Blacks will be left behind in new Democrat party fighting against Trump and Ignorant White Leftists
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/us/politics/democrats-joe-biden-hillary-clinton.html?smid=tw-share
Democrats at Crossroads: Win Back Working-Class Whites, or Let Them Go?
By JONATHAN MARTIN and DEC. 15, 2016
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Washington on Tuesday. He lamented last week that Hillary Clinton had not done enough to reach white working-class voters during her bid for the White House. Al Drago/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Sounding like a frustrated Cassandra, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. lamented last week that Hillary Clinton had not done enough to reach white working-class voters in the presidential campaign. Even more egregious to Mr. Biden, some of his fellow Democrats had concluded that blue-collar whites were not even worth pursuing.
“I mean these are good people, man!” Mr. Biden exclaimed in an interview on CNN. “These aren’t racists. These aren’t sexists.”
With his typically unambiguous assessment, the vice president had thrust himself into a heated debate, already well underway, that has shaped the Democrats’ self-diagnosis since Donald J. Trump won the presidency: Should the party continue tailoring its message to the fast-growing young and nonwhite constituencies that propelled President Obama, or make a more concerted effort to win over the white voters who have drifted away?
For Democrats, the election last month has become a Rorschach test. Some see Mrs. Clinton’s loss as a result of an unfortunate series of flukes — Russian tampering, a late intervention by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a poor allocation of resources — but little more than a speed bump on the road to a demographic majority, while others believe the results reflect a more worrisome trend that could doom the party.
It is a sensitive topic, touching on race and class, but the choices that Democrats make in the coming months will shape their post-Obama identity and carry major implications in both the midterm elections of 2018 and the next presidential race.
Few leading Democrats are arguing for a large-scale reconsideration of the party’s core liberal agenda. After all, history is a game of inches, and Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, but lost the presidency by 77,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — less than the capacity crowd at Lambeau Field on any given Sunday.
“Demographically, the Electoral College is heading in the right direction” for Democrats, Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to Mr. Obama, said. What Mr. Trump pulled off, he added, “would be hard to replicate.”
Even those who believe the party has become too fixated on identity politics do not think it should reverse course on such issues as immigration, criminal justice and legal protections for gay and transgender Americans.
Yet as a matter of politics, those in Mr. Biden’s camp believe the party’s ethos of inclusion may add up to less than the sum of its parts.
In the minds of those Democrats, they will not be a majority party again in Washington or across much of the country without winning back white voters of modest means.
“You don’t need those people?” Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, asked with a tone of incredulity. “You’re going to wait how many decades before this other strategy works?”
Sitting at a conference table looking out at the National Mall here, Mr. Vilsack last week gently chided a reporter.
“You’ve got me all wound up here,” he said.
Mr. Vilsack, a former Iowa governor, had tried to push Mrs. Clinton, a longtime ally, toward focusing more on rural America, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. He was just as exasperated over what he described as his party’s decades-long pattern of neglect of many of the voters he spent eight years working with in his cabinet post.
“Rural America is 15 percent of America’s population,” Mr. Vilsack said. “It’s the same percentage as African-Americans; it’s the same percentage as Hispanics. We spend a lot of time thinking about that 15 percent — and we should, God bless them, we should. But not to the exclusion of the other 15 percent, we don’t have to exclude them.”
Map
The Two Americas of 2016
A view of two imaginary nations created by slicing the country along the sharp divide between Republican and Democratic Americas.
OPEN Map
In their zeal for pursuing clearly defined constituencies, some Democrats now worry they missed the bigger picture of the electorate: failing to deliver a message that would cut across all constituencies, and ceding too much territory to Republicans in whiter, more conservative areas that Mr. Trump won by wider margins than other recent Republican nominees.
Representative Gwen Graham, Democrat of Florida and a likely candidate for governor in 2018, called her party’s message “too funneled.” It needed to be more open to pursuing moderate and conservative voters, she said.
Ms. Graham, who was elected in a conservative-leaning district in the Florida Panhandle, said she would campaign across every part of the state if she ran for governor. Though Ms. Graham declined to criticize her party’s presidential nominee directly, such campaigning would be starkly different from the approach taken by Mrs. Clinton in 2016, when she focused overwhelmingly on courting the state’s biggest metropolitan areas.
“I would run a 67-county strategy,” Ms. Graham said. “And I would reach out to all different kinds of Democrats and Republicans, along the ideological spectrum.”
But while this may make for a good message at the outset of a campaign, it is, in the eyes of a vocal contingent of Democratic strategists, a dated approach that ignores inexorable political and demographic trendlines. To win in a changing country, these Democrats said, the party must tailor a platform and strategy that explicitly appealed to younger and nonwhite voters on issues like policing, climate change and immigration.
Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster, said it was folly to continue developing a message for and devoting considerable resources to “a shrinking, increasingly resistant market.”
Mr. Belcher recalled focus groups in North Carolina this year in which nonwhite voters who had come out for Mr. Obama’s two elections could not even name the party’s Senate candidate in the state. (It was Deborah Ross, and she lost.)
“We’re spending all of our resources on broadcast television chasing this mythical unicorn white swing voter,” he said.
Mr. Belcher, who has published a new book about race and the Obama presidency, “A Black Man in the White House,” said the party should not ignore white voters. But he said Democrats also should not react to this election by refashioning their appeal as though the country were just as white as it was when Bill Clinton and other centrists began the Democratic Leadership Council 30 years ago.
“Why would we go back to running campaigns as though it’s the 1980s?” Mr. Belcher asked. “Because it’s not the 1980s.”
Mr. Pfeiffer, the former Obama adviser, noted that red states like Arizona and Georgia were closer to turning blue this year even as Mrs. Clinton lost, and argued that new arrivals in Florida and North Carolina would make those states tilt Democratic.
Yet even Democrats from solidly blue states, who can in theory win elections without capturing a single conservative vote, said the party’s identity-heavy message was lacking.
Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles said Democrats had not explained to many voters how tolerant social values translated into government action.
“Of course we are for a tolerant, diverse, inclusive, cooperative future,” he said. “It isn’t enough.”
Mr. Garcetti likened the party’s message to the gestures of conciliation proposed by civic leaders in Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots in the 1990s — well intentioned but insufficient.
“If the starting point is: ‘Hey, we are a party and we are a country that stands for blacks and Koreans and people of all stripes liking each other,’ that’s not an agenda,” said Mr. Garcetti, who has not ruled out a run for statewide office. “These values aren’t just about social inclusion. They’re about getting things done.”
Democrats at Crossroads: Win Back Working-Class Whites, or Let Them Go?
By JONATHAN MARTIN and DEC. 15, 2016
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Washington on Tuesday. He lamented last week that Hillary Clinton had not done enough to reach white working-class voters during her bid for the White House. Al Drago/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Sounding like a frustrated Cassandra, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. lamented last week that Hillary Clinton had not done enough to reach white working-class voters in the presidential campaign. Even more egregious to Mr. Biden, some of his fellow Democrats had concluded that blue-collar whites were not even worth pursuing.
“I mean these are good people, man!” Mr. Biden exclaimed in an interview on CNN. “These aren’t racists. These aren’t sexists.”
With his typically unambiguous assessment, the vice president had thrust himself into a heated debate, already well underway, that has shaped the Democrats’ self-diagnosis since Donald J. Trump won the presidency: Should the party continue tailoring its message to the fast-growing young and nonwhite constituencies that propelled President Obama, or make a more concerted effort to win over the white voters who have drifted away?
For Democrats, the election last month has become a Rorschach test. Some see Mrs. Clinton’s loss as a result of an unfortunate series of flukes — Russian tampering, a late intervention by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a poor allocation of resources — but little more than a speed bump on the road to a demographic majority, while others believe the results reflect a more worrisome trend that could doom the party.
It is a sensitive topic, touching on race and class, but the choices that Democrats make in the coming months will shape their post-Obama identity and carry major implications in both the midterm elections of 2018 and the next presidential race.
Few leading Democrats are arguing for a large-scale reconsideration of the party’s core liberal agenda. After all, history is a game of inches, and Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, but lost the presidency by 77,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — less than the capacity crowd at Lambeau Field on any given Sunday.
“Demographically, the Electoral College is heading in the right direction” for Democrats, Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to Mr. Obama, said. What Mr. Trump pulled off, he added, “would be hard to replicate.”
Even those who believe the party has become too fixated on identity politics do not think it should reverse course on such issues as immigration, criminal justice and legal protections for gay and transgender Americans.
Yet as a matter of politics, those in Mr. Biden’s camp believe the party’s ethos of inclusion may add up to less than the sum of its parts.
In the minds of those Democrats, they will not be a majority party again in Washington or across much of the country without winning back white voters of modest means.
“You don’t need those people?” Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, asked with a tone of incredulity. “You’re going to wait how many decades before this other strategy works?”
Sitting at a conference table looking out at the National Mall here, Mr. Vilsack last week gently chided a reporter.
“You’ve got me all wound up here,” he said.
Mr. Vilsack, a former Iowa governor, had tried to push Mrs. Clinton, a longtime ally, toward focusing more on rural America, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. He was just as exasperated over what he described as his party’s decades-long pattern of neglect of many of the voters he spent eight years working with in his cabinet post.
