Democrats and the angry white man

[bill718]

It looked pretty grim for the Democrats a year ago, the working class white man, once the backbone of the Democratic party, largely abandoned them in favor of the GOP. It's understandable in some ways, in their headlong pursuit of the minority and female vote, the working class white man was made to feel left out of the Democratic family. Like a ocean liner at sea, the course is slowly changing, and many of those same people are drifting back to the left wing, as they find out (the hard way) this New York billionaire can't do very much about their blue collar jobs, and all those rosey numbers coming from wall street isn't helping them much at all, so relax Democrats, the angry white man may not be coming back to you in huge numbers, but you'll get more than enough of them back to make the next 2 elections good one's for the left wing.

 

[JoeB131]

It looked pretty grim for the Democrats a year ago, the working class white man, once the backbone of the Democratic party, largely abandoned them in favor of the GOP.

I got to kind of cut you off right here, buddy.

The last time the Democrats won the majority of the WHITE vote was 1964.

This isn't a new issue. It started with Nixon and his "Southern Strategy".

McCain got 55% of the white vote. Despite war and recession and generally fucking up everything on the part of George W. Stupid, the majority of white people just couldn't pull the lever for a black guy.

The other myth I'd like to dispel is that Trump had this great surge of white working class voting for him.

No, he didn't. In fact, he got less of an overall percentage of the vote than Mitt the Mormon did four years earlier (46 vs. 47%) and less of the White vote (58% vs. 59%).

You'd have to believe that Mitt Romney was a champion of White Working people, which everyone agrees he wasn't. The only difference between Trump and Romney is that Romney didn't openly pander to the racism of the White Working Class.

The ONLY reason why Trump won those swing states was because too many white voters thought 1) Hillary was just as bad because the media kept saying she was and 2) Hillary has it in the bag, so I can do a protest third party vote with no consequences!

 

[BradVesp]

I just sent a few aldermen messages to tell them I was angry because (among other unrelated things like waste) no one would clear snow off the sidewalk over a river. It seems to me that's public property and should be a high priority for government. Maybe I should do it myself.

JoeB, what was Nixon's southern strategy? I figured people liked him because he was slimy (like Trump and Clinton) and everyone's sarcastic.

 

[JoeB131]

JoeB, what was Nixon's southern strategy? I figured people liked him because he was slimy (like Trump and Clinton) and everyone's sarcastic.

Nixon made the decision in 1968 to take anger in the south over LBJ's signing of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 to try to lure white southern voters (who voted uniformly democratic since the Civil War) to the Republican Side.

Here's the thing about Nixon. He was actually a pretty good president if you ignore Watergate. He got us out of Vietnam, he created a lot of really beneficial agencies like the EPA and OSHA, his foreign policy was absolutely brilliant.

The thing was, unlike Clinton and Reagan, he tried to defend his underlings who were caught up in a scandal instead of throwing them under the bus.

In many ways, Nixon was a victim of his time, when people stopped trusting government, there was anger on all sides and someone was going to pay for that.