The Democrats' Hermetic World
It seems many Democrats believe most voters are just like them. They're in for a rude awakening.
I was barely 16, a high school junior growing up in a small conservative farm town in Oklahoma. I was weirdly interested in politics, especially for a teenager. Not long after President Nixon won a massive landslide in the 1972 election over his challenger, US Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), I remembered a quote from Pauline Kael being bandied about in the media. At the time, she was the film critic for the New Yorker. I’ve kept it all these years.
Nixon’s landslide should have surprised no one. McGovern’s campaign was a mess almost from the start of the Democratic National Convention when he gave his acceptance speech so late that almost no one watched it. He was forced to ditch his first running mate, Senate colleague Thomas Eagleton (D-MO), over psychiatric treatment (electric shock) reasons for Kennedy family icon and our nation’s first Peace Corps director, Sargent Shriver. That didn’t help.
And that was just for starters. McGovern’s far-left positions over the Vietnam War (immediate withdrawal) and welfare (a guaranteed annual income) were radical at the time. Polling never had it close. Nixon carried every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, capturing 520 electoral votes - even McGovern’s home state of South Dakota. Nixon won the popular vote by over 23 percentage points, even as his party lost two Senate seats (okay, 1966 was a GREAT year for the GOP) and gained only 12 House seats. Voters didn’t like McGovern, but they didn’t trust Nixon, either. Americans like their checks and balances (see: 2020 election, a Biden “win” with a 14-seat GOP House pickup).
But somehow, all this escaped Manhattan resident Kael. She was long famously quoted saying, “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”
Later, in 2011, New Yorker film editor Richard Brody offered what many consider a more accurate version of Kael’s retort. It is no less damning: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
Pauline Kael has nothing on disgraced ex-FBI agent, now Georgetown University professor and MSNBC contributor Peter Strzok, who once texted his FBI paramour, Lisa Page, “'Just went to a Southern Virginia Walmart. I could smell the Trump support.” The olfactory gifts of some Democrats are unique.
The lesson is obvious. When one never ventures outside their bubble, they believe everyone thinks as they do. They’re surprised when reality shows up, like the mayhem guy from the Allstate commercials. It can happen to any of us.
And those who haven’t learned that lesson are doomed to repeat it in about 9 days.
Our political world has turned upside down over the past 50 years. During the first congressional campaign I worked on in northeast Oklahoma, it wasn't long ago that Republicans were seen as the party of the wealthy, the elite, the erudite - “country club Republicans,” they were called. Democrats were the working class n, the “little guy.” I got a big dose of that just 12 years later while working to elect St. Sen. Bill Cabaniss to the US Senate in 1990. He challenged the last Democratic US Senator from Alabama not to switch parties, Howell Heflin, with one forgettable exception.
It wasn’t a good year for the GOP, which lost a net one seat that year, but Cabaniss was ahead of his time. The erudite St. Sen. from tony Mountain Brook, the richest community in Alabama, a wealthy suburb of Birmingham, wasn’t one to connect to working-class voters then. We tried.
An old-fashioned populist Democrat, Heflin killed us when the conservative-leaning Democrat mentioned that Republicans had encouraged him to switch parties. “I’m not one of THEM,” he slow-drawled to great effect. The mannerly Cabaniss, a class act who would have made a great US Senator, would later serve as US Ambassador to the Czech Republic during the Bush 43 Administration. It’s hard to find a Democrat in Alabama these days. No one is concerned about GOP nominee Katie Britt’s election on November 8th.
As a newly-minted Democrat-turned-Republican campaign operative in 1978, I struggled to figure out how to pitch my candidate to working-class voters. I cheered whenever I saw my candidate’s bumper sticker on the back of a pick-up truck (we lost, by the way, but not by much). Today, that congressional seat - eastern Oklahoma’s second district - is solidly Republican and about to send its representative to the US Senate, one former mixed martial arts fighter and plumbing company owner Markwayne Mullin.
Political signage on pickup trucks has evolved over the past 50 years.
Most college-educated voters, which comprised about 15 percent of the electorate back then, voted Republicans. Non-college-educated whites voted Democratic, along with black and other minority voters. Today, that’s flipped on its head. College/indoctrination center-educated voters now lean heavily Democratic in their blue bubble while “working class” voters - white, Hispanic, and increasingly black - are moving en masse to the GOP. And many suburban voters turned off by Trump are moving back.
Comedic Democratic consultant Paul Begala underscored this point last May on Bill Maher's late-night television show.
“Don’t tell anybody that we Democrats have a lab,” he told Maher. “Two labs, actually, secret labs, one in Berkeley and one in Brooklyn, where we come up with ideas to completely piss off the working class. And it’s working wonderfully.”
