Ezra Klein asks today, "Why haven't the Democrats completely cleaned the Republicans' clock?"
Actually it's Ruy Teixeira who asked that question, and it's one I share. I mean, Republicans have turned into complete loons. Democrats should have been able to build a huge and enduring lead over the past decade. Why haven't they?
Teixeira suggests it's because Democrats have lost blue-collar voters:
We have to get back to some of the underlying trends that have affected working class voters in the United States and how they’ve experienced their lives, and how their communities have evolved and the resentments they have about the various political parties and what they stand for.
....I tend to believe if Democrats could produce rising incomes and wages for most working-class voters for many, many years and transformed the political economy of the United States into something pretty different and perceived as something pretty different than what they’ve experienced in the last several decades, do I think they’d benefit and be able to dominate a Republican Party whose economic policies are far less salubrious? Yes. I do think that’s, in fact, possible.
That is possible. Here's a chart I've posted before, though it's been a while:
Over the last 30 years college educated workers have seen their earnings go up. Not a whole lot, but at least up. The same is true of women who only completed high school.
But men with only a high school diploma have seen their incomes slide and then slide some more. There were brief exceptions during the expansions of the late '90s and aughts, but they didn't last. Right now, men with no college earn 6% less than they did 30 years ago. The college kids, who were already making more, have opened up ever bigger leads over time.
In other words, it's really true that blue-collar men in particular have an economic beef they probably don't think Democrats take seriously. On the other hand, this started as far back as Nixon, long before neoliberals took over the party. It's also true that by far the worst decade for blue-collar men was the Reagan era and the best decade was the Clinton era. But they loved Reagan and didn't care much for Clinton. Economics just doesn't seem like it can explain much.
Every time this comes up, I refresh myself on the evidence and end up coming back to the same thing: the two drivers of Democratic losses are race and culture. Race is obvious: the white South has switched pretty much completely from Democratic to Republican and it was quite obviously due to the Civil Rights Act and other racial turnabouts of the '60s and beyond. Today, the Republican Party is almost entirely white.¹
Culture is also fairly obvious because we've talked it to death over the past couple of decades. Working class discontent with liberals has been driven by an underlying long-term trend starting in the counterculture '60s and then supercharged by Fox News starting in the late '90s. Fox may tell their audience that Democrats are bad for the economy, but they spend ten times as much time obsessing over the latest cultural outrage from liberals. You could pretty much write a political history of the right just by listing the most common subjects covered by Fox News over the years since 2001. It's gone from Muslims to voter fraud to the tea party to Critical Race Theory to whatever they decide to focus on this year.
Research suggests that Fox News generates about 3% more votes for Republicans than they'd otherwise get. In a 50-50 electorate, that's a lot. And it doesn't help that Democrats make themselves so easy to attack. From "Defund the Police" to extreme softness on the border to defending trans girls competing in high school sports, liberals have been pushing the boundaries of social conventions pretty hard. That scares ordinary people and costs votes.
There's probably not a lot we can do about race. Some people are racists and that's that. We just have to fight them. But we could probably tone down the cultural leftism and adopt moderately more populist economic policies. It wouldn't take a lot. But it might make enough of a difference to sink the Republicans for the coming decade.
¹In Congress, there are currently four Black Republican House members out of 222 and one Black senator out of 49. That's less than 2%.
But Democrats didn't invent 'defund the police' and Republicans just lie about crime stats anyhow.
And defending trans girls in hs sports - where they're least likely to have an advantage is just beating up on non-gender-conforming girls. For every trans girl in sports, there's a ten to a hundred cis gender girls who are going to be harassed by these rules.
I was reading that in one state there was ca. 75,000 high school athletes, and ca. 4 were trans, and only one was trans girl.
I'd guess there's a lot more non-binary, i.e. use "they/them" pronouns, which for the right is the downfall of civilization.
Yep. Trans kids usually have enough problems they don't participate in sports.