“Rural America is 15 percent of America’s population,” Mr. Vilsack said. “It’s the same percentage as African-Americans; it’s the same percentage as Hispanics. We spend a lot of time thinking about that 15 percent — and we should, God bless them, we should. But not to the exclusion of the other 15 percent, we don’t have to exclude them.”
Map
The Two Americas of 2016
A view of two imaginary nations created by slicing the country along the sharp divide between Republican and Democratic Americas.
OPEN Map
In their zeal for pursuing clearly defined constituencies, some Democrats now worry they missed the bigger picture of the electorate: failing to deliver a message that would cut across all constituencies, and ceding too much territory to Republicans in whiter, more conservative areas that Mr. Trump won by wider margins than other recent Republican nominees.
Representative Gwen Graham, Democrat of Florida and a likely candidate for governor in 2018, called her party’s message “too funneled.” It needed to be more open to pursuing moderate and conservative voters, she said.
Ms. Graham, who was elected in a conservative-leaning district in the Florida Panhandle, said she would campaign across every part of the state if she ran for governor. Though Ms. Graham declined to criticize her party’s presidential nominee directly, such campaigning would be starkly different from the approach taken by Mrs. Clinton in 2016, when she focused overwhelmingly on courting the state’s biggest metropolitan areas.
“I would run a 67-county strategy,” Ms. Graham said. “And I would reach out to all different kinds of Democrats and Republicans, along the ideological spectrum.”
But while this may make for a good message at the outset of a campaign, it is, in the eyes of a vocal contingent of Democratic strategists, a dated approach that ignores inexorable political and demographic trendlines. To win in a changing country, these Democrats said, the party must tailor a platform and strategy that explicitly appealed to younger and nonwhite voters on issues like policing, climate change and immigration.
Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster, said it was folly to continue developing a message for and devoting considerable resources to “a shrinking, increasingly resistant market.”
Mr. Belcher recalled focus groups in North Carolina this year in which nonwhite voters who had come out for Mr. Obama’s two elections could not even name the party’s Senate candidate in the state. (It was Deborah Ross, and she lost.)
“We’re spending all of our resources on broadcast television chasing this mythical unicorn white swing voter,” he said.
Mr. Belcher, who has published a new book about race and the Obama presidency, “A Black Man in the White House,” said the party should not ignore white voters. But he said Democrats also should not react to this election by refashioning their appeal as though the country were just as white as it was when Bill Clinton and other centrists began the Democratic Leadership Council 30 years ago.
“Why would we go back to running campaigns as though it’s the 1980s?” Mr. Belcher asked. “Because it’s not the 1980s.”
Mr. Pfeiffer, the former Obama adviser, noted that red states like Arizona and Georgia were closer to turning blue this year even as Mrs. Clinton lost, and argued that new arrivals in Florida and North Carolina would make those states tilt Democratic.
Yet even Democrats from solidly blue states, who can in theory win elections without capturing a single conservative vote, said the party’s identity-heavy message was lacking.
Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles said Democrats had not explained to many voters how tolerant social values translated into government action.
“Of course we are for a tolerant, diverse, inclusive, cooperative future,” he said. “It isn’t enough.”
Mr. Garcetti likened the party’s message to the gestures of conciliation proposed by civic leaders in Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots in the 1990s — well intentioned but insufficient.
“If the starting point is: ‘Hey, we are a party and we are a country that stands for blacks and Koreans and people of all stripes liking each other,’ that’s not an agenda,” said Mr. Garcetti, who has not ruled out a run for statewide office. “These values aren’t just about social inclusion. They’re about getting things done.”
Can this clownish thread please die
ezrathegreat
Veteran
Someone else commented hence why I commented to stop please.Why do you keep clicking on it and commenting, keeping it going?
We just saw Bernie illustrate to a Trump voter how her interests (the social programs) arent in line with Republicans.
How many of them would vote up and down the Progressive agenda. It's one thing to tell a wwc voter about Medicare and the likes, remember in Kentucky a state that saw a reduction of uninsured under the ACA still votes for people who are committed to taking it down. Is the left going to convince a West Virginia voter to cast the ballot for them because of social programs while talking about climate issues related to coal. It is a double edged sword and there are people who are desperate to believe that class solidarity will ever be a thing but the divergence of black and white working class and even black and white religious voters shows that it is not that simple. Blue dogs were winning in those conservative areas for a reason.
You know damn well you don't give a fukk about socialist economics or ordealsI've said several times, that I'm center left on economics. I'm not a marxist though, and the lack of nuance escapes you all.