All I’ve heard for the last week and a half is how alienated the white rural working class is in this country, and that this led them to vote for Trump. Trump, as we all remember, is a billionaire, the son of a millionaire, attended a series of elite private schools en route to Wharton, and was born and raised in New York City. One could hardly imagine a politician with less in common with his base.
So, if the white rural working class is such a political force, where is the Bill Clinton figure who comes from that background and genuinely speaks to that base, as opposed to a con man like Trump?
Bill Clinton, as we all remember, was born in rural Arkansas, the son of a traveling salesman and a nursing student.
Is there so much money in politics now that such a person couldn’t get any national traction, or was the rural white working class bloc such an unexpected development that no one else was poised to take advantage of it? Or a third thing?
All you need to be the next Bill Clinton is get interested in politics when you’re in high school, win a scholarship to Georgetown, clerk for a U.S. senator, get elected to Phi Beta Kappa, win a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, transfer to Yale Law School and marry a woman who’s willing to sacrifice everything to further your political career.
That is the level of (at the least, similar) experience that we should insist upon from every Presidential candidate. Instead, we went with the real estate agent.
I love the idea that it’s democrats, and not republicans, who practice identity politics. “Gays are a threat to our nation’s moral character,” is identity politics. “Coastal elites don’t care about you,” is identity politics. “Islam is a political movement, not a religion,” is identity politics. All of those are attempts by conservatives to motivate voters by making them scared or angry at someone who isn’t like them.
Republicans invented identity politics, and as this last election showed, they play that game better than anyone.
It’s not that they play the game better; it’s that the groups they identify with are bigger:
More whites than blacks and hispanics
More heterosexuals than gays
More Christians than Muslims
…
Biden’s great. O’Malley is a great candidate, but no Bill Clinton. He’s quite liberal and quite urban.
There are a lot of great Democrats with blue collar backgrounds who have spent most of their lives outside the big urban areas, it’s just that the base will probably never accept them. Bill Clinton was only made possible by three straight Republican victories, and big ones at that. It’s hard to see the liberal base giving up on an urban, liberal candidate, especially when the Democrats won the popular vote. In other words, they aren’t turning to Jon Manchin just yet. The next nominee other than Biden will almost certainly be urban, liberal, and very likely born in the upper class.
Excellent point. If you play that game with white males, you’re looking at some 33% of the population, give or take a little bit. And throw white women in, and you have 65-66% of the population.
Play that game with say… black people (men AND women), and you’re looking at 12% of the population.
I think there’s a lot of merit to the commentary that I’ve read that part of the issue in this last election was that the Republicans did play identity politics just like the Democrats did, but the Republicans played it to white working and middle class people and the elderly, while the Democrats played it to a bunch of much smaller (and less likely to vote) groups.
I’d argue that until now the Republicans didn’t play identity politics, or they played it so subtly that a large portion of white voters did not vote based on their identity. Trump changed all that. Nate Silver pointed out on election night that for the first time, white working class voters voted as a bloc, the way minority voters do. And if white working class voters continue to vote as a bloc, or vote in even larger numbers for Republicans, there’s no combination of Democratic groups that can overcome that for a long time.
What I would hope is that both parties stop appealing to identity and that people start voting with their brains rather than their genes.
Ah - Republicans didn’t play identity politics. So when Jesse Helms ran the ad called “Hands,” he wasn’t setting once race against another. It was just a subtle message about the economy, stupid! (to mangle Carville’s motto.)
Helms was an overtly southern Senator, and an old Southern Democrat who knew precisely how to play the game.
This is the first time it was done at the Presidential level, but even if you disagree with that too, it’s the first time it actually succeeded. The white working class vote is now basically like the Latino vote, and is close to becoming like the African-American vote.
Because it didn’t work as well. It didn’t have to of course, because there were more whites. But white are shrinking enough that voting as a minority group is something they are naturally falling into.
Are we also trying to say that Reagan made overt appeals to white voters’ identity? I’d say Clinton actually did more of that.
I disagree strongly with the bolded part. Clinton may have made more overt appeals of an economic nature to working class voters than Reagan did. But he didn’t harp about welfare queens, and he defended affirmative action (“mend it, don’t end it”).
“We’re going to end welfare as we know it, we’re going to mend affirmative action, I’m going to keep those gays from gettin’ married, we’re gonna deal with all that crime and those superpredators, and… oh, wait a minute, just got a call, gotta go home and execute a black guy.”