Great post

Unemployment was high and the economy was collapsing and Obama was a black man with a boat. A lot people hopped on board, not necessarily because they liked him, but because they didn't want to drown. That said, I don't think the deplorables voted for Obama even then. In fact, they formed the tea party to protest President Obama and they surrounded the Whitehouse carrying guns and waving confederate flags.

I don't think we need to change our message. We just need to figure out how to keep Russia from interferring in our democracy.

I wonder why.

I wouldnt call them racist but they voted for Trump.

They live in Wisconsin, voted for Obama twice, Al Gore and Bill Clinton.

They fell for the lies. These people all used to have good paying union jobs. Tru mp told them he was going to bring those jobs back.

Clinton didn't even pay a visit to Wisconsin.

And these people, who don't consume news like we do outside of the local nightly news kept reading nonsense stories on Facebook that I was responding to everyday.

Trump won thiose states because he lied and encouraged people to not believe factual news. It's a scary notion.

I agree with you though that many of his supporters are deplorable bigots. I am disgusted and angry and ready to fight.

when Walker and Republicans in his and other states have largely broken the backs of the Unions? Did your family not bother to question how that's going to work? Oh yeah, everybody has the "Right to Work" but that doesn't mean that it's necessarily going to be a good job with good wages, protections, etc. But hey, beggars can't be choosers, right?

He won't. In fact I anticipate a backlash against Trump by the midterms. I just hope that we are able to take advantage of it.

His supporters, however, think that he's already keeping/bringing lots of jobs back here already pre-Inauguration (and the media is, unfortunately, not helping).

There are posts almost daily saying "Fuck the White Working Class.

And White men have repeatedly told right here on this website by posters to basically fuck off, they weren't the base of the party, and they did not matter.

If that isn't alienation, I don't know what is.

People voted for his racist policies, and preferred HRC on economics. It's a meme promoted to split you off from the Dems, and it's not my problem if you fall for it.
If your values matter less than hurt feelings maybe you should stay home.

I don't care - white, black, brown, we need them all. And many of the WWC that voted Trump had voted for Obama in 2008 & 2012. I'm sure there was more than just race, misogyny, homophobia, or some other form of bigotry at work.

I realize there are many Trump voters who will never vote Democrat, but for those that might - or previously have - we need to be ready to offer better solutions for the challenges they face if (ok, WHEN) Trump's policies fail them. It may be 1% of the Trump voters, it may be 20%, I don't know. But I do know that in a close election, we'll need to pick up as many as we can to defeat Trump or whomever the GOP nominates in 2020.

White communities (Trump voters were largely self segregating) and try and convince them that you're not the devil but I am sure not risking my ass to do it.
We need those good but lazy people who did not vote, not the assholes who hate us enough to vote for Trump. If any of them are not truly hateful they will come around because they are selfish and see what the GOP is doing to them-not because they have better angels we can appeal to.

and like you, would not be sticking my neck out going door-to-door in certain counties in deep red America. Some of them would just go Zimmerman on my ass and reckon the justice system will forego charges. So yes, that's a problem, to say the least. But the DNC could put time, money, and resources into areas that voted Obama in 2008 & 2012 that went for Trump this year. If it's only a matter of swinging a few percentage points of voters in those areas to flip a state like Michigan or Wisconsin, we, as a party, have to. Hillary got 66,000,000 votes, so it wasn't a case of a lot of people staying home, IMHO.

But you are correct that there are many who we will never reach, and some who will only vote Democrat out of financial/economic reasons. Not much we can do about these folks...

"They're all the same/ corrupt " memes that gained such traction but also that things have been relatively stable to good- and the press never credited Obama for low gas prices or increased prosperity. The polls really did a number on screwing the strategy. I don't know if it's a thing now to lie or is there were more people staying home or what.
A couple of friends who spent time in Michigan and Montana said the people there hadn't gotten the message of how bad Trump was. They thought he was a respected and successful man. Were all shocked when told that NYers think of him as a con man and buffoon. Hadn't heard about how he stiffed workers, all the lawsuits and scams, or the idiotic nonsense he had said on record. I'm not sure if we bought air time the right channels or what. But you'd think they'd know that was out there. Very strange to hear that. But it was all about hating tax and spend liberals who like abortion and immigrants more than them. That's the idea they had of us. They're greedy about taxes and want to deregulate businesses and think the GOP will help w that.

Out of idiotic tribal racist tendencies.
I don't "wonder" that it was the TPP or coddling racists assholes who hate women and black people.

If your not a Democrat or supporting our party, what are you doing here?



Wait..
Silly question.

Or that I am campaigning now?
No, I'm guessing you know better but just want to push your narrative.

