The Young Turks / Ana Kasparian: "Democrats Launch Effort To Reclaim White Voters"

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What Republicans Know (and Democrats Don’t) About the White Working Class

....There’s an important social and economic divide that drives working-class whites that progressive elites mostly miss — to their political peril......In his memoir, Vance pitted two groups of low-status whites against each other—those who work versus those who don’t. In academic circles, these two groups are sometimes labeled the “settled” working class versus the “hard living.” A broad and fuzzy line divides these two groups, but generally speaking, settled folks work consistently while the hard living do not. The latter are thus more likely to fall into destructive habits like substance abuse that lead to further destabilization and, importantly, to reliance on government benefits..... While elite progressives tend to see the white working class as monolithic...I have also lived it. I grew up working-class white, and I watched my truck driver father and teacher’s aide mother struggle mightily to stay on the “settled” side of the ledger. They worked to pay the bills, yes, but also because work set them apart from those in their community who were willing to accept public benefits. Work represented the moral high ground. Work was their religion....

Like Vance, settled white workers tend to see themselves living a version of the American dream grounded primarily — if not entirely — in their own agency. They believe they can survive, even thrive, if they just work hard enough. And some of them are doing just that. Because they lean into the grit of the individual, they tend to downplay structural obstacles to their quest to make a living, e.g., poor schools and even crummy job markets, just as they downplay structural benefits. They also discount “white privilege” because giving skin color credit for what they have achieved devalues the significance of their work. This mindset is also the reason that when Obama said in 2012, “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” the remark landed so badly among the settled working class. They’re not accustomed to sharing credit for what they have — perhaps especially when they don’t have much..... — “suddenly, you’re a worker and anyone who is not a worker is a bad person....”

....Exit polls from 2016 also reflect this division, with the lowest-income voters supporting Clinton—and therefore safety-net programs associated with Democrats—by the greatest margin, 53 percent to 41 percent over Trump. It was folks earning $50,000 to $99,000, those who depending on region and family size might be considered settled working class, who preferred Trump by the greatest margin of all income brackets — 50 percent to 46 percent....As important as this divide is to understanding working-class whites — and in spite of national publicity by big-name scholars and journalists — coastal and urban progressives often seem oblivious to it. This may be because few have any meaningful interaction with either faction of the white working class. Outsiders struggle to grasp the significance of this class war that rages within our nation’s broader class war....

.....Whenever I talk about this settled working class mindset to folks in my coastal progressive world, I get two responses. The first is an assumption that these folks are simply racists whose sole motivation is to deny benefits to people of color. The second response is that they are irrational, even delusional, not to see that they are vulnerable — that they might someday need public benefits, too, given the way precarity has not only crept up the socioeconomic ladder, but also outward and into a growing number of communities left behind by the knowledge economy....First, going straight to allegations of racism is incendiary and infuriating to the folks being labeled “racist.” They tend to define that term narrowly, referring to people who say the n-word or explicitly endorse white nationalism.....Bias based on race and bias based on class are not mutually exclusive, and it can be easier to assume that racial animus is at work when in fact, it’s classist or cultural animus directed at those on a lower economic or social rung. As the late cultural critic Joe Bageant expressed it, “what middle America loathes … are poor and poorish people, especially the kind who look and sound like they just might live in a house trailer....”

...In July 2016, Senator Chuck Schumer suggested Democrats could ignore this constituency. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania,” he said, “we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”....Schumer’s strategy proved a notorious disaster for Democrats, and it’s not a gamble the party can afford to repeat in 2022 or 2024. If anything, white workers look more critical than ever to a winning Democratic coalition, as more Latinos drift into the Republican column....It thus behooves Ryan and other Democrats to consider carefully how to communicate with a voting bloc they once took for granted....President Biden talks more about jobs and the working class than President Obama did, but generic job talk may no longer be getting through to workers given the shifting image (and reality) of Democrats as the party of elites and intellectuals. The sad truth is that coastal progressive condescension toward workers has become second nature to many Democrats...

When Trump said he “love[d] the poorly educated,” the credentialed class cringed. They assumed no one would want to be labeled as such and, indeed, that no one would want to be poorly educated (read to mean having little formal education). But folks without college degrees — even folks without high school diplomas — heard Trump’s comment as affirmation. He was happy to be associated with them, and Trump’s warm embrace was a salve on a deep, festering wound. Trump’s comment was also a rare one that did double duty in speaking to both settled and hard-living factions of the white working class.....But Trump also found a way to speak specifically to the settled working class, those with strong identities as workers. The “again” part of “Make America Great Again” brings to mind a time when their jobs provided greater economic security—as Papaw Vance’s steel mill job had—and also a time when blue-collar workers felt broadly respected. For workers displaced or fearing displacement, Trump named various external culprits (aka structural challenges)—unfair foreign imports, immigrants, regulation. He also offered solutions, e.g., tariffs, a border wall, less red tape, though he didn’t deliver on all of his promises. Trump didn’t save coal jobs, but the American steel industry did benefit from his tariffs....