Which means the more we solve their problems, the more want to play with their peers. And that will mean their expressed gender.
Where cis-girls are advantageous they want 'capitalism' and 'natural selection.'
Where they are disadvantaged, they want 'socialism' and more 'regulations.'
That's our Atticus to a T.
Teixera seems to have only one drum to bang these days: "it's economic anxiety!" ["It's the shoes!"] He seems unable to get beyond it, and I'm glad you didn't fall for it, Kevin.
If it were poor blue-collar workers that were the base of the GOP, we'd know it b/c we'd see it in the income statistics on Trump vs Biden voters. But it's not there, is it?
Republican Party base is a straw manning of their observations. As for the over-performance of Trump versus expectations: 2020 national level which is not granual enough to give excellent insights notably as to the key "battleground states" never the less https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2020 shows
Teixeira has spent the last few years desperately trying to explain why his Big Theory about demographic change resulting in a permanent Democratic majority turned out to be nonsense. It was, of course, the Democrats' own fault. But pretending Democrats could wave a magic wand, "produce rising incomes and wages for most working-class voters for many, many years and transform the political economy of the United States" is a new level of inanity. He and James Carville should go enjoy a well-earned retirement and grow pumpkins or something.
No magic wand, but there is a way to ensure rising incomes for the working class that Congress could facilitate: Legislation that strengthens unions and supports the organization of workers. The best idea in the Constitution is the separation of powers; and the best idea for the economy is a balance of power among government, labor and management/owners.
No magic wand indeed, it took a lot of time and effort to shift the tax burden from capital to labor, bust unions, move production overseas, eviscerate anti-trust, extend patent protection into virtual eternity, etc. etc...all of which pushed income and wealth to the top.
An increase in the federal minimum wage to about $17.00/hr. would also help.
In fact he's been highighting the misinterpretation of his first publication, and cogently so. But easier to strawman the critics than grapple with the errors of the Brahim Left in political focus, assumptions and strategy as blue collar percentages bleed away.
Policy statements do not fit neatly on bumper stickers.
"liberals have been pushing the boundaries of social conventions pretty hard"
Shouldn't that be more like "*some* people on the liberal end of the spectrum have been pushing boundaries in ways that are easy for gop alarmists like Fox to make complete caricatures of"?
There's just no such thing as a Liberal Central Headquarters with its own Black Hand to go around enforcing centrified orthodoxy so Fox and the other alarmists won't have anything to exaggerate and lie about.
And there is literally nothing they won't exaggerate and lie about, so even if we went and set up a Central HQ, it would be a completely futile effort.
So what simple solution does our man Ruy propose? "If Democrats could produce rising incomes and wages for ... many, many years and transformed the political economy of the United States into something pretty different and perceived as something pretty different," well then, we could stick a fork in that Republican turkey, easy-peasey. Good thing it's not complicated.
Here's the common element to the culture stuff: it's easy to caricature as weak in some way-- accepting, accommodating, respectful, inclusive, complicated, doesn't draw simple lines, doesn't say simple things, etc. Everything in that list is true to real life and important in civilized society, I think, which leaves only one thing that's worth trying to do, and that's to say things in simple ways.
Simple things sound stronger. That's how our leading figures need to talk. Fewer subordinate clauses and qualifying phrases. More direct assertions. More hard truths about the gop-- all the more telling because true.
Bill Clinton said years ago that when voters have a choice between somebody who's right but isn't declarative, and somebody who's wrong but sounds definite, they'll go for strong and wrong every time. Simple sounds strong. Save sophistication for people who appreciate it.
"CONSERVATIVES have been pushing the boundaries of social conventions pretty hard"
Liberals say, "Black people are being unfairly and disproportionately injured and killed in interactions with police, and that needs to be addressed. We have to make policy that reflects that Black lives matter ..." and conservatives say, "THEY'RE CODDLING CRIMINALS AND HATE POLICE!"
