism is a winning formula for winning elections-attacking Trump and hoping for the best is a proven formula for losing elections. The comments here are ceasing to be reality based-nobody is bothering to interact with the treasure trove of data folks like Greenberg, Texiera and Tom Edsall or even local Paul Simmons have compiled.
It would be nice if stronger together worked-I’ll always be proud of their vote. The Clinton’s are an vitally important part of our party’s past success and an impediment to its future. Any party that stays static and calcified in policies and positioning that the electorate has moved on from is a party that doesn’t want to govern.
We must move to the left on economics and to the middle on immigration. I see no other way forward other than waiting 20 years for this class of people to die off and hoping America has survived a decade or more of right wing government.
I will boldly predict that Trump will get re-elected by the same electoral margin if we do not change our strategy.
Malarkey.
If John McCain won in 2008 and then went on to rescue a cratering economy (while breaking even on the largest ever bailout), save the auto industry (again, breaking even) and give access to health care to the least able yet most needy and put in place Dodd/Frank the most important changes to banking law since the 1930’s they’d be carving his face on Mt Rushmore right now. Barack Obama failed the “twice as good and half as black” litmus test.
If Hillary Clinton had a Y chromosome she’d have cruised to victory without the slightest hint of trouble. Backwards and in high heels still doesn’t rate any respect.
A large part of the electorate is racist and sexist. You think they voted their pocketbook and accidentally got a viciously sexist troglodyte who couldn’t find the truth with the help of the Almighty…. and who can’t possibly deliver on his promises? You think that Trumps ragged disrespect, hateful attitude and meager abilities are a side effect??
It is not a side effect. It is, pure and simple, representation. Someone once said, ‘you get the politics you deserve…’ so stick that in your focus groups and poll it.
Nor do the Democrats bear all that much responsibility for losing, having achieved numerical superiority in six of the last seven presidential elections, That the game is rigged, the opponent venal and a large part of the electorate stuck in 1956, is a situation beyond the abilities of a mere political party to overcome.
Glad we are engaging with the linked texts and disputing its wealth of data and evidence with alternative data and evidence. Glad nobody is simply sticking to their existing biases and preconceived notions here. Glad we are engaging in a reality based way. Have a good weekend everyone.
Yeah, right. If we did that I’d have to tell you, again, that you don’t know how to read.
Pretty sure he was being sarcastic.
This just in.
I haven’t disputed that analysis-the majority of them were Republicans so of course a majority of Republican primary voters and general election voters are upper class Republicans. He still won whites with a college degree too-but we never doubt Hillary’s strategy of courting them on social issues even though it didn’t work. This macroanalysis isn’t wrong-it also isn’t new, interesting or electorally relevant.
It’s the microanalysis of independent and Democratic voters in the five states that decided the election who defected to Trump that Greenberg and the Prospect is looking at. This subset of soft or marginal Trump voters are attracted to a bolder progressive economic agenda from Democrats. I find this data fascinating and troubling and it finally quantified the experience I had on the ground in places even in this state where Democrats are losing ground.
This just in-Labour has historic vote share and a hung parliament. They didn’t do this by telling Leavers to fuck of for moving to the middle. They got WWC, students and minorities to vote for an economic agenda of solidarity over austerity-time our party does the same. Remember Roosevelt? He never thought working people were beneath him despite his wealth and education. It’s why he won every time.