An interesting short essay by a good Colorado observer of politics.   T

Colorado Politics

Democrats no longer the party of the working class | SONDERMANN

By Eric Sondermann

Mar 17, 2024 Updated Mar 17, 2024

What a difference a couple of decades can make.

In 2002, journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira came out with their book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” In a nutshell, their thesis was that the growing cadre of knowledge workers would join ranks with the Democratic Party’s core constituents among minorities and working-class voters to form a durable, dominant, post-industrial, center-left coalition.

This past November, 21 years after that initial publication, Judis and Teixeira, both formidable intellects, returned with a sequel of sorts, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.”

The question at hand centers on what happened over these two intervening decades and why Democrats did not emerge as the enduring, unassailable majority, per the forecast.

In the telling of these two authors to go along with that of plenty of others, the longtime “soul of the party” has turned into the missing piece. That is a reference, of course, to the so-called working class which long constituted the party’s backbone.

Think back just shy of a half-century to the 1976 election between Jimmy Carter and then-President Gerald Ford. Save for Hawaii, the westernmost state to vote for Carter was Texas. Yes, you read that correctly.

Texas, Florida, Missouri, Ohio and West Virginia were blue states as were current battlegrounds like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia (Carter’s home state). California was still deeply red as were other states that are now Democratic bastions such as Oregon, Washington and our own Colorado.

So, what changed? 50 years or thereabouts is a long expanse and demographic patterns have shifted notably. Witness the growth of Florida and Texas (then blue; now quite red) as well as the inverse pattern in California and Colorado.

But that is far from the entire story. Political parties are dynamic organisms and they, too, have rearranged in marked form.

For quite a period, including after he departed the scene, Republicans were the party of Reagan with his three-legged stool of social conservatism, muscular foreign policy and paeans, often empty, to limited government.

That general consensus held until master marketer Donald Trump read some tea leaves and upset the apple cart.

On the Democratic side, a string of decisive defeats (McGovern, Carter, Mondale and Dukakis) resulting from a lurch to the left following Vietnam and the social upheavals of the time finally led to the “third way,” “New Democrat” equivocation of Bill Clinton.

That, too, slowly withered as party activists became more animated and unyielding in their beliefs, not wholly unlike their Republican counterparts. Or in the words of Judis and Teixeira, the soul of the party changed.

For decades, the Democratic Party had been the creation of Franklin Roosevelt. His boundless experimentation and major expansion of the federal government in response to the Great Depression redefined his party.

To be a “New Deal” Democrat was to be on the side of the working man, not the boss and his country club cronies. During the FDR years and for multiple decades after, to identify as a Democrat was to believe in the power of government as a tool for economic growth and leveling, and as a safety net for the downtrodden.

At the center of that Democratic coalition was the steelworker, the iron-ore miner, the pipefitter, the electrical-line installer, the snowplow driver, the grocery clerk, the hospital orderly, the assembly-line technician, the dairy farmer.

Now read back through the list. If that describes yourself or someone in your circle, odds are that person long ago broke from Democratic ranks. It is a decent bet they may now be a closeted or out-front Trump supporter.

The Democratic Party has become a wraparound coalition of many of society’s most affluent along with those on the lowest economic rungs. Accompanying all of this is the assortment of government workers, academics, nonprofit employees, those in therapeutic occupations, climate activists, gay advocates, and those who define themselves and others based largely on skin tone.

Bully for all of them. But what’s missing from this alliance is what used to be at the center of it; namely, those of the non-college-educated working class. Education has become the great dividing line of American politics. Those with college degrees or even more advanced credentials are disproportionately Democrats. Those lacking such refined certification have increasingly gravitated to the Republican Party.

Perhaps my straddling of the fence is explained by my having attended college though departing before graduation. Just saying.

Remember the old stereotype of Republicans as the party of the wealthy and business elite? Those days are dated and gone. Of the 25 wealthiest congressional districts across the country, 24 are now represented by a Democrat. On the flip side, nearly two-thirds of districts below the national median income send a Republican to congress.

Working-class voters have deserted the Democrats over a slew of issues. Trade policy, crime and immigration are certainly high on the list.

Though the driving factor has less to do with economic policy than with the Democratic Party’s unceasing cultural march. Those loyalists who continue to cite Thomas Frank’s book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” and insist that voters should be principally, even exclusively, economic creatures fail to understand human nature.

Want to grasp what has chased away working-class Americans?

Flash on every debate over those born male playing women’s sports; every placard about “defunding the police;” every corporate training on “equity” instead of the old standard of equal opportunity; every talking head declaring “no migrant is illegal;” every reference to “birthing people;” every email proclaiming the sender’s pronouns; and every gratuitous use of “Latinx”, a description only three percent of Latinos even embrace.

Democrats’ bloodletting centers on the white working class. They have become Trump’s base. But repeated polls have shown erosion as well among the Black and Latino working class. If that materializes in any appreciable way, it is curtains for Joe Biden and for Democratic prospects for a good while.

Economic insecurity is a part of the revolt. Those among the working class have suffered most from inflation as well as from the downward pressure on wages due to illegal immigrants in the construction trades and other sectors.

Though that is but a piece of it. As Democrats have grown ever more morally vocal and judgmental, and ever more advantaged and coastal, working-class voters have fled in droves.

FDR is spinning in his grave. Same for JFK and LBJ; for Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. Those current Democrats like John Fetterman still with working-class loyalties are smacking their heads in disbelief.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for ColoradoPolitics and the Gazette newspapers. Reach him at [email protected]; follow him at @EricSondermann

https://www.coloradopolitics.com/columnists/democrats-no-longer-the-party-of-the-working-class-sondermann/article_a3bacc52-e219-11ee-b6ea-5bff9d003776.html