Liberals say, "Loving couples should have legal rights to support each other and create families regardless of their gender" and Conservatives say, "IT'S SIN! THEY'RE TRYING TO DESTROY MARRIAGE!"
Liberals say, "We have to address how much we are putting carbon in the environment because it's changing the climate and creating dangerous weather events that are costing lives and money and disrupting countries" and Conservatives say, "THEY'RE TRYING TO DESTROY UNION JOBS BY PUSHING ELECTRIC VEHICLES! THEY'RE DESTROYING WEST VIRGINIA COAL JOBS!"
Liberals say, "There are too many school and church and public space mass shootings, and we need to pass laws that restrict the most deadly weapons to reduce the harm to Americans," and Conservatives say, "THE GOVERNMENT IS COMING FOR ALL YOUR GUNS AND WANT TO CONTROL YOUR LIVES!"
Liberals make common sense arguments, arguments that usually pretty quickly have 60% and better support from the public, and the Conservatives turn them into culture wars.
We're only fighting "culture wars" because the GOP turns reasonable, popular positions into emotional, aggressive "culture" issues.
"From "Defund the Police" to extreme softness on the border to defending trans girls competing in high school sports"
Oh FFS. while some people called for reevaluting policy policy and how money is spent on nonviolent encounters, which is 90% of calls, no congressional Democrats nor Biden supported or ran on calls to "defund the police." And large cities with Democratic mayors spend far more money on policing and hire far more police officers than large cities with Republican mayors.
And when people like Drum and Chait and other center right useful idiots are fueling the right wing bigoted transphobic moral panic, they are the problem. Not a few trans girls playing HS sports.
Seems like Fox brain has infected Drum too.
He’s referring to how *perceptions* of this kind of thing play out in the media and translate into polling. And on this, Drum is 100% correct.
Great. I just called Democratic Party Central Control and Marcy, the agent on the line, apologized for the poor service the Democratic Party has been providing all of us, and promised to get all 100m ish Democratic leaning people across the US to stop using the phrase Defund The Police and stop treating trans people like they’re real people. She even deposited another 10,000 more liberal miles into my account for my inconvenience. Can’t believe nobody thought of doing this before, but it was easy peasy as they say.
The fact that you equate "treating trans people like they're real people" with boys being allowed to compete against girls in sports clearly proves the point Kevin is making.
The fact that you are equating allowing trans to live normal lives with dignity with the faux moral panic from the GOP says all we need to know about your 'reasoning".
The fact that you reject any kind of nuanced response to a current controversy says all we need to know about your "reasoning".
The fact that you don't know the definition of 'nuanced' says all we need to know about your reasoning. Gee, aren't I a clever one for riffing off you the way you just did to the previous poster.
That completely makes up for the lack of any substance, amirite?
The GOP doesn't do nuance. To claim otherwise is to be arguing in bad faith.
What is this "faux moral panic" to which you refer?
Whether or not it's "faux," it is pretty stupid and trivial. In the year of our lord 2024, with climate change, the economy, wars abroad, and everything else going on, getting in a snit and demanding people care about freakishly rare edge cases involving who is and who is not playing amateur afterschool sports on the "proper" team is fucking bizarre.
I never said its the most important issue out there. Certainly it takes a back seat to things like what you mentioned. But, unlike many other issues, there is no ambiguity with this one. There is so clearly a right and wrong. And, as the father of a high school female athlete, I feel I have a vested interest in it.
"I feel I have a vested interest in it." Something tells me you either don't know or don't care that this sentiment is precisely why you are so looked down upon here.
You're correct. I don't care.
So you also shouldn't care when people inform you that ipso facto you're their moral inferior. But your past comment history suggests otherwise. Way otherwise. IOW, like so many of your stripe, you not only want to have your way, no matter how much it hurts or inconveniences others, you think it's unfair that you get called out for that very behaviour. For chrissakes, put on your big boy pants and stop whining about people calling you an asshole when you are, in point of fact, and asshole ... and say you don't care what other people think of your assholery.