The dems wouldn't be stupid enough to tell a sizeable voting bloc to go fuck themselves...

take advantage of Trump and the Republican's fall, we will be lumped with them. It will not just be white working class voters either, minorities are tired of being taken for granted.

The telling bit of this is our Party's establishment not making Keith Ellison the DNC Chair despite so many loving the idea. He would be able to help us turn the Party around and take full advantage of the coming fall of Trump and the Republicans.

We need to learn the lesson of this election, people are tired of the corruption of our public officials who represent Donors instead of the 99%!

He or she will be elected by DNC membership on February 24.

The Democratic nominee for president this year was not corrupt. She spent her public life fighting to make life better for regular folks. Third party voters and no shows were played brilliantly by a number of dishonest operatives from many sides. However, 65,000,000+ knew better.

In less than three weeks, we will have an exemplar of corruption sworn in as president. If there is any lesson to be learned from this election, it is to be wary of those on either side who actively encourage you to vote against your own best interests. Their agenda is self-serving has nothing to do with making life better for the 1%.

We do have a problem with corporate money IN OUR PARTY. Democrats are not immune to influence and a rapidly growing number of Americans are tired of it, they have had enough.

Did the Republicans and Trump cheat, yes. Are they corrupt, yes, but when people start talking about "spineless Democrats," what they are really talking about is being sold out!

Washington is awash in money and influence peddling, it is! We ignore this at our own peril.

Are people who fall for such obvious dog whistles as putting a white supremacist in charge of his campaign, building a wall, deporting 11 million, and keeping a registry on an entire religion even reachable?

And remember we still got 3 milliomn more votes.

We just have to make a determined effort to stop repug cheating — vote suppression, Crosscheck/dumping black and Latino sounding names off voting rolls, not counting thousands of ballot in minority districts, Putin, the rogue FBI chief and on and on.

Add fixing or somehow going around the relic from slavery, the EC and will began recovery.

It won't be easy but those are areas we need to work towards.

Those are the things we need to prioritize. If we do that, catering to fickle non-progressive whites who so easily fall for a racist misognist . . . well, that, IMO should be down the list of priorities as our demographic advantage grows daily.

An all out, sustained effort to stop repug cheating to overcome our demographic advantage should be our focus now as that is how they stole the election.

win people over?!

But our message is perfect!

I will not marginalize the rest of us who had the common and good sense to vote for Hillary by making excuses for those who did not. Screw them.

When they are ready to see reason (i.e., when Trump's policies begin to hurt THEM), then perhaps they will come back; otherwise, they are not redeemable in my eyes.

Until then, I will continue to remember and be cognizant of those Trump policies that are going to hurt me and my family, and I will remember why that SOB is in power and who the fuck put him there.

November was the culmination of decades work by the fascists. The ongoing propaganda assault against Clinton proves it. And it's sad to see the Democrat haters and the Clinton haters using the same lies here, all the while claiming to be liberals.

Last edited Sun Jan 1, 2017, 09:50 AM - Edit history (1)

It has nothing to do with real, live working class people who happen to be white. It's a fascist code word for the alt-right vermin who crawled out from under their rocks to vote for Trump.

And if those "International Bankers" just happen to look stereotypicaly Jewish, and the worker kicking his ass just happens to have the same white skin, blond hair & blue eyes as the Nazi's Aryan ideal, well that's just a coincidence. Right?

Let's take the alt-right fascists seriously & treat them as rational equal partners. We'll win by an even greater margin than we did in Nov, and the fascists will still be in power. Then you'll have us bend over backward to accommodate them even more.

Sieg Hiel, comrade!

Just keep going on believing every fucking RW alt-right fascist bullshit idea that comes down the road, then complain when reality-based Democrats point out that it's a fucking RW alt-right fascist bullshit idea & get on with dealing with real problems.

Fucking right I'm angry. Any real Democrat should be - but not at the party.

Could you tell me what you are specifically referring to?

It implies that whites are somehow special, and should be set apart from other people in the working class and treated special. It originated from the alt-right fascists, because the corporate media felt that "Fucking Nazis" was too impolite.

But there's nothing special about being white. Pretending that there is buys into the fascist RW mindset that we're trying to combat. Working class people have similar lives, goals, experiences & economic situations, no matter what their skin color is. And Democrats won the working class demographic overwhelmingly in 2016.

Should the Democrats change their message to the working class to favor the alt-right fascists who'll never vote for Democrats anyway?

I would have thought that was obvious.

"White working class vs. "Working Class people who happen to be white"

Excuse me, but the former is just a shorter way of saying the latter.. It's a distinction without a difference. I see no "code" in that..

Since calling the deplorables who voted for Trump "Fucking Nazis" isn't very polite, the media has taken to using the alt-right fascist's own deliberately inaccurate description for themselves: "White Working Class".

