A group that hails itself as “being born out of Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign” is blaming Kamala Harris’s 2024 election loss on Democrats not being willing or at the least just able to connect with working-class voters.
I’ll take the bait: tell me, then, what exactly did the Donald Trump side do to connect with working-class voters again?
Because I know the answer, and I bet those Bernie Sanders folks do, too.
“Despite Trump’s clear track record of broken promises on healthcare, wages, and jobs, the Democratic Party didn’t lean into a strong critique of his economic failures. Instead, we saw Harris appeal to affluent voters, while neglecting the very people whose lives are most directly impacted by rising costs and stagnant wages. When voters look for answers to their economic struggles and don’t see them in the Democratic platform, they turn elsewhere,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution.
Let’s get real about this: what Trump did to appeal to working-class voters is not novel against the backdrop of two-plus centuries of American political history.
The founding documents of these United States formalized structural economic inequality, not only codifying the institution of slavery, but rewarding states that benefited economically from slave labor with additional political representation.
When slavery was outlawed after the Civil War, Southern political elites maintained political power by denying Blacks the right to vote, and convincing working-class Whites that their greatest threat was Blacks trying to take their low-wage jobs, not the systematic subjugation of both poor Whites and poor Blacks.
All Trump did in his 2024 campaign was substitute “immigrants” for “Blacks” – the immigrants are coming for your jobs, the Biden-Harris administration created millions of jobs, but they weren’t for you, they were for them.
They call it resentment politics for a reason.
Video: The Bernie Bros miss the point
I’m trying to figure out how Democrats could have done anything to counter this, considering how our political culture works.
It’s easy to exploit higher prices resulting from inflation as being the fault of the party in power, and profoundly difficult to get across in a soundbite the reality that, the reason we had inflation was the bipartisan decision that was made during the pandemic to print trillions of dollars to distribute out to people in the form of stimulus checks to keep the economy from totally cratering until we could get the vaccines out.
A natural consequence of that was always going to be an extended soft landing that would include a period of inflation.
The American media made it out that the inflation was something unique to the U.S., when it wasn’t – and in fact, the U.S. economy fared better than any other in the industrialized world post-pandemic.
But the message that people got from the media was, prices are up, and Democrats aren’t doing anything about it, and even when the inflation rate finally got back to where we wouldn’t notice it anymore, that prevailing narrative was still there.
Try to make that bite-sized – hey, you think inflation is bad, at least you’re not standing in a soup line, is the best I can do.
And that’s not accounting for the fact that our media ecosystem is actually a media-entertainment complex, with the most-watched cable TV news network, Fox News, less about disseminating news than serving the propagandistic aims of conservative political and economic elites.
Southern elites in the Jim Crow era could have only wished they’d had a Fox News to make their job this easy, right?
It’s against this backdrop that Our Revolution sent out a press release to highlight its thoughts on the idea that Democrats are somehow neglecting working-class voters, a ridiculous proposition – who is leading the fight to preserve Obamacare, who fights private-school vouchers that drain money for K-12 education, who mustered the votes to pass the Inflation Reduction Act that put millions of people to work?
Spoiler alert: it ain’t Trump.
A line in the release made the point that “a staggering realignment has occurred among working-class voters,” and it made me think – and I agree, but not in the way the Our Revolution folks would want me to.
“Many who previously backed Biden in 2020 turned to Trump this time, disillusioned by a Democratic Party that failed to address the affordability crisis and deliver meaningful economic policies,” the group claimed in the press release, leaving out any critique of Trump to fail to address the effects of inflation or deliver anything meaningful in terms of economic policies aside from promising to slap onerous tariffs on China that will push prices for imported goods through the roof and put a million people out of work just in Year 1.
The Sanders people have always been incapable of pointing out the obvious about Trump.
Back to the point about the idea that we’re in a political realignment: this is clearly the case, but not for the reasons that Our Revolution wants us to believe.
“While the Harris campaign focused on moderate coalitions and endorsements from Republicans like Liz Cheney, working families and young people who wanted economic and social justice felt ignored. Voters wanted a champion who spoke directly to their needs, not a campaign captured by wealthy donors and corporate interests,” Geevarghese said in a quote in the release.
The problem here is that we’re to believe that working-class voters felt abandoned by a Democratic campaign “captured by wealthy donors and corporate interests,” so in response they cast their lots with the other campaign fully owned by wealthy donors and corporate interests, which did nothing to reach out to them other than play to racist fears that immigrants are going to take their jobs.
Look, I’m a Democrat because I grew up in a low-income household – the child of teen parents, bouncing around from trailer park to trailer park.
Working-class struggles aren’t an academic exercise for me; I had a lot of dinners with ketchup sandwiches, if you know what I’m saying there.
An aunt and uncle ended up splitting after their daughter was in a horrific car accident, and the medical bills bankrupted them, if you want to know why I won’t settle for anything less than universal healthcare.
I am where I am because of public K-12 and higher education, if you want to know why I fight for our kids.
The Democratic Party that I’ve been involved with for decades fights for working-class voters.
It didn’t abandon the working class for moderate coalitions and Republicans like Liz Cheney.
Democrats forged those alliances to try to cobble together a coalition because working-class White voters that they’re fighting for are abandoning them for the shiny objects promised to them by Donald Trump.
Just as poor Southern Whites voted against their self-interests to prop up Jim Crow, thinking that keeping some others down was a better approach than working with those others to make life better for everybody involved.
This is the tough spot that Democrats are in – we’re the ones who look out for the interests of the working class, but we can’t get the White working class to want to partner with the Black working class and the Latino working class.
Until the Bernie Sanders folks can acknowledge that White racism is the root of the problem here, they’re not going to get us closer to the solution that we’re all working for.
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Chris Graham