Goggle Christopher Rufo. He started this when CRT didn't catch fire as they hoped it would
Normally, nobody lifts up the skirts of the female athletes in middle or high schools to check that they are, in fact, “actual” females. We all just take their word for it that they are, and with modern locker rooms having individual shower stalls, it’s unclear how anyone “knows” Sam over there is short for Samuel and not Samantha. Not sure why this basic human dignity simply can’t be extended to the vanishingly tiny number of trans kids out there competing in sports, but you can fuck all the way off to hell, Atticus, for your pedophilic desire to have adults inspect the genitals of kids before they engage in sports.
Are you really that dimwitted that you can't see the implications of having boys play on girls athletic teams? There are two very obvious reasons why this would be an issue -- safety and fairness.
My daughter plays lacrosse. She is a very good player on a great team. Her club team is top 10 or so in the country. Everyone on her team will likely play in college and most at the D1 level. However, an average male lacrosse player would dominate if playing against them. He'd be the best player on the field. His disproportional strength and speed would put all the girls at risk for injury. For all the emphasis on player safety these days it would be absurd to have a boy play against girls.
The other aspect is fairness. After all the years of practice, camps, private lessons, clinics, hundreds and hundreds of hours of wall ball, it would be devastating for my daughter (or anyone in her position) to potentially lose out on the last scholarship for the women's lacrosse team to a boy who decided he wants to play with the girls.
I assume you were just feigning ignorance with your last comment in an effort to sounds sufficiently liberal.
Yet you have no problem with an academically ungifted student acing out by a point of two on their SAT's someone with actual chops out of a top slot a college by virtue of the former having had hundreds of hours of coarching and private tutoring while the latter had to work thirty hours a week after school to help support their family.
Face it, Atticus, you're known to be selfish, self-centered asshole 'round these parts. In addition to being academically ungifted, and what's lacrosse got to do with, you know, academics?
Hi, Atticus, I see you're being bigoted and lying in the comments.
Would you like to lie some more?
Kids don't have a large disparity in sports performance until the end of high school; at which a trans kid would have been on puberty blockers most of that time.
They aren't 'boys in the girls sports', despite your straw man. That doesn't happen. These kids would have been seeking transition for years at this point, or are below the point at which there is a gender difference in sports performance.
Stop lying, your bigotry is horrid.
And he is helping to create those perceptions with how he talks about these issues.
"Some people are racists and that's that."
I maintain that virtually everybody is racist, it's just a matter of degree. The least measurable racism would be discomfit living in a world where everybody else is of a different ethnicity. It's miniscule, but non-zero and hence meets the criteria for being racist. Remember, "racist" is a simple adjective with no inherent threshold to exceed.
Too much of the racism debate is premised on a strict binary yes/no, which hinders analysis and is politically unhelpful. There *are* purists on both ends of the scale who are often presented by the press as representative of large segments of the population. That is incorrect.
* there are many sympathetic portrayals on the order of, I was the only X person in a community that was exclusively Y - with ethnicity the X and Y. Is that racism? Sure it is.
Yes, tribalism or fear of the other or racism are hardwired into our species. Zero doubt. The key is to prevent the reptilian part of our brains from overcoming our capacity to be rational. Especially when it comes to formulating policy.
Decades ago, I read a column by Andy Young in which he said you should never trust someone who says they're not a racist. You should say "I'm working on my racism."
I often make the same point Dana Decker does. There's degrees of racism. For example, Amy Schumer in her standup routine tells some very racist jokes. There's a difference between someone who laughs at Amy Schumer and someone who burns crosses on a black person's front yard.
Your reference is almost a decade old, about jokes that are also up to a decade older, from a skit about a dumb character she played.
So relevant.
