Les Leopold, Common Dreams

Somalis are garbage! Deport a college student during a trip home for Thanksgiving! Pardon the Honduran ex-president convicted of drug peddling! Kill survivors from an unarmed boat the Navy has bombed in the Caribbean! Turn against Canada, our number one ally! Threaten to take over Greenland! Sell out the Ukrainians to the Russian invaders!

And there’s a good chance, a very good chance, the worst is yet to come.

How did we get a president who says these things, does these things? And what are the Democrats doing about it?...

Socialism is alive and well, and it is growing, though maybe not in the way you expect.

The federal government provides more than $700 billion in contracts to private sector corporations. It also forgoes approximately $1.5 trillion in tax receipts to provide tax breaks for corporations to encourage job-creating investments, or so we are told. The net result is that corporations avoid paying their fair share while we, the taxpaying public, make up the difference.

As if that public support for private enterprise isn’t enough, now President Trump is taking it to the next level by acquiring 10 percent of Intel’s stock in exchange for the $8.9 billion the government is providing the company via the Chips and Science Act....

There is no question that the Democratic Party, once the party of the working class, is now the party of the professional managerial class.

Workers have been voting with their feet, while the Democrats have been marching in the other direction:

• Trump won 56 percent to 43 percent voters without college degrees, a proxy for the working class, according to exit polls.
• Trump won 52 percent to 46 percent those with total family income of $30,000 to $100,000, another proxy for the working class.
• Of those who felt that their family’s financial situation was worse today than four years ago, 82 percent voted for Trump. Of those who felt it was better, 83 percent voted for Harris, as the Democratic brand moved up the income ladder.
• Of those who said the economy is not so good or poor, 70 percent voted for Trump. Of those who thought the economy was excellent or good, a proxy for the managerial professional class, 92 percent voted for Harris.
• There is a very strong statistical correlation between the counties with the highest layoff rates and the decline of the Democratic vote. During the last four years approximately 80 million workers suffered through involuntary layoffs. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)

These trends have been a long time in the making. In 1976 Jimmy Carter received 52.3 percent of the white working-class vote. Biden received only 36.2 percent in 2020, and Harris 33.0 percent in 2024. Racism can’t be the major cause of recent declines, since Barack Obama did better with 40.6 percent in 2012....

While some prominent Democrats are calling on party to reconnect with the working class by embracing economic populism, Fareed Zakaria, the host of a CNN news show and a Washington Post columnist, argues in a recent op-ed that it’s lost cause:

“[The Democrats] have a solid base of college-educated professionals, women and minorities. Many of the swing voters who have helped them win the popular vote in seven of the past nine presidential elections are registered independents and suburbanites. Perhaps they should lean into their new base and shape a policy agenda around them, rather than pining for the working-class Whites whom they lost decades ago.”

It's eerily reminiscent of what Senator Chuck Schumer infamously said eight years ago just before Hillary Clinton lost to Trump:

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Zakaria, however, claims that Biden didn’t follow Schumer’s advice and instead enacted massive infrastructure investments that were intended to please the entire working class. Biden, he writes, “presided over the creation of almost 17 million jobs with inflation nearing the Fed’s 2 percent target….wage inequality is down…and wage growth is outpacing inflation.”...

How do we know anything at all about the 74 million people who voted for Trump in 2020? Are they mostly racist? Sexist, homophobic, xenophobic? Are they white working-class males who suffer from status anxiety as the U.S. population grows more diverse? Are Trump supporters wealthier voters or poorer? Are they anti-elites, or elites themselves? Are working people becoming the core of the Republican Party, as Senator Josh Hawley proclaimed on election night? Or did Joe Biden bring them back into the Democratic fold?

Answers to these questions traditionally come from exit polls supplemented by what we hear from political commentators, labor union officials, and community leaders. An NBC poll (February 21, 2021) reported that the news is not good for labor progressives:

The GOP is rapidly becoming the blue-collar party.
In the last decade, the percentage of blue-collar voters who call themselves Republicans has grown by 12 points. At the same time, the number in that group identifying as Democrats has declined by 8 points.

Are working people really flocking to the party of their bosses? Or are the polls really screwed up? Given the massive polling errors during the Trump elections, there is reason to be skeptical. Just recall the pre-election polling of the critical "Blue Wall" states. On the morning of November 3, 2020, Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight poll-of-polls had Biden up by 8.4 percent in Wisconsin, 7.9 percent in Michigan and 4.7 percent in Pennsylvania. That forecast was off by 3.5 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 5.1 points in Michigan and a whopping 7.8 points in Wisconsin, thereby underestimating the Trump vote by 16.4 points in these three key states alone. And in the Senate race in Maine, the poll-of-polls had Susan Collins losing by 8 percent the day before the election. She won by 10.6 percent. Exit polls, which analyze who voted for whom demographically, are even less accurate....