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The Democratic Party Is Toast If It Doesn’t Earn Back the Trust of the Working Class
The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters requires showing that you are in their corner by consistently naming and picking visible fights with powerful culprits.
Nov 22, 2024
A week before the election, my dad was visiting and talked to me about his gut feeling that former U.S. President Donald Trump might win. He was clear about his choice to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. “But what are they doing?” he asked me, exasperated.
“They need to level with people about the economy,” he continued. “I know so many people who can’t afford a place to live any more. People do not want to hear, ‘Well, actually the economy is good.’”
Then suddenly he pivoted away from Harris to liberals more generally, and away from the economy into culture.
Wall Street and greedy billionaires make for far more convincing culprits to most working-class voters than a trans kid who wants to play sports.
“You know, another thing: I’m tired of feeling like I’m going to get jumped on for saying something wrong, for using the wrong words,” my dad confided, becoming uncharacteristically emotional. “I don’t want to say things that will offend anyone. I want to be respectful. But I think Trump is reaching a lot of people like me who didn’t learn a special way to talk at college and feel constantly talked down to by people who have.”
At 71 years old, my dad is still working full time, helping to run a delicatessen at a local farmers’ market. He didn’t go to college. Raised Mennonite and socially conservative, he is nonetheless open-minded and curious. When his cousins came out as gay in the 1980s, he accepted them for who they are.
My father would never dehumanize and scapegoat transgender people, immigrants, or anyone else, but he understood a key ingredient of Trump’s rhetorical strategy: When Trump punches down at vulnerable groups of people, he presents himself as punching up at condescending cultural elites—the kind of elites strongly associated with the Democratic Party.
Like me, my father has now voted against Donald Trump three times in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania. Like me, he was unhappy about all three Democratic nominees he felt obliged to vote for—and deeply disappointed by the party and its leadership.
He doesn’t feel like they give a damn about people like him. I’m disinclined to try to persuade him otherwise. Because it’s clear as day that if Democratic Party leaders could swap the party’s historic base of working-class voters for more affluent voters and still win elections, they would.
This is not hyperbole. This is what they have shown us and told us over and over again—in their policy priorities, messaging choices, and electoral campaigns. They say it out loud. In the summer of 2016, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer smugly claimed that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
The strategy failed spectacularly in 2016 and again in 2024.
And even when it appeared to work in 2018, 2020, and 2022, when Democrats won over sufficient numbers of suburban defectors, harnessing a momentous backlash against Trump, the risks were apparent.
In a little-noticed April 2018 post on the election analysis blog FiveThirtyEight, analyst Nathaniel Rakich showed how, at that time, “on average (and relative to partisan lean), Democrats [were] doing better in working-class areas than in suburban ones.”
Rakich showed that Democrats had roughly similar odds of winning over working-class voters as they did affluent voters and that they would likely see some positive results no matter which set of voters they invested resources into reaching.
But Rakich warned that such positive results could be self-reinforcing: If Democrats invested only in winning affluent suburban voters, those efforts would produce some results, and this would bolster Democrats’ resolve that they had chosen wisely. Schumer’s strategy would seem to be validated. But what about the working-class voters who weren’t prioritised?
Three years later, in March 2021, Republican Representative Jim Banks sent a strategy memo to House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, arguing that the Republican Party had become “the party supported by most working-class voters.” Banks advocated that the GOP should explicitly embrace this realignment to “permanently become the Party of the Working Class.”
Banks wasn’t using “working class” as a euphemism for white working class. The memo pointed to movement of lower-income Black and Latino voters to Trump from 2016 to 2020 at numbers that should have seriously alarmed Democrats.
A striking feature of the memo is the thinness of its proposed policy solutions to attract working-class voters. While it suggests calling out “economic elitism,” it identifies the villains supposedly responsible for working-class grievances as immigrants, China, and “woke college professors.” Big Tech is called out only because of its “egregious suppression of conservative speech.”
The GOP’s actual policy agenda—from weakening unions to deregulation to lowering taxes on the wealthy to further gutting of public education and more—is a disaster for working-class people.
