Democrats Dont Have an Easy Answer for the Rust Belt

[mia]

The presidential election wasn’t the only race in which Democrats lost white, working-class voters who had traditionally gone blue. They lost the seats they had targeted in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. They did poorly in majority white states such as Minnesota and Iowa, where the state Senate switched from Democrat to Republican.They lost the governorship of Indiana, which polls had predicted would go to the Democrat, and the governorship of Missouri, the western-most Rust Belt state, which had been occupied by a Democrat, Jay Nixon.

If they want to win future elections, Democrats are going to have to find something better to say in the Rust Belt. Their current message is not resonating with residents who have seen manufacturing jobs disappear and who want to return their towns and states to how things used to be. Democrats “remain obsessed with cultural issues,” University of California-Hastings professor Joan C. Williams wrote, in a Harvard Business Review essay shortly after the election. “I fully understand why transgender bathrooms are important, but I also understand why progressives’ obsession with prioritizing cultural issues infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are economic.”

... Hill says that one way to create jobs in the Rust Belt is to bolster apprenticeship programs so that unskilled workers can get trained in some of the hundreds of thousands of jobs now going unfilled. Another is to model the manufacturing system on the one in Germany, where public-private institutes translate research into potential commercial products, and detailed educational pathways help train students for jobs that will be in demand. “We’ve lost the ability to train a sophisticated manufacturing workforce,” he said. One-fifth of the German workforce is employed in manufacturing—double the U.S.’s share.

...Another strategy might be to double down on the importance of unions and other structures that will help workers earn more. That includes advocating for higher wages, better legal protections for part-time workers, and more robust retirement and health benefits. It could also mean talking more about anti-trust policies that could address some of the growing monopolies that have led to industry consolidation and job loss across the United States. “I think the goal is what Bill Clinton announced, which is good jobs at a good wages, and, I should say, good incomes, for hard-working people,” Robertson, at the University of Missouri, told me. “That’s what Democrats were really remiss at talking about in this election.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/democrats-rust-belt/508544/