The Democratic Party produces its share of Onion worthy headlines. Here’s one from Monday’s New York Times: “House Democratic Super PAC Creates $50 Million Fund Targeting Working Class.”
How do you reconnect with the working class? Why, you blow $50 million on Washington pollsters and consultants to tell you how to reconnect with auto mechanics in Iowa. It’s so obvious.
This is a waste of time and money because the problem is not “the messaging.” The problem is not that they’re using the wrong social media platform. The problem is not technical. It’s fundamental.
Blue collar voters understand perfectly well what the Democratic Party stands for. They just don’t like it very much. A Quinniapac poll from last week explains the problem, as earlier polls have as well. Voters think that the Democratic Party’s priorities are abortion, LGBTQ rights, climate change and health care. Voters also list health care as a concern, but their others are inflation, the economy and immigration. They think the Republicans share their priorities and the Democrats don’t.
The result of that disconnect is that only 31% of voters have a favorable view of the Democrats — the lowest since Quinniapac started asking the question in 2008 — while 43% have a favorable view of the Republicans. A whopping 57% of voters have a negative opinion of the Democrats while 45% feel the same about the GOP.
There’s an important caveat here that wasn’t part of that Times story, though. A poll that came out a few weeks back and reported on in the Atlantic found that even rank-and-file Democratic voters don’t agree with the priorities that voters in general assigned to Democrats. The average Democratic voter shares the concerns of the public at large. It’s Democratic elites whose priorities are abortion, LGBTQ issues and climate change. The problem is that it’s those outspoken elites who drive the image of the party.
So, the answer isn’t to spend $50 million on a fool’s errand. The answer is in substance. The answer is to pull back from the party’s unpopular social agenda and to cool the rhetoric on climate change. Really all they need to do is go talk to one of their own. Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez wins in red district in Washington State. “The fundamental mistake people make is condescension,” she said. “A lot of elected officials get calloused to the ways that they’re disrespecting people.” But Gluesenkamp Perez has also been dissed by party liberals for not always toeing the liberal party line. For example, she voted against Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans.
I don’t think the party needs to abandon its progressive policies altogether. It just has to follow the polls.
For example, the party can still be for equal rights and nondiscrimination for everyone. But it cannot be for keeping parents out of the loop when their kid is asking to change his pronouns at school. The party cannot be for requiring that biological men be allowed to participate in women’s sports. And the party should have respect for those who express skepticism about irreversible treatments for prepubescent kids experiencing gender dysphoria.
The party can continue to be for moving away from fossil fuels toward renewables. That’s popular. But it has to back off from policies favoring electric vehicles. That’s happening anyway without the government programs and the policies are unpopular, probably because they seem to favor a certain kind of affluent American whose car radio is always tuned to NPR.
The party should continue to be pro-choice. That’s popular with two-thirds of Americans, even if they wouldn’t list it as one of their top issues. As the November election showed, it’s not always enough to pull a candidate across the finish line when other issues are involved. But when they can isolate it — as they did in the last Wisconsin Supreme Court race — they can ride it to victory.
If all of that is so clear from readily available polling and from the experience of at least one of its own pols, why is the party spending all that money to try to discover what the problem is? It’s because party leaders already know what the problem is, but they can’t get away with doing what’s necessary to fix it. The activist class in the party would go crazy if it tried to back off LGBTQ or climate purity.
So, that $50 million project is really about trying to answer this question: How can we continue to push policies that blue collar voters either hate or don’t care about and still convince them that they should vote for us?
There’s not enough money on earth to answer that question.
YSDA stands for:
Free speech.
The rule of law.
Reason.
Tolerance.
Pluralism.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
They only know how to waste money.
Keep an eye on Fetterman who has done more to connect with the working class with his attire than the elites ever will.
How long until they try to destroy him too?
LikeLike
I appreciated you highlighting Gluesenkamp Perez, her and Jared Golden are who dems should be listening to. They need to just talk like normal people and stop being seen as the party of moral scolds on issues. No one likes puritans of any kind.
LikeLike
Well put Davemeister. Dems have themselves, as usual, to thank. While team Biden or Kamala have made legit missteps, the core problem is: in 1998, the Working Families Party was launched by Dan Cantor, who ran Jesse Jackson’s 1988 Presidential campaign and is a Dem Socialist. WFP is financed largely via more liberal, public sector unions and has ties to all the perfect social issues: abortion, guns and LGBT allies. Indeed, through WFP the Rainbow coalition that was muted in the Clinton years is alive and active. WFP exists “primarily” to ahem, run Primary candidates against incumbent Democrats or seek open seats. As Dems applaud winners like Penn US Senator John Fetterman, they just promoted Malcolm Kenyatta to lead the DNC…With WFP support, Kenyatta ran against Fetterman in the 2022 Senate Primary, with Fetterman getting nearly 5 times the votes. Kenyatta then runs again for statewide office getting less than 46% to GOP winner. I do not have any personal or political grudge against Kenyatta, only pointing out the dichotomy to his DNC rise with its contrast to the successful Fetterman “brand” of Democrats.
As I’ve pointed out in my comments with YSD, this was made painfully obvious when Biden and Bernie debated in 2020 Presidential Primary about ACA, existing employer based health plans (union contracts) vs. single payer or Medicare for all. Biden was successful in that debate making Bernie look too far out, and made single payer sound like its more expensive, more risky for taxpayers, union workers. All while using GOP talking points from when Clinton tried universal health care.
It’s pretty simple: Dems already have their working class “outfit”, they just get burned because it does not win statewide or national elections so much as localized, heavy liberal voter turnout. They easily could throw all eggs into the Working Families Party format, and abandon moderate Democrats, swing voters or even Republican leaning territory where the GOP candidate is too far out. Keeping those “non-conforming” voters into the mix all while keeping the juice going for more liberal activist base is the existential Dem Party math problem for the last 25 years: the rise of Internet and the “tech” industry, amidst 9/11, Great Recession, pandemic shutdown and the era of Trump’s influence.
LikeLike