Jonathan Smucker urges “Democrats, next time try fighting for the working class: The Democratic Party’s decision to abandon working class voters is bearing the expected disastrous results” at aljazera.com. He begins by quoting his father: “I’m tired of feeling like I’m going to get jumped on for saying something wrong, for using the wrong words,” my dad confided, becoming uncharacteristically emotional. “I don’t want to say things that will offend anyone. I want to be respectful. But I think Trump is reaching a lot of people like me who didn’t learn a special way to talk at college and feel constantly talked down to by people who have.”….At 71 years old, my dad is still working full time, helping to run a delicatessen at a local farmers’ market. He didn’t go to college. Raised Mennonite and socially conservative, he is nonetheless open-minded and curious. When his cousins came out as gay in the 1980s, he accepted them for who they are….My father would never dehumanise and scapegoat transgender people, immigrants, or anyone else, but he understood a key ingredient of Trump’s rhetorical strategy: When Trump punches down at vulnerable groups of people, he presents himself as punching up at condescending cultural elites – the kind of elites strongly associated with the Democratic Party….Like me, my father has now voted against Donald Trump three times in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania. Like me, he was unhappy about all three Democratic nominees he felt obliged to vote for – and deeply disappointed by the party and its leadership….In the summer of 2016, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer smugly claimed that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin….The strategy failed spectacularly in 2016 and again in 2024….Ambiguous anti-elitism – again, focused primarily on cultural elites – is absolutely central to Trump’s narrative strategy. His populism is fake inasmuch as it lets economic power off the hook, “punching up” instead at cultural elite targets, like the news media, academia, Hollywood, and Democratic politicians….It works partly because economic power can feel abstract; people tend to feel resigned to it, like they do to the weather. Social elitism, on the other hand, has a human face and condescension is experienced viscerally.”

“The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters,” Smucker continues, “requires showing that you are in their corner. For people to believe that you are really in their corner, you have to consistently name and pick visible fights with powerful culprits, like Wall Street, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, as well as the politicians in your own party who are in their pocket….Even as Biden broke from the prescriptions of neoliberalism in important ways early in his administration, we still see a lingering hesitancy among top Democrats to call out the culprits who have rigged our economy and political system and left America’s working class in the dust….The reality is that the Biden/Harris administration didn’t deliver nearly enough to help working people, especially to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis. And they didn’t effectively narrate what they did accomplish – and what more they attempted to do – primarily because they prefer not to name or pick open fights with the powerful people who stood in the way….Why are Democrats so resistant to naming powerful culprits and owning a popular economic narrative? The reasons go beyond familiar critiques of “Dems are just bad at messaging.” In short, the neoliberal era did a number on the fighting spirit of the party of the New Deal….Today’s Democratic Party holds mixed and contradictory loyalties, as it hopes to hold onto both the multiracial working class that constitutes its historical base of strength and power, and the donor class that is its current source of funding. In an era of historic inequality, when most Americans believe the system has been rigged by the few against the many, there’s not a message that will inspire the multiracial working class without also turning off at least some of the party’s donor base.”

In “Donald Trump’s Victory and the Politics of Inflation,” John Cassidy writes at The New Yorker: “In March, I was a guest at a dinner discussion organized by a progressive advocacy group in New York. As the talk turned to Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, another attendee brought up the skewed media coverage of the President’s economic record, which seemed to be a source of vexation for nearly everyone around the table. I readily agreed that positive news about jobs, G.D.P., and Biden’s efforts to stimulate manufacturing investment—of which there was plenty—wasn’t receiving as much attention as it deserved, particularly compared with the voluminous coverage of inflation. But I also pointed to governments from across the political spectrum in other countries, such as Britain, Germany, and France, that had experienced big rises in consumer prices. Inflation, it seemed, was poison for all incumbents, regardless of their location or political affiliation….At that juncture, I was still hopeful that, with the U.S. inflation rate falling back toward pre-pandemic levels, there was enough time for public sentiment to shift, and for Biden’s approval ratings to recover. It never happened, of course. According to the network exit poll, conducted by Edison Research, seventy-five per cent of the voters in last week’s election said that inflation had caused them moderate or severe hardship during the past year, and of this group about two-thirds voted for Donald Trump….Kamala Harris and the Democrats joined Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party, Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, and a number of other incumbents that have been punished by disaffected voters. According to the Financial Times, “Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years.”….To be clear, I’m not arguing that economic factors were solely responsible for the U.S. result. Immigration, the culture war….But anger at high prices clearly played an important role, which raises the question of what, if anything, the Biden Administration could have done to counteract the global anti-incumbency wave….William Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked in the Clinton Administration, said last week that Biden should have pivoted much earlier from emphasizing job creation to focussing on the cost of living. “He was trapped in a very traditional ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ mind-set,” Galston said. “It was a fundamental mistake.”….Ultimately, however, none of these things dislodged the public perception that over-all prices were still too high and that Biden and Harris, if not entirely responsible, were convenient vehicles for voters to take out their frustration on….The great irony, of course, is that the candidate who is promising to raise prices further by imposing blanket tariffs on imported goods emerged as last week’s victor.”

NBC News’s Alex Seitz-Wald reports in “After Democrats lost the working class, union leaders say it’s time to ‘reconstruct the Democratic Party” that “Defining the working class is tricky in a postindustrial economy. But whether they are measured by income or educational attainment, President-elect Donald Trump won working-class voters overall while he made strong gains among nonwhite working-class voters like Hispanics and Asian Americans…. As recently as 2012, non-college-educated voters were splitting their votes evenly or even slightly in favor of Democrats. This year, they broke 2-to-1 for Trump over Harris, according to NBC News exit polls. And while former President Barack Obama won 57% of people making $30,000 to $49,999 in 2012, Trump won that income bracket 53%-45% this year….“If you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic Party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said on NBC News “Meet the Press.”….“The narrative that he was able to craft was almost right out of the labor unions’ playbook in terms of focusing on the economy and jobs, bringing manufacturing jobs back, getting tough on China, making sure that working families can put more money in their pocket,” said Liz Schuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the massive labor federation that includes 60 unions that together represent 12 million people….“If you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic Party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said on NBC News “Meet the Press.”