Maybe you are new to these parts, but it seems your gloss on Mr. Drum and his positions is off base. I've been reading here for a while, and he seems center left to me. And nowhere have I seen any fueling of "right wing bigoted transphobic moral panic." Au contraire, I see Mr. Drum providing a clear perspective of the reality of trans rights.
Could we retire “au contraire”?
It sounds French (because it is French), and it seems to be trendy these days. It also seems elitist. We’re discussing blue-collar attitudes toward liberal left talking points, after all.
This seems exactly like folks who tell women to not sound too smart around men.
The ‘law and order’/crime issue can’t be subsumed as a culture-war thing, it is a major factor in Republican overperformance. Listening to NPR today and heard another report on the disconnect between actual crime statistics and people’s beliefs about crime rates. This issue has worked for the GOP since Nixon.
“Crime” and “law and order” are just code for “visible disorder” (homeless tents, etc) and/or “brown people everywhere.”
Literally that would make it a culture war. The culture of imaginary fears versus reality.
It is astonishing to me that segments of the Left could find such an anodyne statement like this to be even remotely controversial:
“But we could probably tone down the cultural leftism and adopt moderately more populist economic policies. It wouldn't take a lot. But it might make enough of a difference to sink the Republicans for the coming decade.”
Indeed. And that’s why Biden should relentlessly campaign on equal opportunity, merit, hard work, free speech, strong borders, liberty and justice for all. If he does this, he and the Dem party will win big.
But that means rejecting DEI/antiracism (with its reductive and profoundly unpopular emphasis on engineering equal racial outcomes), renouncing safetyism (with its idiotic stand against any free speech that might hurt someone’s feelings), and unequivocally condemning any and all talk of open borders.
In the words of a rather well known and unexpectedly successful politician: “[W]e simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people ... who are waiting lawfully”
These were not Donald Trump’s words in 2016, these were Illinois Democratic Senator Barack Obama’s words in 2005. And they need to be President Biden’s words in 2024.
Assuming, that is, that Biden actually wants to win a second term, save the country from Trump, and secure his place in history as the man who defeated both the right-wing cult of personality and the Leftist cult of ideology.
You either love your neighbor as yourself or you don't. MAGA doesn't and there's no sugarcoating "meet in the middle" way of resolving this. I won't coddle bigots and misogynists to "go along to get along" as all that did was get us down the Trumpian path we find ourselves in.
That Biden and nearly all Democrats have rejected open borders and 'engineering equal racial outcomes' never seems to enter into poor Leo's rant.
Another swing and a miss.
Fighting the imaginations of these loons is a tough challenge. No matter what you actually do, the Leo's will fault you for whataver new thing or boogeyman they have made up as this months outrage.
Leo’s point seems sensible to me. I guess Barry is no longer popular on the extreme left.
No one cares what you think is sensible.
Leo's point is a lie, and bigoted to boot.
Your racism and xenophobia is sickening. You should be ashamed of yourself.
And I'm not sure why we should take prescriptions on what the left should do from someone who can't even spell it correctly.
As for Obama's statement, my comeback to that will always be "then document anyone who wants to come in. We did that for a hundred and fifty years. The ancestors of most of the people in this country got in by showing up, signing their name, and walking in. That was just and equitable, and it is sickening for their descendants to adopt a policy of 'if you're rich or highly educated, we want you, otherwise we're going to kick you in the face if you dare to be a huddled mass yearning to be free.'"
Even though President Obama was so tough on illegal immigration that he was called “the deporter in chief” Trump still successfully used illegal immigration as his major campaign issue when he ran. At the time more Mexicans were returning to the US than coming in. Yet Trump demonized those who came here as drug runners and rapists and showed old footage of mass crossings in campaign ads to make his lying point. So more people believed the lie than the truth, particularly amongst the segment of the population in question. So how does Biden overcome that?
I grew up in the Midwest, and it always seemed like the problem was the Republicans. If we could just elect more Democrats, then things would be great.
