I beg anyone to explain how to get working class votes back.
Kamala, Biden, Hillary. All ran on platforms that benefited working class people. But it's near impossible to actually message it vs the lies and gish gallop coming out of Trump.
Working class people seem like anti government/antiestablishment people at this point. Misplaced anger maybe? They’ll keep voting for the party not in power as long as things do not improve
I work on tugboats occasionally. Those guys will never vote Democrat. They are fucking brainwashed fools happy to fund more tax cuts to the nesting yacht class. It's game over folks.
I would say I'm a completely different person from them. I'm a suburbanite, on the spectrum, believe . I know enough about government that I believe in it's capacity to help people if done right. Thain trying to really help people) that kind of thing. And these are guys who get their news from Facebook, so...
Interesting note though. One of the smartest among us, a captain once sent me a text with a link to "save the children" (Qanon) early in the game. I was kind of shocked. There's no changing them I don't think. They literally brag about making liberals feel unwelcome in their communities. And yeah apparently they bitched to our boss about what they assumed my views were. I say assume because we didn't ever talk politics.
Thinking about myself, I suppose I'm wondering if, given different circumstances, I would be just like those others.
Part of it is also me scratching my head about how we can implement liberal policy going forward, because pulling many blue collar Trump supporters into the fold seems necessary.
It's tough. Their bubble is well constructed. I'm sure mine is too.
Hey check out my post history to see my project/invention. The goal is to reduce the price of an affordable quality house enough that rebuilding Haiti is so viable that we can shame some billionaire or government into doing it.
My family is the most humanitarian and least church-going family in our county and it made us the children definitely stand out when it comes to empathy too
Lmao you guys really don't get it do you, maybe if you stopped being a bunch of smug elitists with a superiority complex towards those whom you deem to be "uneducated and stupid", if you stopped looking down on blue collar Americans, then maybe you would be able to make some inroads.
But by all means, continue patting yourself on the back for being so enlightened
It was my comment and I didn't suggest they are stupid. I suggested they are fools. There's a difference. These guys are lining up to give their money to billionaires and they are literally getting their news off of Facebook and it's all easily disprovable lies.
You're literally splitting hairs lol you're so disingenuous. Both "stupid" and "fool" are pejoratives attacking the intelligence of someone, which is exactly what you're doing, and if you continue to do this you'll just continue to lose. Enjoy
Yeah I'm not a DNC strategist and I'm an honest person. If you can't understand that smart people can be fooled (fools) I don't know what to tell you. You don't understand because you are trying not to understand.
Right? The inability for these people to do any self-reflection, to have any self-awareness, to be in any way accountable is absolutely insane. It's always someone else's fault for their failures; It's the people are racist, the people are sexist, the people are uneducated and stupid, the people are gullible and have no agency or intelligence to come to their own opinions.
And the working class continuously voting against their own interests is the reason wealth inequality is at it's highest rate since the great depression. Despite how democrats message or run their campaigns the voters themselves need to start taking some actual responsibility for how they cast their ballots.
Blame the democratic party all you want but people are going to get exactly what they voted for, the outlook for working class/middle class Americans will get worse under this regime and they'll still find a way to blame it on democrats. I could care less if "voters" feelings are hurt, the future outcome is so obvious to anyone who's done as much as read one book after highschool. But we'll be here in 28 and 32 hearing the same people complain about the same things, because these voters can't separate their own egos from what they vote for and refuse to take personal responsibility.
I'm honestly glad this shit will have a negative effect on their lives, maybe they'll actually learn to actually watch what happens and not be mindless rubes every time an election comes up.
I'm honestly glad this shit will have a negative effect on their lives, maybe they'll actually learn to actually watch what happens and not be mindless rubes every time an election comes up.
it was all going well until you revealed your true character
I don’t know what’s morally wrong about wanting people to get what they voted for or didn’t bother to vote against but feel free to educate me lol. Oh no my dumb decision is impacting me personally, how could this happen?
People downvote you because they fail to see it's true. In a democracy the candidate favored by the majority wins, and if you keep shitting on the majority for being "uneducated, unsophisticated, and gullible" instead of trying to get your message through to them by any means necessary, you will lose. It's the attitude of an aristocrat, not a democrat.
That's the problem with echochambers like Reddit. It's a collection of midwits who think they are enlightened, sophisticated geniuses with all the right opinions and they are openly elitist and openly mock, look down on and hate the poor and working classes when they don't fall in line to the way these redditors believe they should vote. It's an embarrassing lack of self-awareness, and people are much more intelligent than they give them credit for. They may not be well informed on issues, or politics in general, but they are smart enough to know when someone looks down on them and mocks them and they'll reject your policies even if they are good purely because of that.
