Michael Scherer sets the stage in his article, “The Democrats’ Working-Class Problem Gets Its Close-Up” at The Atlantic: “The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by…Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, “Is there such a thing as a middle class anymore? What is that?” They spoke about the difficulty of buying a house, the burden of having kids with student loans, and the ways in which the “phony” and “corrupt” Democratic Party had embraced far-left social crusades while overseeing a jump in inflation.?…“It was for the people and everything, and now it is just lies,” one man said when asked how the Democratic Party has changed.”

In “Trump’s lies on tax cuts are another gut punch to America’s working-class,” Svante Myrick, President of People for the American Way, writes: “Trump’s numbers don’t add up. If he were getting a math grade for his speech to the joint session of Congress, he’d fail miserably… Trump is worse than a student who hasn’t done his homework. He’s a president who routinely lies to mislead the public, justify his wrongdoing and distract us from the real harm he’s doing to Americans and the lasting damage he’s doing to America… Trump made a lot of promises about a new “golden age” for America. But in reality, he and congressional Republicans are getting ready to sell out Americans and our future so he can deliver massive tax cuts to billionaires like Elon Musk… The budget bill House Republicans just approved is big, but it’s far from beautiful. Their top priority is providing $4.5 trillion in tax cuts whose benefits go overwhelmingly to the richest Americans. That will pile on even more national debt, leave us with less money to support families and communities who need it and force big cuts in Medicaid…Budget experts report that the Trump-Republican plan would give the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers an average tax cut of more than $300,000 — and that the richest 200,000 multimillionaires would get more money than 187 million families…  While the rich would get richer, lower-income households would be even worse off when you factor in cuts to Medicaid and food stamps that would be necessary to make his tax-cut boondoggle work….A majority of Americans who voted in the 2024 election voted for someone other than Trump. A third of eligible voters didn’t participate. Most Americans do not support a tax scheme that funnels most of the benefits to those who are already at the top of the economic pyramid. And the overwhelming majority of Americans want to preserve Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

“In the wake of the 2024 election, pundits and politicos have had much to say about the battle for the American “working class,” with their commentary—whether from the left, the right, or the middle—invariably accompanied by the same image: guys wearing hard hats, toiling away at a construction site or on an assembly line…”Two-thirds of those without a four-year college degree—the criterion that many demographers use to define the “working class”—are employed in services (including health care, retail, and hospitality), compared with one-third in manufacturing, construction, and related industries,” Rick Watzman and Erin Contractor write in “America’s working class barely scrapes by. An outdated image of them doesn’t help” at Fortune…We know this because one of us has been researching and writing about this topic for many years. The other helped to shape labor policy in the Obama and Biden administrations… Their needs are distinct, and they remain largely unmet…We know this because one of us has been researching and writing about this topic for many years. The other helped to shape labor policy in the Obama and Biden administrations—and, perhaps more to the point, has a mom who has worked as an hourly employee at Walmart since the late 1990s. (She currently makes $17.78 an hour as a floor associate.)…”

Tyler Stone writes in “Why Is Trump Relatable? Listen To Him Talk, This Is How Working-Class People Talk” at Real Clear Politics: “On SiriusXM ‘The Megyn Kelly Show,’ Host Megyn Kelly is joined by comedian Andrew Schulz, whose latest Netflix special is “Life,” to discuss the Democrats’ failed messaging and inability to connect with the working class, why Trump’s boldness resonates with Americans of all political persuasions, Trump’s ability to talk like normal people, and more.” Stoner quotes Schulz: “I find a lot of times with the Democrats, there is this pretentiousness. There’s this, like, Ivy League educated, second or third generation kind of trust fund nepo babies that are telling people how they should live and how they should vote. And it’s like, first of all, if you’ve never had a real job, you don’t get to talk… You don’t get to tell people how they should vote… We just despise that. So what I think they have to do is get back in touch with the working class is very much make this a class issue, and you’ve got to call out those people who are giving you money, which these young billionaires and these corporations that are donating, and they won’t do it, and that’s why they’ll probably lose. But the first person in that party that calls it out, you’re going to see the Bernie effect happen again…another thing Democrats don’t understand. They don’t understand like — why this like billionaire who was given money from his dad is so relatable. Well, why don’t you listen to him talk? I’ve had conversations with like rich people. Okay, they don’t talk like that. Yeah, they are incredibly buttoned up a lot of them and concerned publicly about their image and they’re very deliberate about what they say…” The problem didn’t originate with Trump. Something of the same dynamic was in play with Bush v. Gore in 2000. Democrats flipped that script in Obama vs. Romney in 2012. Like Bush II, Trump is every inch a preppie. But he has developed an ear for worker-speak, and it has served him well. It wasn’t all that long ago that nobody thought a New York City guy would do so well in the south. Even bogus class identification trumps regional kinship in winning voters.