Then I moved to Portland Oregon, and the Democrats control everything, and have for years.
And it's not great.
I voted for Measure 110, it was presented as a way to help drug addicts with treatment instead of jail, but as it turned out, no treatment, no arrests, just lots and lots of drug use such that I now know what burning Fentanyl smells like (acrid) and it's unsafe to take the Max train (crazy people knifing passengers randomly on the regular).
There's plenty of crazy on both sides, is what I'm seeing.
Perhaps you need to step away from the NextDoor app, crime is down in most US cities.
If someone is actually knifed “next door,” most people take notice. The Portland Metro knifing a couple of years ago killed two men attempting to protect a Muslim woman from being harassed and threatened by a white thug. Stop minimizing urban violence. It happens every week near where I live, 15 miles north of Portland.
Proof that it's a weekly thing suddenly in the past few years? I call bogus - folks are getting stirred up over crime because more of it is getting documented on film and social media.
That was right-wing violence.
How is allowing more right-wing violence going to solve that?
Portland would not be measurably improved by Republican-style crackdowns, and there is only so much cities can do without state and federal support.
"Then I moved to Portland Oregon, and . . . it's not great"
And yet you still live there.
Your statement about 110 is a lie.
The drop in arrests are because cops stopped enforcing basic petty law.
Oh, and it turns out that it's illegal to arrest someone for sleeping or camping when there's no place for them to do that legally.
Civil rights along with Vietnam in the ‘60s. Roe v Wade in the ‘70s feels important in the sense that something was starting to coalesce. Politics took a nasty turn in the ‘90s, perhaps fueled by billionaires setting in motion a movement over which they would lose control. The internet at the start of the millennium changed everything. Iraq, Afghanistan, and outsourcing to China were elite projects that ultimately undermined confidence in the elite. Immigration took over from abortion as a touchstone, and continues to gain power. If there were off ramps, we seem to have blown by them.
The truth is not so complicated, folks. There's one event that towers over all others in explaining what happened to the two parties and why we have the political division that exists today in this country. It was the Civil Right Act of 60 years ago.
Democrats had a lock on the South from the Civil War on, then lost it to the Republicans just as the Sunbelt was growing rapidly and gaining political clout.
Likewise, Democrats' increasing support for minorities and civil rights alienated the predominantly white suburbs just as the postwar suburbs were growing rapidly and also gaining political clout.
I don't have much patience for questions about why Democrats lost the working class. That question usually assumes the working class is all white, which is a telling error, since Democrats still have majorities among working class folk who are Black, Latino, and otherwise nonwhite. But the question also implies that Democrats did something wrong. What they did, though, was do something right. They said no more Jim Crow, no more segregation, no more KKK terror on the Black community, and Democrats paid a price.
That's the context for virtually all the politics that followed in recent decades. Of course, other factors were at play (changing media landscape, globalization, structural electoral & governing imbalances, etc.). But the essential division in our political system is about race. If that's not exceedingly clear to you, especially with the rise of Trump and the MAGA cult, which has taken over a broken GOP, I don't know where you been.
He is a young Black conservative, who argues — in his writings, a podcast and a YouTube channel with about 173,000 subscribers — that schools have taught students of his generation to obsess over their racial identity, while blocking arguments that challenge their worldview.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/us/coleman-hughes-black-conservative-colorblind.html
Nutpicking the few rare Black conservative tokesns is not a refutation of Joseph's post.
More a demonstration of the problem than a refutation. Hughes is a jackass. The division is about race.
Yes, you are demonstrating the problem of blaming non-white people for their problem being systematically excluded.
Bugger your racism.
Nailed it exactly.
I'll say its not complicated. I mean, since trump brought every lunatic representative of the Repub base out I don't even see how this is a question any more.