But a head-to-head comparison of policy agendas is not how most voters make up their minds about which candidate to back. Most Americans are struggling, with a large majority living paycheck to paycheck. In such a context, Trump’s core competency is his intuitive read of popular discontent. His central message boils down to: “I will wreak havoc on the elites who have wreaked havoc on our country.”
While Trump and Republicans are diametrically opposed to progressive economic policies, Trump excels at naming culprits. He’s adept at consistently tapping into generalized “anti-elite” anger and resentment, typically weaving it together with racial prejudice, xenophobia, misogyny, and—especially in 2024—transphobia.
Ambiguous anti-elitism—again, focused primarily on cultural elites—is absolutely central to Trump’s narrative strategy. His populism is fake inasmuch as it lets economic power off the hook, “punching up” instead at cultural elite targets, like the news media, academia, Hollywood, and Democratic politicians.
It works partly because economic power can feel abstract; people tend to feel resigned to it, like they do to the weather. Social elitism, on the other hand, has a human face and condescension is experienced viscerally.
And let’s be honest, affluent liberals can be incredibly condescending. Vulnerable groups are targeted in part to tell a story that “Kamala Harris cares more about catering to this special group (that you harbour prejudice against) than she cares about hard-working people like you.”
Before you go throwing trans people or immigrants or anyone else under the bus (because MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said we should), consider the possibility that these attacks are weak sauce when compared with the popular appeal Democrats could have if they decided to consistently name more compelling villains.
Wall Street and greedy billionaires make for far more convincing culprits to most working-class voters than a trans kid who wants to play sports. Trump’s manoeuvre to misdirect resentment only works when Democrats refuse to tell a compelling story that makes sense of working-class voters’ real grievances.
But by beating down the bold vision, fighting spirit, and grassroots enthusiasm that [Bernie Sanders’] reform movement represents, party leaders effectively enabled two Trump terms and perhaps even the consolidation of a long-term authoritarian realignment of the electorate.
The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters requires showing that you are in their corner. For people to believe that you are really in their corner, you have to consistently name and pick visible fights with powerful culprits, like Wall Street, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, as well as the politicians in your own party who are in their pocket.
Even as President Joe Biden broke from the prescriptions of neoliberalism in important ways early in his administration, we still see a lingering hesitancy among top Democrats to call out the culprits who have rigged our economy and political system and left America’s working class in the dust.
The reality is that the Biden-Harris administration didn’t deliver nearly enough to help working people, especially to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis. And they didn’t effectively narrate what they did accomplish—and what more they attempted to do—primarily because they prefer not to name or pick open fights with the powerful people who stood in the way.
Why are Democrats so resistant to naming powerful culprits and owning a popular economic narrative? The reasons go beyond familiar critiques of “Dems are just bad at messaging.” In short, the neoliberal era did a number on the fighting spirit of the party of the New Deal.
Today’s Democratic Party holds mixed and contradictory loyalties, as it hopes to hold onto both the multiracial working class that constitutes its historical base of strength and power, and the donor class that is its current source of funding. In an era of historic inequality, when most Americans believe the system has been rigged by the few against the many, there’s not a message that will inspire the multiracial working class without also turning off at least some of the party’s donor base.
Banks’ strategy memo told Democrats exactly how Trump and the GOP would win in 2024, and then they proceeded to do it.
So when can we read the strategy memo for how Democrats intend to stop the bleed of working-class voters and win them back?
We’ve had the framework in our hands for as long as we’ve had Trump. It’s easy to find. Google: “Bernie Sanders.”
By circling the wagons to defeat Sanders (twice), the Democratic Party establishment imagined it was making itself more palatable to highly prized affluent swing voters. But by beating down the bold vision, fighting spirit, and grassroots enthusiasm that this reform movement represents, party leaders effectively enabled two Trump terms and perhaps even the consolidation of a long-term authoritarian realignment of the electorate. Even The New York Times’ “moderate” columnist David Brooks finally gets it now.