But there's nothing special about being white. Pretending that there is buys into the fascist RW mindset that we're trying to combat. Working class people have similar lives, goals, experiences & economic situations, no matter what their skin color is. And Democrats won the working class demographic overwhelmingly in 2016.

Should the Democrats change their message to the working class to favor the alt-right fascists who'll never vote for Democrats anyway?

and I don't buy into the idea that the term "white working class" was coined by the alt right. It dates from at least the time of Reagan.

Just because the alt right may have tried to re-define the term for their own purposes, doesn't mean we should run from it. I am tired of allowing crackpots to own the English language.

you think about it, is just another divide and conquer tactic and we should not fall for it.

By leaving out black, Latino and other working class people while prioritizing how "important" the white working class is by using phrases like "stop playing identity polictics" we risk losing a huge part of our base.

Let's prioritize stopping repug cheating instead of catering to a fickle demographic segment that is so easily lured into voting for a repug dog whistler who grabs p_ssy, wants to build a wall, deport 11 million and build a Muslim registry.

Thank you for pointing out the bit I missed.

They voted for a Nazi's wet dream of rounding up brown people and stripping them of their rights, but we need to stop all this identity politics stuff and feel sorry for the white men that lost their white privilege status.

I actually wished I had a better word than flaws - as a "flaw" can be innocuous. However, I think he had two HUGE issues behind him - abortion, which he really did not have to say much, and the scapegoating of TPP and otehr trade deals for econnomic changes really due to automation and globalization.

Voting is a constrained choice and many people who juded Trump unfavorably voted for him. What I think back to is the 2002 NJ Senate race. It became clear by late summer/early fall that Torricelli was corrupt. I know relatively little about the Republican who opposed him, Forrester, other than that he did graduate from the Princeton Theological Seminary and was an former Eagle Scout. (NYT oped - http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/26/opinion/new-jersey-s-dreadful-senate-race.html )

Like many Democrats, I was appalled that I was going to vote for someone I KNEW did not deserve to continue to be a Senator. I voted for the control of the Senate, which though we did not get in 2002 - had Forrester won that seat, we would not have gained the majority in 2006. Based on just what I knew, it was very likely that Forrester was the more ethical, moral man. I suspect that there were many Republicans who voted not so much for Trump, but for Republicans to head all the various parts of the Executive branch and to nominate Supreme Court Justices they wanted. They voted for their team.

Not to mention, there was a reason that Trump at least twice made Bill Clinton's past a high profile issue. Unfair as it is to Hillary Clinton, it was a way of pointing out that Democrats nominated Bill Clinton in 1992 knowing he too had problems as well and he was renominated and reelected as more stories emerged. This actually worked on two levels. 1) Bill Clinton (and many earlier Presidents) were good Presidents in spite of not being models of good behavior. 2) It "normalized" that issue for some - either Trump or Bill Clinton would be in the White House. I know this ignores that Bill Clinton was not running. He would still be in the White House.

I would argue that the Reagan Democrats, in those rust belt states, are not - like me - on EITHER team to the degree that any of us are. I suspect that because the tilt of the Supreme Court was in the balance, Trump may have won many votes - including in those states - because of abortion. Think back that this was a big issue in 2004, where it was clear that Renquist would be replaced. Had Kerry won, that would been a shift from the right to the left. The seats up in 2008 were from the liberal side - so Obama's appointments kept the court where it was. They blocked Obama from replacing Alito because they controlled the Senate. I suspect that this issue had more force this year and in 2004 because THEY saw they could lose something they believed in to their core for a long time.

Of course, we NOW, see that we could lose everything that was so hard won in the last 8 years. However, I suspect that until election day, we were rather lolled into complacency. While there was a large core of people who have supported HRC for several decades and were excited that she would soon win the Presidency, there were many who were voting for her to support the Democratic agenda continuing. This is not to knock HRC, it is true in ANY election.

A much younger friend of mine complained that we always have a harder time because so many Republicans are essentially one issue voters, while we complain about ANY nominee as not being for 100% of what we want. For instance, people perceiving themselves as religious, voting for the degenerate Trump to "save babies" - in their words.

I also think that it always is hard to win a third term for any party. The other side can usually get the votes of people who are unhappy or frustrated. Here, Trump dishonestly used the trade deal issue. It has always been the Republicans who had the most unified support for the deals - even if Bill Clinton signed the NAFTA agreement, negotiated by GHWB. This may have been the second most powerful issue for Trump. He was able to label HRC as dishonest in her opposition to TPP - using her statements while SoS before it was completely negotiated. (From my point of view, her opposition was political. She shifted when Bernie Sanders, who consistently ideologically is genuinely against the trade deals, was gaining support.) In essence, this was a "twofer" for Trump - place HRC on the wrong side of an issue for the Reagan Democrats - AND reinforce her negative as dishonest and untrustworthy - while knowing that the big business Republicans will not believe they can not control him. (On the latter, his cabinet choices show they were not wrong.)