1. Add up the hard core gun nuts
2. Add up the hard core anti abortionists
3. Add up the hard core anti taxers
4. Add up the hard core soverign citizens anti regulationists
5 Add up the hard core people who think racism is a private issue
6. And, thanks to Fox, add up the doofuses who just hate Dems.
1 - 6 adds up to like 40%, although each might be a minority. Look downstream for our Leo, leaps in like clockwork on point 5. I have no idea if he even cares about point 2, or point 1, but who here thinks it would even matter?
There is a whiff of plausibility in the argument that democrats are suspicious of the police and love illegal immigration (sorry -asylum seekers) and transgenders. That’s why it sticks. I don’t think there is a way to walk away from it. Might as well just admit it and take our chances.
I think it’s a bit off to blame right wing opposition to the transgender on sports. It’s way deeper than that. More just that they find it creepy, I think.
As long as you support basic rights for people, you are going to susceptible to these suspicions and attacks from those who dont.
You cant really fix this, or meet them halfway or get ahead of whatever the next made up panic will be about.
You dont win by compromising here, you just lose in a different way.
Yeah - own your values.
How exactly would Democrats go about stopping all people from saying things that FOX News might go crazy with? How would this plan work exactly?
Defund The Police had almost no support across the Dem landscape, from politicians, to advertising to grass roots groups to major policy think tanks.....but it was a Fox News phenomenon nonetheless.
Culture, racism and policy preferences for upward redistribution explain this matter. Hard to win these voters and still maintain a liberal/progressive/left approach to the world.
"Defund The Police had almost no support across the Dem landscape ..."
It had enough support that Democratic politicians were unwilling to say that the idea was nuts and that the people supporting it were morons.
Good example of the lack of support and how little the angries actually care about it.
As you say, it doesnt actually matter if anyone supported the idea, what matters is that they didnt criticize and attack the people you want criticized and attacked. Social warriors are funny like this. The issues dont matter, its all about virtue signaling and declaring what side of the culture war you are on.
Similarly, immigration policies dont matter, its all about how much you dislike and disrespect you can show towards immigrants.
CULTURE WAR!
For someone whose every post is just so much signalling, you sure don't have a lot to say.
Citation not included.
I wonder why...
There is also a bit of commentary about arabs in Michigan coming out against Biden over the war. In many communities, we've recently learned that Arabs / muslims are as opposed to my values as right wing republicans. They are hostile, for example, to homosexuals and transgender. So from where I sit, they really have nothing to offer democrats at all.
And then you have Africans immigrants who even Pope Francis sees as hostile!
"Those who protest vehemently belong to small ideological groups," Francis told Italian newspaper La Stampa. "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it".
While surely that's a pretty expansive generalization, it also has a whiff of plausibility.
How about not being bigoted, and not coddling bigots?
I don't see how your idea that we throw defense of non-white or queer people to the curb is going to win more votes.
"Democrats have lost blue-collar voters ..."
If by "blue collar" you mean "middle middle class white male voters" than sure. But there are plenty of other blue collar workers out there who aren't aggrieved white guys.
"...if Democrats could produce rising incomes and wages for most working-class voters for many, many years ..."
That would require the Democrats BEING IN POWER FOR MANY, MANY YEARS. But when the Dems do produce good economies, great growth, low unemployment, good stock market results, etc. etc. etc. they get the rug pulled out from under them and the GOP is given the House and Trump is leading in the polls.
Give Dems three terms in the Oval with the House and Senate and you'll see these results. But this back and forth crap means all the Dem gains get pissed on and reversed just as they are starting to kick in hard.
The main takeaway is that since Dems can't use race and gender politics to peel off Republicans, they can focus on issues that the GOP is absolutist about that most voters feel invade people's privacy and are highly motivating.
So not economics. REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS.
100%-- gop is not only absolutist about this, it's radioactive. Dobbs is not a one-and-done thing that people will get over in time, it's the very opposite. It's a deep, slow burn that will continue to build in intensity over a generation. Dems stand against it, and they should. It's the right position on an issue that Rs have been wrong and foolish to push.
