The missing piece in Democrats’ approach to the White working class

The missing piece in Democrats’ approach to the White working class

By Paul Waldman

Columnist

Today at 3:46 p.m. EST

One thing you can say about Democrats: When they have a problem with a certain sector of the electorate, they are not going to ignore it. Republicans won’t waste a moment’s thought on nonreligious Americans or urban voters or anybody else disinclined to vote for the GOP. But even after an election victory, Democrats will launch a thousand polls and articles and seminars to figure out how they can win back the affections of voters who have spurned them.

So it has been the case for a while with White working-class voters, who have increasingly been giving their votes to the party whose most passionate and immutable commitment is to low taxes for the wealthy.

Yet in the various essays and analyses you can find from very smart Democrats, almost none of them focus on the one thing that would help their party the most, and which has proven to work: Not convincing those working-class voters to love Democrats, but convincing them to hate Republicans. It may not be the most high-minded strategy in the world, but it accounts for how people actually make voting decisions. And it’s perfectly honest.

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If you were following this debate, you might think that there are really only two paths Democrats can follow: Should they work harder to convince White working-class voters of how they’ll be helped by Democratic policies, or should they turn their guns on their own left flank? Ron Brownstein of CNN rounds up this debate well, including a discussion of the “Sister Souljah” strategy that some are now recommending:

In Republican-leaning states and districts, “Democratic candidates have to forcibly separate themselves from the Democratic brand” on cultural questions, says Andrew Levison, a contributing editor at The Democratic Strategist, a website that debates the party’s choices. He argues that “a reckoning does have to be done with certain elements of the progressive wing of the party” and that [President] Biden should directly renounce some left-leaning ideas on race the way Bill Clinton did in 1992, when he criticized the rapper Sister Souljah. “Standing up for certain traditional cultural principles against the left might help Biden establish his own bona fides” for 2024, says Levison. “He can’t really ride on 'Amtrak Joe.’ ”

During the 1992 campaign, Clinton made a point of criticizing provocative comments about the L.A. riots by Sister Souljah, whom only a tiny proportion of the American electorate had heard of before then. The assumption ever since has been that this was a shrewd if cynical strategy that won Clinton the support of White moderates, who warmed to him after they saw how he was willing to attack a Black person.

But there’s no actual evidence that Clinton’s remarks moved any significant number of votes. In terms of his overall strategy, it was a minor blip. His campaign focused on George H.W. Bush’s handling of the economy and how out-of-touch Bush was with struggling Americans trying to recover from a recession.

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So the idea that White voters will flock to Joe Biden if he attacks some Black activists is not particularly persuasive. The fact is that the Democratic Party is the party of minorities, and of people who live in cities, and of young people, and of liberals. It has been struggling with the White working class since the 1960s, when battles over civil rights reorganized party loyalties and Richard Nixon established the “Southern strategy” that has formed the foundation of Republican success ever since.

And every time Democrats have garnered enough support from the White working class to pull them over the line to victory, they did it with attacks on Republicans.

There’s probably no better example than Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. As a matter of identity, Obama was everything Democrats love and Republicans loathe. So his campaign absolutely pummeled Mitt Romney as a vulture capitalist who laid waste to factories and towns while lining his own extremely deep pockets.

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It was extremely negative, and it worked. Obama didn’t have to convince White working-class voters he was one of them, because he convinced them — or at least enough of them — that Romney was their enemy.

The lesson for today is that you can suggest that Democrats “do a better job” of explaining all the ways their policies will help working-class people, but if they don’t focus on Republican opposition and what it says about who those Republicans are, they’re only telling half the story — and it’s the less persuasive half.

The degree to which Democrats seem to have forgotten this lately, even if they halfheartedly repeat “Republicans just want to cut taxes for the rich,” is remarkable. Only seldom do they take that policy argument and make it personal.

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They barely even tried with Donald Trump (though in fairness, he was appalling in so many ways it could be hard to choose what to focus on). That enabled Trump to present himself as a champion of the little guy. It was so preposterous as to be almost obscene, but it persuaded even many of those who were not cheering his racism and xenophobia — and who are therefore open to being convinced to move back to Democrats.

Democratic policies are almost always the far more popular ones; the reason Republicans stay competitive is that they find ways to make voters get angry and hate Democrats. The answer to that problem is never going to be “Please, won’t you read our 10-point plan?” and it won’t be found in turning liberal activists into scapegoats. Democrats already know what works; they just have to remind themselves.