“Labs, you say, actual labs,” Maher pressed Begala for more.
“And they all have PhDs right in pissing off the working class,” Begala continued. “Somehow, in my lifetime, the Democrats have gone from being the party of the factory floor to being the party of the faculty lounge.”
Jack Metzger is a retired Humanities Professor from Chicago’s Roosevelt University. He penned a short essay that underscores this point. While the percentage of college-educated voters has grown, they are still outnumbered. And Republicans are filling the void. We’re about to see just how much in a few days.
How Big is the Working Class — and Why Does It Matter?
Jack Metzgar Oct 29, 2022
Americans without bachelor’s degrees outnumber college grads 2 to 1. But if you and most people you know and have ever known are college graduates, you might not realize that most Americans are not like you and your cohort. As a result, you’re likely to think your class of people is much, much larger than it is.
That misunderstanding is crucial for American politics in the early 21st century. As David Shor and others have pointed out, most political operatives and activists – and perhaps especially Democrats — are college grads who seem to assume that most voters are like them.
Likewise, most network and cable TV reporters and commentators also often seem to assume that almost everybody has been to college. They might get the right answer on a true-or-false question if somebody asked, but nobody does. And, thus, there is a feedback loop among the political and pundit class: they don’t realize that they are engaged in a public inter-class conversation that is code-restricted to those who have graduated from college – and maybe even only to those who have graduated from the most elite schools.
For the past two decades, Ruy Teixeira and a handful of other progressive Democratic analysts have been banging their heads against this wall, trying to convince Dems to pay more attention to working-class whites, defined as whites without bachelor’s degrees, and now raising alarms about the erosion of Black and Hispanic working-class voters as well. Teixeira’s latest effort on the coming mid-term elections shows how the political class shapes issues based on unconscious or semi-conscious class bias: focusing on abortion, Trump’s corruption, gun control, and January 6th – issues top of mind among the college-educated – to the exclusion of economic issues, including inflation and its effects on real wages, that matter most to working-class voters of all colors.
I sympathize with Teixeira’s frustration with the class tilt of Democratic Party professionals and most of the media, but I think he presents too uniform a view of the party, one that may be accurate in the D.C. – New York corridor but much less so across the country. President Biden has repeatedly emphasized working-class issues, for example, as have several Democratic Congressional candidates, like Tim Ryan in Ohio.
But the party can’t ignore issues like abortion and Trumpian corruption for both principled reasons and because it is a cross-class, multi-racial coalition that cannot work without all of its parts.
Democratic data firm Catalist makes the challenge clear: Democrats are still a mostly working-class party, as 58% of Biden voters, all colors, did not have bachelor’s degrees. But the other 42% of the coalition did, and Democrats cannot ignore either group’s interests. The picture gets more complicated when we factor in race. Catalist groups Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and “Others” together as people of color (POC), and they made up 39% of the Biden coalition.
Read the rest of this piece at Working-Class Perspectives.
“Somehow, in my lifetime, the Democrats have gone from being the party of the factory floor to being the party of the faculty lounge.” Paul Begala
Joe Biden: “Our economy is strong as hell.”
Americans:
How delusional are many Democrats? Take this MSNBC appearance featuring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on October 23.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said on this week’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show” that the Democratic Party would win majorities in the midterm elections.
Discussing aid to Ukraine, Capehart asked, “Let me get your reaction really quickly. Do you think that comment which was made by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy about a blank check, is that a disqualifying comment for someone third in line to the presidency?”
Pelosi said, “Was I not clear? We are going to win this election.”
Capehart said, “No, I understand.”
Pelosi added, “”It may be. I mean, I don’t know if this is disqualifying, but it – people should take that into consideration if they care about democracy. Democracy is on the ballot, not just because of the support for Ukraine, but because of trying to nullify elections, voter suppression, overturning elections because they don’t like the outcome.”
She added, “But again, democracy on a ballot, we want it to be strong. The planet on the ballot, we want it to be safe. Our values on the ballot, we want them to be respected, and we fully intend to win. Take it to the bank.”
She predicted the same thing just before the 2010 midterm elections.
The GOP picked up 63 House seats that year.
Here’s the thing to watch for. Will the Democrats’ course correct after their debacle, or will they double down?
A course correction would require a spoonful of reality medicine sans sugar and humility not often found in Democratic leadership circles (or many Republican ones, for that matter). The more likely reaction, especially from progressives, is to blame their leaders for not more aggressively pursuing their agenda. The recriminations will be delicious, and watch for progressive Democrats to double down and shout out their more based colleagues, many of whom will be seeking new jobs after November 8th.
I wonder whom Democrats will elect as their new leader for the 118th Congress. It won’t be Nancy Pelosi.