The Republican Party, after a long history of unfailing support for plutocrats, has become the party favored by a majority of non-college-educated working-class voters and rural Americans. Republicans did this not by abandoning Wall Street wheeler dealers, corporate titans and the country-club set, but by stoking the fears and adopting the cultural biases of folks in small towns and beleaguered industrial regions.
Republicans have proved that the driving rationale for Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign – “It’s the economy, stupid!” – no longer applies. Sure, people still say they worry about things like jobs and inflation, but they vote on hot-button issues like abortion, gun rights, immigration and trans people reading books to kids. In fact, a good case can be made that working-class and rural citizens are undermining their own economic interests by backing GOP politicians, but Democrats have gotten nowhere making that complicated argument.
My colleague Danny Westneat explored this strange political twist in his Sunday column. He took note of comments made by Washington’s newest member of Congress, 3rd District Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who chides her fellow Democrats for being a bunch of elitists. The Democratic Party, she claims, has lost voters in the mill towns and farmlands because Democrats ignore them while catering to the aims and attitudes of affluent, college-educated urban folks who have benefited most from the information- and tech-driven economy.
Gluesenkamp Perez is not the first to note this disconnection from the class of voters who, until the 1970s, were the base of the Democratic Party, and she is right that her party needs to restore at least a viable presence outside of the well-off cities and suburbs in places where the party label has become the kiss of death for aspiring Democratic politicians.
At the same time, though, it should not be forgotten why this shift from one party to the other began. Democrats started to lose elections in what are now called the red states when the party abandoned its unholy alliance between Northern liberals and Southern segregationists. It was a politically costly divorce, yet it was the right thing to do, just as it is the right thing for Democrats to continue advancing the cause of social justice for every American, even if it alienates certain voters.
Republicans have won over the working-class vote not just because Democrats have gotten too elitist, too urban, or too woke, and certainly not because of GOP economic policies. Their success has come largely because they picked up the flag of bigoted populism that was once carried by old-school Dixiecrats, such as George Wallace and Strom Thurmond. If a significant share of working-class voters rally to that flag, it says more about them than about any failings of the Democrats.
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