It should now be abundantly clear that if Democrats do not learn to speak to and earn the trust of working-class people like my father—and people who are far more alienated than him—the party is toast. That means standing up visibly and vocally for working people and picking open fights with powerful culprits. Ultimately, it means confronting and reversing the central crisis underlying the “populist moment” we live in—runaway inequality—by delivering big for America’s working class.
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Rahm Emanuel Made Alarming Stock Trades as Ambassador to Japan
A report on the "suspiciously timed" trading comes as the longtime party insider mulls a run for Democratic National Committee chair.
Nov 19, 2024
"Siri, what is insider trading?"
That's how one reader responded to Tuesday reporting by The American Prospect's Daniel Boguslaw that Rahm Emanuel, who is supposedly mulling a bid for Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, made some concerning financial moves while in his current government job.
Emanuel is the U.S. ambassador to Japan. He was previously the mayor of Chicago, a Democratic Illinois congressman, and a key adviser to former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. While in the House of Representatives, he chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and then the party's caucus in the chamber. He's also been an investment banker.
As Boguslaw detailed Tuesday:
Periodic transaction reports filed with the Office of Governmental Ethics over the past two years suggest that Chicago's golden boy may be better served returning to his roots on Wall Street, given the six-figure trades he executed at highly opportune moments in U.S.-Japanese trade relations.
Among the millions of dollars of stock trades Emanuel conducted between 2021 and 2024 while serving as ambassador, one purchase jumps out. On September 29, 2023, Emanuel bought between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of stocks in CoreWeave, a leading AI cloud computing service.
Emanuel's purchase took place one day before the Japanese government announced a $320 million subsidy to Micron Technology to manufacture storage components that are essential to the Nvidia chips which CoreWeave relies on for its AI computation services.
Emanuel "purchased between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of Ocient stock on March 8, 2024, before the close of the firm's series B raise," after the Illinois "data analytics company's CEO Chris Gladwin traveled to Japan in October on a trade delegation mission," Boguslaw noted. "At the end of July, Rahm also purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in Monroe Capital, a Chicago-based middle-market lender that specializes in collateralized debt obligations, the Frankenstein financial product that crashed global markets in 2008."
While Emanuel did not respond to the Prospect's request for comment, Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, declared on social media that it was a "MASSIVE STORY!"
Hauser told Common Dreams that "being ambassador to Japan is a big job, but normally owing to its importance to America's relationship with a key ally in a critical area of the globe, and not because of the access it apparently provides to actionable stock tips."
"Ambassador Emanuel's brain ought to have been focused on improving America's lot in East Asia, not maximizing his retirement account," he said. "We at Revolving Door Project have long argued that senior government officials should be limited to investing in diversified mutual funds rather than stock by stock. That Emanuel was making exotic investments in businesses he may have learned about on the government's dime only underscores the need for such reforms."
"If Democrats are to ever put a full and final end to Trumpism, they are going to need to develop a clear and consistent critique of why corruption by public officials is a bad thing. That would make Rahm Emanuel among the worst possible choices for DNC chair, especially since Sen. Menendez seems likely to be unavailable for the position," Hauser added, referring to Bob Menendez, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey who in July was convicted of taking bribes.
As Common Dreamsreported last week, progressive critics of Emanuel have called his potential leadership of the DNC—after various devastating losses for the party on Election Day earlier this month—a "sick joke" and "the worst idea in the world."
Noting Emanuel's consideration of the job in an email to supporters on Tuesday, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said that "there is a disease in Washington of Democrats who spend more time listening to the donor class than working people. If you want to know the seed of the party's political crisis—that's it."
"The DNC needs an organizer who gets people," she asserted. "Not someone who sends fish heads in the mail."
Martin O'Malley, a former Democratic presidential candidate and Maryland governor, and Ken Martin, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair and a DNC vice chair, have both formally launched their campaigns for the position.
Other potential contenders for the DNC post include Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler and Chuck Rocha, a political strategist for the latest campaign of Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats, said after the elections earlier this month that "it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
According toCBS News:
Rocha said he's still waiting to see how the field develops before jumping in, and "if there's a better candidate that really stands for what I want to see done with the party."