Democratic solutions to worker travails will mostly differ from those proposed by Republicans, of course, but Democrats can fruitfully borrow a page from how Trump communicated with workers. First and foremost, tell workers that they and their labor are seen and appreciated. A key theme of 2016 election coverage was that many working-class white and rural voters felt overlooked. Tracie St. Martin, a union member and heavy construction worker who supported Trump, summed up the disgruntlement, “I wanted people like me to be cared about. People don’t realize there’s nothing without a blue-collar worker.....”

The ongoing labor shortage is all the more reason Democrats should keep telling blue-collar workers of all races that they are valued—and all the more reason to mean it. Our nation badly needs carpenters, electricians, plumbers and the full array of blue-collar workers who are going to help us overcome our national housing shortage and actually reconstruct our infrastructure. Politicians like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) speak more often than most about job training for workers like these... others should follow her lead.....For them, the most important thing is simply to get to work. A close second is living in a country that values their work—along with a paycheck that reflects both that value and their dignity as workers....

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/24/democrats-white-working-class-00041807

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Democrats Have Forgotten the Working Class. It Will Cost Them In November

....I remember vividly when, just before I turned 18 years old, my father filled out my selective service paperwork and voter registration and, against my protests, registered me as a Democrat. To my father, it did not matter that I considered myself a Republican, because, as he put it, "our family are Democrats." My family saw this as an essential plank of our identity. "We are Mexican. We are Catholic. We are Democrats." My family believed that the Democratic Party looked out for working families and stood for their values.

To whatever extent that may have been true in the past, it is apparent that in 2022, it is no longer the case. Working-class families are finally taking notice....At this time, American families are struggling economically, and no one is being hit harder than the working class. Under a Democrat-controlled Congress and a Democratic president, we have watched inflation and gas prices skyrocket. Rather than address this issue, Democratic politicians have asked the working class to sacrifice more while liberal elite celebrities dismiss the concerns and even poke fun at those feeling the impact. Just this week, multiple media pundits on the ideological Left went so far as to admonish voters for being more concerned with inflation and gas prices than with topics they believe should be the priority, such as the January 6 hearings....

...Regardless of what a person believes about January 6 and the subsequent hearings, it is unrealistic, out of touch, and frankly insulting to expect working-class voters to prioritize anything over the well being of their families as they try to make ends meet. It is hard to imagine anything more out of touch with the values held by families like my own than Stephen Colbert telling his audience "I'm willing to pay $4 a gallon. Hell, I'll pay $15 a gallon because I drive a Tesla," while working-class families are trying to figure out how to afford groceries and fill their gas tanks....

...But inflation and gas prices are not the only working-class problems Democrats have shown themselves to be unaware of or unconcerned about....Instead of meaningful immigration reform, President Joe Biden has effectively opened the borders, wreaking havoc in states along the southern border, such as my own state, Arizona. The nonprofit organization that I co-founded—Cece's Hope Center, which works with victims of sex trafficking—has been overwhelmed by the increased demand created by disastrous border policies. And fentanyl, a drug that comes to America from China by way of illegal smuggling through Mexico, has become the number-one killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45....

...As our children continue to fall behind academically and struggle emotionally (another crisis felt most deeply among the working class) following the school closures of the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats have focused on implementing social experimentation and politicized curricula that are at odds with the values of many working-class Americans. Educating our children and preparing them for college and the workforce should be the top priority....

The values and priorities of the Democratic Party today are not reflective of the working-class families, such as my own, that supported it for years. It should come as no surprise to anyone this November when we see a "Red Wave" in the midterm elections; this will be the cost that the Democratic Party pays for forgetting about the working class, the backbone of America....

https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-have-forgotten-working-class-it-will-cost-them-november-opinion-1719880

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[lickin_starfish 1,893]

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[jonmx 2,424]

I can't imagine why all those deplorables don't vote Democrats.   Those racists just can't seem to be able check all their white priviledge to understand why givernment redistribution and control is the answer.  They just are too busy worrying about how to hold all those black people down as they live paycheck to paycheck trying to feed and house their family as they cling to their guns and thump their Bibles.  Those people are just too uneducated to understand how much they need government and how great it is to be slaves to the state. 

They are all a bunch of wannabe terrorists who think they can speak their minds to government officials making them the biggest threat to Democracy there is.  Why don't they understand Democrsts are best for them.  

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[Voltaire 5,203]

I'm already a fake astronaut and fake lion-tamer. Maybe I'll get a rabbi degree from wherever Jessica Rosenberg went to school.