Democrats are riding high right now with Kamala Harris surging in the polls, and Donald Trump repeatedly stepping on his own d–k.
Good news, Trump is going to keep stepping on his d–k, because that’s what Trump does, but the bad news from me here is, at some point, the euphoria over Harris replacing Joe Biden is going to dissipate, and we’re going to settle in to what we can assume will be a tight 2024 presidential race.
One issue that won’t go away for the Ds as we settle in: the lack of a meaningful connection with the working class.
“I think that there needs to be a greater connection between the working class and the Democratic Party because, let’s face it, Alyssa, the Democrats have kind of lost the working class,” said Katie Couric, a UVA alum and veteran TV news reporter and anchor, in an interview with podcaster Alyssa Mastromonaco this week.
I’ve been saying this for years, even wrote a book on the topic – Poverty of Imagination, published back in 2019.
The thesis of my 2019 book: working-class whites vote Republican not because Republicans advocate policies that will make their lives better, but because Republicans have convinced them that Democrats look down their noses at them.
“You had the head of the Teamsters at the RNC, you have people buying into this notion that Republicans care about dinner table issues much more than Democrats, and these narratives, I think, have become too deeply entrenched about liberal college-educated elites who are condescending,” Couric said.
The FDR coalition of the 1930s was built on a connection with the working class. Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968 and 1972 peeled away white working-class Southerners, who became Reagan Democrats in the 1980s.
Instead of trying to get those voters back, Democrats have just ceded them to Republicans, who deftly play the race-card script perfected by old Southern Democrat elites in the Jim Crow era, convincing white working-class voters that their status is threatened by Blacks and, now, also, the Trump addendum, Latino immigrants.
It’s good to see someone with the chops of a Katie Couric pointing this out, though I have to question one of her ideas for how Democrats can try to rectify the problem.
Couric suggested getting Harris “with a welding hat on, working with regular Joes.”
This sounds too much like Michael Dukakis climbing into a military tank for my liking, though I see what she’s getting at.
Just, no, no welding hat.
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Chris Graham