For me, I HATED when both Sanders and HRC trashed TPP, which may be the most progressive trade deal yet written. I do think that Donald Trump will renegotiate it -- taking out the hard fought for by the US environmental and workers rights provisions -- and it likely will pass with mostly Republican votes. So, the Reagan Democrats will get a deal that actually IS worse for them.

Economists have written about how the actual cause of lose of jobs in the rust belt were caused by technology (automation) and globalization - and was already happening before any trade deal was written. Even Jeremy Saks, who advised Bernie Sanders, actually supports trade deals as expanding the pie - arguing that you need to insure that some of the gains of the "winners" needs to support the "losers". In 1993, before NAFTA, you could already see in economic data that the yuppies (as the elites were labeled) were making more than their parents even dreamed of, while through the 1970s and 1980s, at least two thirds of the population found themselves slipping behind - even as they worked longer hours and most families found they needed both parents working, even as child care ate a considerable part of additional income.

I grew up in Northern Indiana - in the suburbs surrounding the steel mill towns. In my high school in a lower middle class town, about half of us went to college and half didn't. The state had a great program (the Hoosier scholarship) that paid some or all of the tuition at a state college - including the well regarded Purdue or Indiana University. This meant that if a student were reasonably smart (at least B average and SATs totalling 1000) , who wanted to go to college could.

However, there were immediate rewards for those who did not go to college. The boys got jobs in the steel mills that were well paying. The girls either took a secretarial course for a year or immediately applied for clerical jobs usually in Chicago. I was in the wedding of a friend who took that path. I was a junior in college, while she was a well dressed, sophisticated secretary at a Chicago company. She was a grown up, while I was a late 60s college kid. One of my brother's best friends went straight to the mills and even a few years after my brother graduated Purdue in mechanical engineering, the friend was STILL out earning him. I went to a 20 year reunion - the two halfs were already two different worlds. For one, most of us had young kids, while they had teenagers.

Now, most of the steel mills are gone, taking those jobs with them. The idea that you could work in a steel mill and live even a lower middle class life is not realistic now. Most of the secretarial jobs that people like my friend took before marrying well enough to quit until that did not work out, are gone - many of those jobs lost to AUDIX which answers phones and "takes messages" and computers that led to very few people being needed to type letters or memos. These people are rust belt voters and Lake County has always been a Democratic stronghold. HRC did win the county, which also contains a large black population in Gary, East Chicago and Hammond, but by significantly less than Obama.

These jobs have been disappearing for decades. This means that many of my age cohort who stayed in the region, did not - as they might have expected when they took jobs straight out of school and worked hard to do them well - recently retire after working for their company for decades, with union negotiated defined benefit pensions to augment their social security. That was the experience of their fathers, so this was not something that was an unreasonable expectation back in 1968 when they left high school. Many likely had to look for and take jobs paying less in the past decades. For them, the giddiness of the late 1960s when they expected to do financially better than their parents hit reality years ago, but it probably does make them vulnerable to people who can demagogue and create a scapegoat for an economy that dashed their hopes. You can imagine how susceptible they would be to a slogan "make America great again".

Now consider that their kids, many of whom became adults in the early 1990s, as my kids entered elementary school, could not follow the path of their parents. Those paths were already collapsing.

We need to find the words and actions that let us communicate to these people. In reality, many things that Obama did actually helped them - especially ACA. We have to find a way to get them to see us clearly enough that the Republican wedge issues fall flat. I have no idea how to do this.

for sharing this.

I think you are right about much!

I cleaned it up a bit and made it a thread. I suspect that because I am in a distinct minority on the trade deals it will likely be flamed, if not ignored.

Because I once knew people who were in part of the rust belt, I have been trying to understand how people I knew to be basically good people could have ignored how completely despicable and unsuited Trump is. In this, I am not helped by my family - my parents, all 9 of us kids plus significant others and our voting age kids ALL voted for HRC.

This was so close that there are likely 10s of causes - all of which could have caused it. This does - like 2000 and 2004 include the long term effort to make it harder to vote. A sister in Durham NC spent an hour in line to vote early - knowing the lines would be impossible on election day. This while it took me only 15 minutes in Burlington - and that because I knew 3 people working the polls and ran into a few neighbors as well! In suburban NJ, it was also extremely easy.

She heard this from her Trump voting brother--oh, and apparently there is such a thing as a "trump bump"--a stolen-from-the-Obama's fist bump.

They're filthy animals.

to fuck off, and expect them to give you the time of day afterwards.

This might end up being a very costly lessonfor the dems if this keeps up.