“Working class” is a mind trap
Politico this morning reports on another 2024 post-mortem poll looking at Democrats’ “working class” voter problem.
Politico begins:
Working-class voters see Democrats as “woke, weak and out-of-touch” and six in 10 have a negative view of the party, concluded a frank internal assessment of the hole the party finds itself in.
My problem is that (unless I missed it) they don’t include a link to the poll itself. Without the data, there is no way to know who the pollsters included in “working class.” We’ll get to that issue in a moment.
The Democratic brand “is suffering,” as working-class voters see the party as “too focused on social issues and not nearly focused enough on the economic issues that impact every one, every day,” the report said.
“We lost people we used to get [in 2024], so why did we lose them? Why don’t we go ask them,” said Mitch Landrieu, co-chair of Democracy Matters and senior adviser to then-President Joe Biden. “They said what they thought about us and it was painful to hear … They feel forgotten, left out, and that their issues are not prioritized by the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.”
I can tell you that without a poll after spending 12 straight Friday rush hours holding signs on an overpass. (The side facing the interstate changes each week. The side facing pedestrians is the one above.)
The week I aimed YOUR LIFE SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD at the interstate, the diversity of vehicles that responded with waves, honks, and thumbs-up caught my attention. Sure, there were Subarus (ubiquitous here), plus Hondas and Toyotas, and even one Mercedes. But positive feedback also came from lawn-service pickups, Latinos in a work van, personal pickups, a couple of semis, and aging beaters with hanging body panels and peeling paint. Many are the sorts of voters and non-voters Democrats have lost to despair, disgust, and apathy.
Cynical and frustrated Americans feel unheard and undefended by both parties. They want to feel seen. This message above has won me instant credibility and trust. Pedestrians on the bridge week after week after week — especially those 35 and under, and especially women — look me square in the eye and thank me. Seriously.
A slim, tattooed young woman about 30 read it and said, “Oh, hell yeah,” and shot me a pinky-and-thumb, shaka salute. She asked if she could take a picture. A car full of 20-something women saw the sign, stopped on the bridge and cheered. A woman on a scooter turned around at the end of the bridge and came back to take a photo. A trio of young guys, early 20s, fist-bumped me on Friday.
I’m no messaging expert. I just lucked into this message after speaking with a 20-yr-old summer intern struggling to make any money while paying $1200/mo. for a short-term apartment. (It might have been $1500.)
If I were canvassing, they might be the first six words out of my mouth when the door opens … before I ask what would make their lives better and how Democrats might help.
Yes, the bulk of pedestrians are white, but the bulk of the “working class” are not. That’s why Rebecca Solnit last week offered this perspective after reading a Tressie McMillan Cottom op-ed regarding Graham Platner, the U.S. Senate candidate from Maine. Solnit posted to Facebook:
It’s been infuriating for a long time that “working class” is too often code for white men, fantasy white men from 1934 wearing hard hats and carrying lunch buckets, stingy-hearted white men who imagine their own thriving can only be built atop others’ deprivation, too often fancy rhetoric to justify pandering to the most prejudiced by throwing anyone and everyone else under the bus. Which is not just bad ethics, but bad strategy, since the backbone of the Democratic Party IS everyone else.
And here’s an important point: despite the wording of the headline, this isn’t a thing “the Democrats” do: I can promise you AOC, Maxine Waters, Elizabeth Warren, and Ilan Omar don’t do. It’s a thing that mostly white guys do in the service of white guys.
Tressie McMillan Cottom writes (in part, but there’s a gift link so you can read the whole thing):
I cannot swear to know the minds of men like Murphy and Sanders. But, were I a betting person, I’d wager someone else’s riches that they know racism and xenophobia are inextricably linked to America’s inchoate understanding of class politics. They know that “working class” has become a powerful political totem of its own — a discursive sleight of hand used to separate out white voters’ concerns as more legitimate, more materially grounded, more important than other voters’ concerns.
