Democrats Have a Demographic Problem: Working-Class Americans

Long-time Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg has news for Democrats: You don’t have a “white-working class problem”; you have a “working-class problem.”

Greenberg is urging the Democratic Party to get serious about addressing its problem with all working-class Americans, defined as those without a college degree.

“The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate, including the rising American electorate of minorities, unmarried women, and millennials,” he wrote in an article in The American Prospect. “This decline contributed mightily to the Democrats’ losses in the states and Congress and to the election of Donald Trump.”

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Greenberg says Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) attack on “big money” hit “much closer to the mark” than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign message, but the problem goes far beyond the issues Sanders broached.

He identifies four reasons working-class Americans deserted the Democratic Party last fall: 1. Obama’s handling of the economy; 2. trade; 3. immigration; and 4. the party’s cultural alignment with the educated elite, and its corresponding disregard and disrespect for the values and struggles of small-town and rural voters.

“The core problem is President Obama’s handling of the economy,” Greenberg wrote, saying that while President Barack Obama saved the global economy after the 2008 housing crisis and financial meltdown with the federal bailout (TARP), all of the gains went to the upper 1%, while working-class Americans saw their incomes drop.

Working-class Americans, he said, felt TARP was a bailout of the “irresponsible elites.”

“Wall Street excess took the country’s economy off a cliff, and Democrats rightly came to the nation’s rescue by passing the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But the bailout of the banks was, and remains, a searing event in American consciousness — and one inextricably linked to Democratic governance,” Greenberg wrote.

TARP was formulated by President George W. Bush but taken up by President Barack Obama when he took office. It bailed out big corporations such as General Motors and giant investment banks, with promises that the money would trickle down to average Americans. It never did.

“National Democrats … consciously do not turn to traditional authority for moral absolutes, and they devalue those who depend on faith-based conclusions.”

It was recently revealed that, when all was said and done, taxpayers took a loss of $11 billion on General Motors — a staggering amount that could have gone toward a cost-of-living increase for older Americans struggling to live off their meager Social Security income, or for job-placement centers to help people get back to work, or to repair crumbling bridges and highways.

Democrats, says Greenberg, have also fallen into a bad spot on the issue of immigration.

Majorities in polls have said in the past that they were open to legalization for illegal immigrants, but something changed in 2016.

In focus groups his company conducted in Macomb County, Michigan, involving white working-class Trump voters who had previously supported Obama, Greenberg said it was clear that the issues of immigration, borders and Islam were “central” to voters’ support for Trump’s calls to take back America.

“Many thought Clinton, on the other hand, wanted ‘open borders,'” wrote Greenberg.

And Greenberg notes that a majority of Americans say they think immigrants take jobs away from Americans. (go to page 2 to continue reading)[lz_pagination]