But Rocha has set several action items he would take as chair: eliminate education requirements for senior DNC positions, mandating that state parties "be more inclusive" and diverse with consultant hiring, and to focus on building party infrastructure in all 50 states.
Asked about Martin's and O'Malley's campaigns, Rocha called them "names that are from the institution."
"I think we need somebody from the outside and a strategist to come in and rebuild the party," said Rocha, who noted that his non-college background and upbringing in East Texas could be an advantage as the party looks to reconnect with working-class voters.
Politicoreported Tuesday that another Sanders ally, James Zogby, "expects to formally launch his campaign in the coming days."
A longtime DNC member and president of the Arab American Institute, Zogby told Politico that he was motivated to run by his anger over Republican President-elect Donald Trump's defeat of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
Zogby criticized Harris for campaigning with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Okla.), said the Democratic Party was too "focused on suburban women and not on white working-class people," and called the decision to not invite a Palestinian American to speak at the national convention "unimaginative, overly cautious, and completely out of touch with where voters are."
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Wall Street Banks Accused of Trying to Sabotage Key Consumer Protection Rule
"The CFPB must stop this ploy by the biggest banks to keep us trapped under their thumbs."
Nov 15, 2024
Consumer advocates applauded last month as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule aimed at making it easier for people to switch financial institutions if they're unhappy with a bank's service, without the bank retaining their personal data—but on Thursday, more than a dozen groups warned the CFPB that major Wall Street firms are trying to stop Americans from benefiting from the rule.
Several advocacy groups, led by the Demand Progress Education Fund, wrote to CFPB director Rohit Chopra warning that major banks—including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, TD Bank, and Wells Fargo—sit on the board of the Financial Data Exchange (FDX), which has applied to the bureau for standard-setting body (SSB) status, which would give it authority over what is commonly known as the "open banking rule."
Standard-setting authority for the banks would present a major conflict of interest, said the groups.
The banks are also on the board of the Bank Policy Institute, which promptly filed what the consumer advocates called a "frivolous lawsuit" to block the open banking rule when it was introduced last month, claiming it will keep banks from protecting customer data.
At a panel discussion this week, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan also said the open banking rule, by requiring financial firms to unlock a consumer's financial data and transfer it to another provider for free, would cause "chaos" and amplify concerns over fraud.
"The American people are fed up with Wall Street controlling every aspect of their lives and the open banking rule is an opportunity to give all of us some financial freedom."
The groups wrote on Thursday that big banks want to continue to "maintain their dominance by making it unduly difficult for consumers to switch institutions."
"The presence of these organizations on both the FDX and BPI boards undermines the credibility of FDX and presents various concerns relating to conflict of interest, interlocking directorate, and antitrust law," they wrote.
Upon introducing the finalized rule last month, Chopra said the action would "give people more power to get better rates and service on bank accounts, credit cards, and more" and help those who are "stuck in financial products with lousy rates and service."
The coalition of consumer advocacy groups—including Public Citizen, the American Economic Liberties Project, and Americans for Financial Reform—urged Chopra to reject FDX's application for standard-setting authority so long as the banks remain on its board.
“It would be a flagrant conflict of interest for the same banks who are suing to block the open banking rule because it threatens their market dominance to also be in charge of implementing it," said Demand Progress Education Fund corporate power director Emily Peterson-Cassin. "The American people are fed up with Wall Street controlling every aspect of their lives and the open banking rule is an opportunity to give all of us some financial freedom. The CFPB must stop this ploy by the biggest banks to keep us trapped under their thumbs."
The groups called the open banking rule "a historic step forward for the cause of giving consumers true freedom intheir financial lives."
"For this reason, it is imperative that SSB status not be granted to an organization whose board members are, either directly or through a trade association they are participating in, suing the CFPB to stop the rules from taking effect, particularly when such members may be ethically conflicted from such dual participation," said the groups. "By rejecting SSB status for FDX or any other organization with similar conflicts of interest pertaining to Section 1033, the CFPB will help prevent big banks from sabotaging open banking rules."
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