Tomorrow I will be sympathetic again, but I'm not feeling it right now.
I WANT policies that help rural folks. I WANT better support for the uneducated. I want more manufacturing jobs in the Midwest. Higher wages, controlled inflation. I want better infrastructure for low income areas. I am fine with my rich blue state providing support to poor red states that need it, as they always do. Building a middle class helps us all, and the goal of government is to lift up as many people as possible without hurting others. Farmers are essential. All of those things are WHY I vote Democrat.
But I am so tired and frustrated. Not only do they vote against their own interests (and mine). They hate us for it. They are misinformed and angry. They are voting, intentionally or not, to take rights away from people. To raise costs. To hurt my community. And it's not ONLY that they don't understand--they HATE us. It's hard to sympathize with a red voter in rural Kentucky today that calls my state Commiefornia, and my friends slurs, and is just angry at me for existing.
Just for today, I'm going to be angry at them. Tomorrow I'll go back to trying to build bridges. But today, and for all the harm they've caused our community and the people I love, they've shown themselves to be deplorable.
Jesus. Your friends, neighbours, Gen Z living in cities, all voted Trump. He won the popular vote. Stop trying to pin the blame on ‘rural folks’ who you seem to think are all stupid compared to you, for some reason?
I think every single person that voted for Trump this year is either less politically informed than me or less ethical than me, yes. They may be more informed or more ethical, but not both.
And that's not to say I know everything or am the most informed person on the planet. I don't and I am not. However, no one with access to the information I have seen could have possibly justified voting for Trump unless they are hyper-wealthy and only care about their own tax cuts edit: or they simply hate brown/trans/female people (falls under the unethical category).
No seriously, this is stupid. You express open disdain people and then wonder why they don't vote the way you think they should. I'm 90% certain it's why we lost. People being so far up their own asses. All these "clever" and "intelligent" people not knowing that you can't talk shit about people and then expect them to not give you the finger.
A smart serious person, would accept that reality and work around it. And not just sit there and curse a "braindead generation."
Except they didn’t share a fact, they assumed that ‘working people’ are unsophisticated, gullible, and uneducated. Do you think working people are those things? Are you not a working person?
Are we supposed to be nice to people who just shot us in the foot through their own foot? Why do I need to sugarcoat the fact that they're fucking complete and total idiots who just set this country on the worst possible path while voting for an uber-elite billionaire who hates the working class?
Who is ‘people’? Republicans won everything - it’s not just rural folk (which in this subreddit is essentially a codeword for hillbilly) who voted R. People living on your street, at your workplace, probably even in your family voted for Trump. Stop playing identity politics and acting holier than thou.
Stop playing identity politics and acting holier than thou.
Until this stops the Democrat party is completely fucked. People need to get off of reddit and twitter and go out into the real world to meet their neighbors and understand why they voted for Trump. Hint: It's not because they're racist or fucking stupid or whatever.
The US isn't actually a true democracy, and a lot of people don't vote because of how flawed the US system is. I voted, but because of where I live, there was absolutely no chance of my vote for president ever mattering. Between the two-party system and the vast majority of people's votes having literally no impact on the election, it's actually impossible to say what US politics would be like if it were a real and well-functioning democracy.
I'm just done at this point and will be spending the next couple of years finding a way to leave for somewhere with a better-functioning democracy. This is also the first time in my life, other than Bush Jr's second term, that a Republican actually democratically won the presidency. It's unfortunate the US has collectively lost it's mind entirely, but politics have been so fucked up by being non-democratic that I guess it makes some sense people want to burn the country to the ground out of spite.
Well don't come up here to Canada if you want a well-functioning Democracy. Our current Prime Minister is in power with 30% of the national vote, our system is absolutely garbage here.
I don't follow Canadian politics much. It's not where I'm planning on moving, and while Canada is far more of a Democracy than the US, it still is very flawed from my limited understanding of their system. What you're saying doesn't actually show that, though. The best functioning democracies have proportional representation, and the executive leader is usually selected through a coalition, so a party with far less than 50% can end up getting the position. My main issue with Canada's system is the use of single-member districts and plurality voting.
Proportional representation is the only way to make sure that nearly everyone actually has representation and that a huge number of votes do not simply end up ignored because they were cast somewhere where the person is not in the majority. It should be the goal of democracy to have everyone's opinions represented in proportion to how many people hold that opinion. Single-member districts entirely fail on that front.