Conservative media has done a bang up job creating an alternate reality in which the problems of the working class and the devolution of their communities are not the fault of the Republican donor class that is responsible for eliminating the jobs they once enable them to live a middle class lifestyle. Rather, they blame all the ‘others’ they once discriminated against, and not being able to feel superior to at least some people galls them and makes them easy marks for conservative media resentment mongers. And since undereducated white people are predominantly rural and rural people are more religious that urban people, they already believe in an unbelievable alternate reality, so it’s not a stretch for them to swallow what Tucker Carlson feeds them.
All the DEI, defend police, Trans athletes, and people at the border may not make much of a difference.
Because if you wave all those issues away you will still have Democrats funding public transit and getting all hot and bothered whenever a school gets shot up. And those aren't going away.
Truck and gun culture is so popular among blue collar white men, it will be more than enough to drive them to Republicans, even without anything else.
Oh please. At a time when Republicans are welcoming Nazis into their ranks and violently trying to overthrow our government and letting women die because they don't like abortion you're going to lecture us about Democratic extremism? It's absurd.
Oh, and it's been years since I've heard the phrase "defund the police" in any context other than of conservatives beating us over the head with it.
"From "Defund the Police" to extreme softness on the border to defending trans girls competing in high school sports, liberals have been pushing the boundaries of social conventions pretty hard."
Aren't these all just issues where the GOP went insane and Dems are holding the commonsense/status quo lines, not pushing boundaries? E.g. Republicans react to high-profile police misconduct with racist, fascist fantasies, and Dems respond with "policing works and we should fund what works." Or Republicans attack trans kids and immigrants and Dems take a "live and let live" stance. To the extent those issues are driving voters, I think you just have to tip your cap to Republicans for so effectively tapping into voters' personality disorders.
It couldn't possibly be because Americans have figured out that in all areas not Trump related, there is very little difference between the party's positions.
I am not thrilled to vote Democratic, I only do it because unless our system is changed it is the only sane choice I see.
This is not and has never been true. You might be able to make that argument during the Clinton years, you know, thirty years ago, but even then it wasn't true.
Well, to be fair, it does depend on what position you yourself adhere to. For example, if jmac is a Trotskyite or something, I guess Republicans and Democrats are pretty close together in his mind.
Although, I'd query whether the phrase "in all areas not Trump related" is doing so much work that it effectively swallows his whole "point."
The unchanging core of Republicans in my area are fundamentalist “believers” who will support republicans despite their racism, tax policies, and homophobia (maybe because of ), It’s abortion uber alles for them. Nothing else matters.
Blue collar workers - the political media's code for non-college white males - keep electing Republicans, but are angry that Democrats haven't delivered for them.
How does that make sense to anyone?
"the two drivers of Democratic losses are race and culture."..."Working class discontent with liberals has been driven by an underlying long-term trend starting in the counterculture '60s and then supercharged by Fox News starting in the late '90s." - Interesting but incomplete as an explanation.
How do you explain the material shift within Hispanics, such as border counties in Texas or in Dade country FL? How do you explain more black males voting Republican?
I’ll try to explain it when I see if it is actually significant. Polls aren’t election results.
Not sure that “ton(ing) down the cultural leftism” would make any difference as the GOP will latch onto something else no matter what. Consider the hounding of Bill Clinton, for instance. Is he a cultural leftist?
I would say: better to go on offense and argue that the economy, the deficit, unemployment, and the stock market all do better under Democrats.
In fact, I consider the greatest failure of journalism in our time to be the regular poll result that more people trust the Republicans to do a good job on the economy.
The UAW is supporting Biden but a large portion of UAW workers are voting Trump. It's not about money or more opportunity, it's about being a "man" and letting culture wars take your eye off the ball
In other words, for being right about those things.