Biden: D’s Have Stopped Talking to White Working Class Voters.
I agree. If you’re a white working class voter and you’re watching this convention, you don’t even see yourself there. Much like that virtually no minorities were seen at the Republican National Convention. This had better change or else.
As a white male I don’t need to see people who look like me to know if they are proposing an agenda that benefits me or not. I can figure that out myself without lookalike spokesmen as visual aids.
Also, many agendas have been unfairly tagged as benefiting only white males when in fact they benefit everybody. Just more distract, divide, and conquer by the 1% and their dupes.
Good for you. But the visuals of the convention appear to be designed to speak to everybody BUT white working class voters. The fact that you can rise above the fray does nothing to change the poll #’s among that group of voters.
Also, a lot of the white working class people I know are racist knuckleheads who want to outlaw BLM and have the police crack down harder on inner city blacks. What the hell are we going to say to them that they want to hear?
My guess and hope is that the VP will address the white working class voter tonight by making references to issues in various regions and testify to Hillary as their best option.
Exactly, Jenr. The way to reach white working class voters is to propose policies that benefit everybody. White voters aren’t looking for carveouts for themselves; they are looking for a general prosperity.
The last D President who was able to capture white working class voters was on stage last night. Monday had a number of union leaders on stage making the case for Hillary. Early evening speakers tomorrow look to be working class people (no idea if they are white) offering their stories.
If white working class voters are not interested in the governing program on offer here, then what? One of the reasons why the GOP has been able to capture this demographic is because they’ve been able to mine their resentments at the expense of any policy that actually makes them more economically secure.
I think it’s way too late to change the racial dynamics of the general election now that Trump is the GOP nominee. It was a platform Trump ran on and won. And so the Democrats have little choice in the matter but to embrace the minorities that Trump discarded in exchange for the white American voters that are negative toward the minority issues, specifically illegal immigration, Muslim immigration, and foreign policy that Trump has bashed and won on. The Dems have a lot of work to do. I think they will need a huge minority turnout to win in November.
White male voters are under 47%…
They don’t matter.
“The morning of his much-anticipated speech at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Joe Biden urged Democrats to remember their base — working-class and minority voters — and fold in Bernie Sanders supporters by tackling income inequality head on.[…]“Bernie is absolutely right in speaking to what eats at my core,” he said.”
Pffft… typical white-guy issues.
And the other side of the coin, is that white male voters are the enemy. Why would we want to talk to people trying to DESTROY America? Why would we WANT to talk to people who are TRYING HARD to make America a two tiered society, where either you are the 1% or a piece of three day old sh/t. Why would we WANT to talk to America’s excrement laying in the gutter of our up to now, glorious history?
These pieces of chewed up and digested mixtures of cellulose and unused protein, ARE what voted AGAINST a budget surplus, AGAINST the best continuous economic growth EVER in our nation’s history, AGAINST all quintiles of our population doing making more and more each sequential year, AGAINST paying off our national debt in 8 years…. Face it… these pieces of human excrement are nothing more than sh/t… Who needs more sh/t? HEY! SH/T HERE… COME GET YOUR SH/T HERE…. JUST 50 CENTS A TON… EXTRA EXTRA… BONUS 5 POUNDS ADDED FREE…
Face it ….. When you get up and look in your toilet after doing your duty…. what you see half submerged in the water,,, looks much, much better than the white voters you are trying to pacify….
What do you do with sh/t? FLUSH IT DOWN THE TOILET…. not pick it up in your hands and coddle it.
From an election strategy perspective, turning Trump’s ignorant supporters into the enemy, may be the winning move.
After all… Look how well Trump has done with a pure message of division and hate.
I generally don’t like divisive politics, but if that’s what it takes to defeat Trump…
So.. Instead of going after a larger slice of that 20% (white-bread ignorant male) of the electorate, it might be better to work on increasing turnout for a plethora of women and various minority groups.
In the end, this election will hinge on turnout.
“The last D President who was able to capture white working class voters was on stage last night.”
Then he signed NAFTA and screwed the working class.
Like I said at the beginning of this thread, it’s not about winning this demographic group, it’s about getting our fair share. I agree with Biden that we’ve not spoken to and/or listened to those who should gravitate towards the Democratic message. We need to do this.