These senators are demonstrating a willful blindness that has become endemic in the Democratic Party. Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class.
It is an old argument. History will tell you that negotiating with racism or fascism or authoritarianism never ends well.
It is also a cop-out that can sound like political pragmatism: The idea that we simply must learn to overlook bad behavior as mere human foibles. Who among us, it is implied, has not said or done or etched a hateful symbol of exclusion and oppression into our minds or bodies? If Democrats are to win back the “working class” that they have lost to Trump, they have to look beyond silly things like Nazi iconography or a little casual racism or a soupçon of sexism and anything else that the “woke” left of the party cares about.
I find it hard to imagine that we would be having this conversation at all were Platner anything other than a fit middle-aged white guy who dresses like a stock photo of a “real man.” Our culture is built to eternally forgive men, generally, and white men of means, especially, for their mistakes. Every single time, they were young and immature and it would be a shame to hold them accountable for anything they did wrong. The rest of us just need to be strong-armed into the forgiving and forgetting portion of the program.
That is how you get to the place I found myself this week, reading apologia for a hateful symbol pretending to be sound, hard-nosed political analysis.
Now, I know for a fact that the working class in this country looks more like a Latino woman who cleans houses than it looks like Platner, a former defense contractor turned oyster farmer with some leftist political beliefs.
I also know a lot of actual poor white people. The kind of poor white people who don’t even make enough or have enough to be counted among the working class. The people who rely on SNAP benefits for their meals and emergency rooms for their health care.
Sometimes they subsist on a diet of racist notions to explain why their lives are as hard as they are. Sometimes those poor white people even have racist tattoos. I live in the South. There is no shortage of Confederate flags and “Don’t tread on me” tags on display in hot, humid months.
Once, at a meeting with tenant organizers in the center of white American poverty in Appalachia, a young white guy showed up to a meeting with his Stars and Bars tattoo on display. The poor white rural women and working-class Black women who run those meetings took this guy to task. They told him (colorfully) to get himself together. And the next week they all protested their landlord together.
Their coalition-building wasn’t the kind of kumbaya that Platner apologists are talking about, where a room full of people were expected to swallow their outrage to preserve one man’s feelings. There was accountability. There was education. And there was meaningful action. There was not a college degree or a political donor among them, and yet, somehow, actual poor people figured out how to handle racist iconography without scapegoating minorities or making excuses for a white man’s mistakes.
Here’s the thing. The Democratic Party has a problem. The party’s leaders think they have a problem with Trump voters. Some polling says white men without college degrees don’t like them, don’t trust them and won’t vote for them, so they think the only logical way forward is to pander. Their polling addiction ignores more complex political instruments telling them that the working class isn’t just white men and that centrism isn’t enough to bring white voters back into the fold.
It is going to take hard politics. The kind that shows up in communities between elections and solves problems that don’t sound glamorous on television talk shows. It looks like facing down the Klan in a trailer park, not complaining about racism while doing far too little to avert it. It means believing that racism is not a natural condition of poverty but a political weapon that rich men use to constrain poor people’s political power. And — most critically — it looks like not wanting, even for a second, to be confused with the people who would do that. You don’t wear a red hat as a joke. You don’t fly the ironic flag of historical hate to get a rise out of people. You don’t wear the cool tattoo for over a decade that maybe, kind of, possibly, probably looks like something horrible and hateful.
That’s why it is annoying not to have the link to the poll to examine the demographics behind it. I get Cottom’s complaint. Solnit is right too. “Working class” is broader than white men of the Rust Belt. “The working class today is much more complex and diverse than the white, male, manufacturing archetype often evoked in popular narratives,” declares Demos. None of my pedestrians look like Platner. But it is not pandering to acknowledge people’s economic struggles whatever they look like, that life in America shouldn’t be this hard. People — not just beefy white men — feel their country and its promise are failing them. And both major political parties. Maybe start with that.
UPDATE: How did I forget to include this?
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