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In 2016, voters without a college degree bailed on the Democratic Party and voted for Trump 52-44 percent, while voters with a college degree voted for Clinton 52-43 percent. This eight-point spread between those without a college degree and those with one was the biggest in the history of the poll, which has been conducted since 1980. The last time so many working-class voters went Republican was in 1984, when Ronald Reagan was running for re-election. In that year, among working-class voters, 17 percent more voted for Reagan than for Mondale. In 1988, however, many of those voters swung back to the Democrats, voting for Michael Dukakis over George H.W. Bush.

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Another issue Greenberg identified as hurting Democrats among working-class Americans was trade. These voters, he writes, pulled away from Clinton because of the Democrats’ “seeming embrace of multinational trade agreements that have cost American jobs.”

“Seeming embrace” might be put too gently. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had gone full-Wall Street, and as secretary of state lauded the Trans-Pacific Partnership as the “gold standard” of trade agreements. NAFTA, which was signed by her husband, President Bill Clinton, was widely regarded as having destroyed whole sectors of American industry.

Trump made trade one of his top issues, complaining of “bad” trade deals made by “stupid” people that had hurt Americans and hurt the American economy. And he promised to cancel the TPP on day one. Trump canceled the TPP on Jan. 23, the Monday after the Friday he was inaugurated as president of the United States.

But the fourth reason Greenberg says the working class left the Democratic Party is the most interesting, and will probably be the hardest to fix, if it can be fixed.

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Democratic leaders, he says, have aligned themselves with the Democratic elite in the big cities. He says in every speech, Obama and Clinton kept talking about how America was so well positioned, and “barely noticed” that there was anything “amiss” in smaller cities and towns.

“They were also aligning the national Democrats with a liberal narrative and moral frame that values equality, equal rights, and fairness,” he wrote. “They consciously do not turn to traditional authority for moral absolutes, and they devalue those who depend on faith-based conclusions.”

Working-class Americans, by contrast, Greenberg wrote, “accept faith-based moral absolutes and respect traditional authority. They honor an individualism that is grounded in personal responsibility, industriousness, [a] strong work ethic, self-reliance, self-restraint, and self-discipline, which guard against idleness and dependence. They honor the traditional family and the male breadwinner role. They value patriotism, love of country, and those who defend it from our enemies, and they believe American citizens come first.”[lz_pagination]