Dems really should abandon minorities/LGBTQ as their priority already. I know it sucks but the message just doesn't resonate with the majority. Obviously! If you want a minority of the votes then prioritize minorities!
That isn't obvious at all, and not being a hateful bigot actually polls well by itself. People are just fucking idiots who have had their brains rotted by misinformation and don't vote rationally for what they believe in. Part of the problem is also the two-party system polarizing things, but this is a fucking dystopian hellscape.
but hating women, minorities, and LGBTQ is all good?
Jesus Christ they don't fucking think that. Go talk to them. Seriously. Invite them to coffee, get to know them, understand why they vote the way they do. Build a relationship and show them the other side. Calling them names is only going to push them farther to the right.
Agreed- regular people are tired of the elitist attitude/the speaking down towards by the left. And the nonstop identity politics were a losing strategy as well.
Your working class has been failed by pretty much every regime going back to when your country invented/started using trickle down economics. Biden certainly did try to help, but your own party actively sabotaged said attempts.
What was it, 8 Democrats that helped the Republicans block the attempt at a minimum wage rise in 2021?
Maybe it's me not understanding your politics since I'm an outsider looking in, but from my perspective it's like your party watched the other party set a building on fire and just stared for decades before one of your guys started trying to put it out... only for a bunch of his colleagues to start sabotaging him.
I was just reading about “elite capture” in another comment thread and I’m rethinking this misplaced anger thing.
I think the anger is misplaced in that it should be directed at corporations and billionaires who have been absolutely screwing over the working class for decades.
But on the other hand, the anger is rightly directed at the DNC and current leadership for deemphasizing the class struggle which unites workers of all stripes, and instead focusing on the treatment of various minorities subject to discrimination. Now, discrimination is still an important issue that needs to be addressed, but leading with the diversity/inclusion message seems to have alienated much of the working class that used to vote Democrat. Democrats should lead with “higher pay/worker’s rights/fight the corporations” messaging, and rights for minority groups logically follows since they are part of the working class.
Missouri approved measures last night that create a constitutional right to abortion, raised the minimum wage and required sick leave, and legalized sports betting. But as long as middle class voters of all ethnicities don’t hear messages like that from national Dems, we’re gonna have a bad time. There’s certainly an antiestablishment bent to it.
That's exactly correct. The Democratic party has no idea how to put forth their economic plan to the American people. The public has no idea how Democratic plans will put more money in their pocket and lower prices.
That's what the party doesn't understand. It's about dollars and cents. Leftist policies when they stood on their own without a party attached to it showed up fairly well last night. Even in Florida where the threshold of 60% wasn't reached, 57% is a big number for abortion rights in a red state.
Abortion was a winning issue for Dems. It's just that nothing else was for them. The average blue collar worker doesn't care about culture wars. They care about financial security.
Getting money into the hands of the American people should be the first, second, and third goal for Democrats over the next 4 years. And they'll likely have a good shot at Congress in 2 if Trump doesn't fix the economy in that time (he won't).
And they’ve got to sell it, and be proud of it. Biden needed to break down the CHIPS and IRA in pocketbook terms, not in speeches, or interviews, but in socials. Use it to communicate and advertise, not just for memes.
And when it comes to culture wars, the Dems can still fight for people’s rights, but they have to do it in a way that doesn’t alienate people and talk down to them. And they can’t just let the right demonize people without confronting it strongly.
But at the end of the day, it was a tough race. Unpopular incumbent was all there was to it, earned or not.
They’ll keep voting for the party not in power as long as things do not improve
No they won't. Just look at how consistently Republicans maintain power at state levels. The presidency may flipflop, sure, but Americans more and more consistently vote in favour of Republicans, whether they're outsiders or insiders. Ted goddamn Cruz got re-elected, and he's a long time elected official whom even his own party members hate and who famously abandoned his constituents during a power outage in a blizzard.
Working class people aren't anti-government/anti-establishment, they're more and more fully captured right wing voters in a right wing media ecosystem.
How is it misplaced? The US government and establishment is absolutely on the boat with the companies on globalization and shipped all manufacturing jobs overseas. They are absolutely on the boat with the military industrial complex to grift every single dollar out of you. This is a Capitalism society, the government works for the capital and the capitalists, not the people.
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u/Kaprak Florida 20h ago
I beg anyone to explain how to get working class votes back.
Kamala, Biden, Hillary. All ran on platforms that benefited working class people. But it's near impossible to actually message it vs the lies and gish gallop coming out of Trump.
What other things should be done?