El they don’t care about the issues. They don’t like our social agenda. The economics don’t matter much to them in comparison. The last democrat who went out of his way to “talk to white working class voters”passed the 94 crime bill and 3 strikes laws which is partly responsible for the mass incarceration of people of color that we see today. Appeasing “white working class voters” got us Dont Ask Dont Tell. Its white working class voters who want us to build a wall on the colored people’s border. President Johnson’s greatest achievement was running those bigots away to the other Party. Hopefully, Hillary can keep the tradition going.
You can’t describe them as ‘they’ as if they’re a monolith. They’re not all the same. We’re not gonna reach all of them. But to dismiss many of them as beyond redemption is just not true.
BTW, Biden’s speech is definitely aimed at those voters. So, far, it’s pretty damned great.
I wish that I could say the same about Obama’s.
White male working class voters…. how do you talk to them? They have been talked to for every election since the beginning of time. The country was built for them. Excuse me for not shedding a tear becuase they feel left out today. Seems like they only feel left out because there hasn’t been a white man in the presidency for the last 8years and possibly the next 8years. We’ve had 44 presidents. Maybe 3 or 4 that have spoken to minorities. Fewer who have spoken to women. Go pound sand. Where did the phrase white working class voter come from anyway…. Frank Luntz? Last I checked, thats what they mean when they say “America”. They aren’t talking about black people or minorities. Which is why Joe Biden always mentions Lower Delaware and its 15 Democrats as being the measure of Delaware and nobody ever gets on a big stage and talks about the people of Wilmington or Bear as being somehow the salt of Delaware. Its because everything that this country has ever been about is for white men (working class voters). But all of a sudden we get 2 presidents that don’t have a white penis and they are “out of touch with white men” Well, welcome to what it must have been like over the last 230yrs of being a minority of a woman in this country.
So what’s fascinating here are the various negative portrayals of working class whites. For me they don’t match up to the realities of the people I grew up around–strong unionists, and people who hadn’t been raised to see Black Americans, but who grew to respect the men they worked beside, regardless of their color.
i think Joe’s right–I tend to think white working class men gave up on the Democrats not because of LGBTQ policies, but because of corporatist, anti-unionist trade policies that took them for granted and left them out in the cold.
That would make sense Steve if they were not voting for Trump and the Republicans. That statement of, “the people I grew up around”… is silly. First, the people you grew up with do not represent everyone. Furthermore, nobody said these people were knuckle dragging neanderthals. They are your neighbor, they guy you work with, and the lady that delivers your mail. Are you expecting them to show up at the family reunion like,” Fuck Blacks and Fags”?
I doubt it. But numbers are numbers. Polling shows that they don’the belive black lives matter, they want more prisons, fewer immigrants, and the changing demographic is terrifying them. Crime is at all time lows but a good chunknown of “white working class voters” believe that it’s on the rise. Not because it’s true, But because there are more people of color in the country than ever before, the president is black, the next president is a woman… and they want their country back. You can act like these people don’t exist, but I say good riddance to bad rubbish. Minorities know the result of compromising with “white working class voters”….. it never works out too well.
Actually, Steve’s right. You are treating an entire demographic as a monolithic bloc. It’s not as if Clinton has as little support among working class white males as Trump has with Latinos. It’s just that she needs more. Biden understands this. That’s why he said that he’d be ‘living’ in the rust belt states until November.
And it’s not as if working class whites don’t have legit grievances against the Democratic Party, particularly as it pertains to trade deals that they believe have cost them their jobs and standard of living. Let the R’s play divide and conquer. The D’s need to reach out and explain why Democratic policies will be more beneficial to them than Trump’s. Sure you’ll never get the out-and-out racists and misogynists. But you’ll get a bit higher percentage of these voters, and that might be just enough to swing the election. It really isn’t that hard to understand.
These are the Reagan Democrats. Not exactly a monolithic group (Bernie caught a part of this group in the primaries), but every single campaign since Clinton has worked to bring these folks back into the fold. They’ve been voting for trickle down and now for miracle deals.
Which isn’t to say that they don’t have legit economic issues and anxieties. The Reagan Democrats in particular have been buying the snake oil for years. Which suggests to me that wonky policy machinations designed to ease the pain or facilitate a transition is a much harder sell than bringing back what you had.
The Reagan democrats, as Cassandra mentioned, have been voting against their own economic interest for decades. The only reason they would do that is the democratic party’s social policies. I just feel like people are in denial about this.
America is becoming more progressive socially and they want to go backward. What do we gain by slowing down and waiting for them to catch up? Make America Greater…….