Barack Obama's Big Lesson -- It's Worth Repeating

[ancianita]

https://archive.ph/7U0R4

It remains Barack Obama’s most underrated political skill: his appeal to working-class voters, including those who are white. Obama won most voters without a four-year college degree in his two presidential campaigns. Those majorities helped him win Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in both campaigns. He even won Indiana and North Carolina once...some people have forgotten how conservative Obama could sound...

Perhaps above all, Obama liked winning. He understood that a Democratic Party that treated the country’s working-class majority as backward or hateful would probably lose those voters. He recognized that sounding like an economic populist, as Obama often did, was not enough. Many people — rich, middle-class and poor — vote on social issues and values at least as much as on taxes and spending...

The Democrats’ post-Obama leftward turn was based on a specific theory of the electorate: that the country’s growing number of voters of color would cover the loss of working-class whites. Under this race-centric theory, Donald Trump looked like a gift to Democrats. He made racist and sexist comments. He resembled a caricature of the backward voters Democrats were happy to leave behind.

But the Democrats’ theory was wrong. As they moved away from Obama’s approach and toward the purer progressivism that’s popular among college professors, pundits and activists, the party didn’t win over more voters of color. Instead, Democrats have lost ground with every major racial group except white voters...
As the Democratic Party tries to figure out a way forward, it can’t merely mimic Obama...Nor can the party assume that the answer is simply to moderate its position on everything. The Democrats who won tough races this year were more heterodox. They sometimes sounded like Bernie Sanders when talking about foreign trade or corporate America and Joe Manchin when talking about government regulation or social issues. They also sounded authentic.

Trump’s anti-establishment populism appealed to working-class voters across racial groups. Trump also helped himself by adopting a mirror image of Obamaism and seeming to reject Republican orthodoxy on subjects like Social Security, Medicare, abortion and foreign wars...Different though they are, both Obama and Trump approach politics as if class matters more than race. Sure enough, Trump’s biggest gains have come among the nonwhite working-class voters who were Obama’s strongest supporters...

We're gonna feel the meme "The Next Four Years Gonna Be Like" as we watch reality sink in for Trump voters.


But we can't let ourselves get stuck there.



At some point soon we must fall back from the bad pride of being right.

It's one thing to know the obvious reason:
win back the House, Senate, and presidency by winning back the voters that Obama and Biden won with.

It's another to know what they now want, and to find common cause with them. We'll need Obama's help with that again.

We'll be in the fight against the dismal dismantling and corruption ahead, for sure, not to mention changing party leadership. But through it all, we must not let ourselves harden even further into being right and rubbing it in.

The reality is, it's not enough that trump voters suffer cost and losses enough to throw the bro bums out just in the midterms.

Because from now on, everyone will be watching to see if we say "fuck you got mine."

We'll have to change our words and deeds so that the lost Obama/Biden voters know we're not condescending, not just stooping to "own the magas," and that they can trust the party's new election infrastructure -- us -- that trusted Biden and Obama's vision of a better, freer future.

Being the adults in the room has been Democrats' historical commitment.

[displacedvermoter]

1. Obama helped this last time.

And last time Trump won, too.

[ancianita]

2. He did,

and we don't know how much, but he did.

[displacedvermoter]

3. Not enough apparently

[ancianita]

4. Or more than we otherwise would have gotten.

Note all the battlegrounds he'd won without much help from any previous president on the campaign trail.

[Elessar Zappa]

5. Yes.

We can’t afford to lose voters in any demographic. Educated progressives aren’t enough to win national elections.