Democrats Never Win the White House When the Working Class Votes Republican
That's been true for 100 years, with one exception, and Mr. Exception would be foolhardy to count on it happening again.
Confrontation between Ford management (left) and United Auto Workers leaders (right), May 1937. This is known today as the Battle of the Overpass. The dandy with the watch chain is Walter Reuther.
“Democrats Could Win Back Working Class Voters,” read an Independent headline in December. “But Should They Even Try?” Yes, they should try. My latest New Republic piece, which is also the cover story in the dead-trees magazine, offers seven suggestions about how to do that.
There’s a statistic in that piece of which I am very proud. It actually took me a couple of days to work it out. The statistic is this: For the past 100 years, no Democrat—with one exception—has ever entered the White House without winning a majority of the working-class vote, defined conventionally as those voters who possess a high school degree but no college degree. The exception was Joe Biden in 2020, under highly unusual circumstances (a badly-mismanaged Covid pandemic, an economy going haywire). It’s unlikely in the extreme that Biden can manage that trick a second time. He must win the working-class vote in 2024.
Please note that I’m not saying no Democrat won the White House without winning the white working-class vote. Democrats lose that on a pretty regular basis (though Clinton won it twice, and Jimmy Carter almost won it in 1976). Something else I’m not saying is no Republican won the White House without winning the working-class vote. George W. Bush did that in 2000.
Anyway, you should read my piece. You can find it here.
In 1952 only 5% of voters were college educated. Premise is invalid. Sentiment of article is far better.
Raise minimum wage, curtailing flimsy asylum escapes and student loan forgiveness are correct policies for times.
Morgage rates will fall with easing inflation. Ideally, in time for November.
Sleepy Joe.
Noah writes "It was almost as though New Deal liberalism, once the Democrats’ prevailing ideology, had stopped being an ideology at all but instead had become some ancient language, like Latin or Sanskrit, that Democrats no longer knew how to speak."
He's right. The policy choices made by the Biden administration in 2021 (see my previous comment) show a complete absence of New Deal thinking or strategy. The New Dealers knew in their gut that the Republicans are not idiots to worry about inflation coming from deficits. They tried to offset their spending with tax increases in an effort to be somewhat fiscally responsible. They also made a lot of use of policy that did not require spending. When we think of the New Deal people think of the programs it created, things like Social Security, WPA, CCC, and so on. But that was not core element of what they did, and it surely was not what created the 33 years of spectacular, widely shared prosperity after 1940. What did this was policy implemented mostly during WW II:
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-inequality-reduction-happened
But the New Dealers needed to be in a position to do these things. And this meant dealing with the problems of the Depression in a way that people would feel their government was working for them to address the crisis and for them to know who is was that was doing this (FDR and the Democrats) and who had done nothing and was opposing them at every turn (Hoover and the Republicans).
The first thing FDR did coming to offer was give the Populists (ancestors of today's MAGA) what they wanted, ending the tyranny of the gold standard. Falling agricultural prices turning on a dime into rising rises, ending the cycle of bankruptcies for rural America. Dems would pass the Gold Reserve Act in Jan 1934 that allowed FDR to proclaim a new price of gold, earning the government a nice profit which he used to fund a new facility that allowed the New-Dealer-controlled Treasury Department to help manage the economy independently of the Fed. He then moved to act on behalf of the working class with the NRA. This program had noticeable positive effects on many worker's lives and didn't cost the government a dime. Those would be cooperating with FDR would display the Blue Eagle, so voters would know who was "doing their part" to help out in this crisis and who (Republicans) were not. And FDR was on the radio, while it was affecting their lives, reporting to the people directly what he was doing. It was policy *and* politics at the same time. And it had a big impact in that it produced the greatest achievement that FDR ever did, the Democratic landslide in 1934. Had it gone in the usual way the New Deal may have ended up a footnote in history like Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal. The US might not have entered WW II, and there might have been no postwar boom. Politics matters, but Democrats seem to have forgotten that. They do stuff and then try to sell it during elections, but don't explain what they are doing while they are doing it.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-dealers-gained-the-ability