The following article by John Russo of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, is cross-posted from Working-Class Perspectives:

The recent debate over the Green New Deal got me thinking about a lecture I gave in 2018 at the Columbia University Seminar on Energy Ethics. The faculty who attended were mostly environmental lawyers and scientists. I am neither. But they asked me to discuss “The Fragility of the Blue-Green Alliance” – not so much the formal partnerships between union and environmental groups but rather the complex challenges of bridging differences between workers and environmentalists. My remarks were informed by three things: Pope Francis’s Encyclical (2015) on the environment, Laudato Si’; my research on working-class communities and economic change; and my frustration with the reporters, liberals, and environmentalists who show little understanding of the experiences of working people.

Our views on climate change reflect our social and economic positions, which in turn reflect multiple factors — class, race, ethnicity, gender, place, and religious and ethical frameworks.  Any discussion of climate change or environmental policies must acknowledge not only that individuals have different stakes in the environment and the economy but that sometimes, those stakes are themselves contradictory. Working-class people and their communities are harmed by both environmental and economic injustices, and they have few economic choices. Solutions that might seem obvious, like ending the use of coal, can come with real costs to workers and their communities, even as they address environmental injustices and climate change.

In talking with colleagues at Columbia, I drew on a local example, from an article in the New York Times, “How Skipping Hotel Housekeeping Could Help the Environment and Your Wallet.” The article described how hotels were promoting opting out of daily room cleaning as a sustainability program, because it reduced the hotels’ use of electricity, water, and chemicals. Customers could earn food and beverage credit by skipping housekeeping. But, I asked, sustainability for whom? As the Chicago Tribune reported in 2014, “green programs” like this were killing jobs and cutting wages as housekeepers lost tips and had to work harder, since fewer workers now had to clean rooms after guests left, but with the same hours as before.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild offers another example in her book, Strangers in Their Own Land.  Hochschild spent four years interviewing people living and working  near the polluted bayous near Lake Charles Louisiana who did not support greater environmental protections that could protect their health and safety. She asked “Why do working-class people support policies that liberals think hurt them?” which she described as the “Great Paradox.” The people Hochschild talked with often sided with the chemical and oil companies that provided local jobs while also polluting homes and bayous. Their beliefs were based on an underlying “deep story” or resentment — but not toward the companies. Rather, people felt they had been marginalized by flat or failing wages, rapid demographic and social changes, and a liberal culture that often mocked their faith and patriotism and assumes they are racist and sexist. Put differently, liberal culture and politicians did not have a real understanding and “empathy” for the plight of working class.

As these examples suggest, creating blue-green alliances requires empathy rather than just judgments. It also helps to have a clear shared enemy. Steve Early describes this kind of alliance in Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. He writes about how workers, environmentalists, Latinos, African-Americans, and some progressives in highly polluted Richmond, California, organized a blue-green alliance in response to a major refinery fire. They built a culture of resistance and forced Chevron to spend $1 billion dollars to modernize a plant, making it safe and cleaner for the workers and community while saving jobs. It was this attention to jobs, working conditions, and the environment that enabled the group to build a volunteer-driven political organization. When Chevron spent $3 million to try to get new city council and mayor elected (an amount unheard of in a local election), the blue-green coalition fought back, electing three environmental-friendly city council members and Richmond’s current mayor. As Early states, “It was a clear achievement for class-based community organizing around environmental issues and the importance of politics.”

But Early acknowledges that this type of blue-green organizing is not easy. In fact, a similar blue-green alliance formed after a refinery fire in Torrence, California, came apart when union members faced the threat of job losses. As Early notes, “job blackmail—and fear of job loss—remains a potent check on labor organization behavior involving workers engaged in the extraction, refining, transportation, or use of fossil fuel.” Tension over jobscreates real divides between unions and environmentalists.

To find more comprehensive solutions, we need to start by identifying shared values. A good place to start might be in Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’, where he asks people to join an inclusive dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. He speaks to the moral and spiritual challenges of the ecological crisis, its disproportionate impact on the poor, and environmental racism. He also calls for solidarity and shared responsibility and for economic development that will reduce injustice and inequality.

People have begun to take climate change and sustainability seriously, often with great empathy for working people. Interests and investments are growing for projects like greening of buildings and cities, producing green products, and developing sustainable global production networks. Most of these are grassroots efforts, but larger groups and institutions are forming new national and international organizations that link environmental concerns with workplace and economic transformation. For example, the ACW (Adapting Canadian Work and Workplaces to Respond to Climate Change) connects 25-partner organizations, including unions and environmental groups from seven countries, with 56 individual researchers working on opportunities and obstacles to create a low-carbon adaptations for resources, manufacturing, construction and services where worker agency, environmental concerns, and just transitions are all taken seriously. The model of just transitions emphasizes protecting and even improving workers’ livelihoods (health, skills, rights) as well as substantive community support.

Political leaders are just beginning to engage in this work, though the results so far are mixed. Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s New Green Deal (GND), a Congressional Resolution (not a bill), reimagines work in a period of climate change and a transforming economy. The GND offers an ambitious “vision statement” for a decarbonization infrastructure, yet it also provides social protection as just transitions for displaced workers, training for green skills jobs within a broader social safety net. The GND drew howls from elected officials and industry lobbyists, who complained that it was too big, too fast, and impractical. Others suggested watered-down policies that undermined the GND but provided political cover for future elections.

While the House did not vote on GND, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell pressed for a vote in order to embarrass Democrats prior to 2020 elections.  In the Senate, Republicans all voted against the resolution and most Democrats voted “present” — a display of the politics of evasion only slightly less dramatic than Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. If this is how Democrats respond, why should anyone expect workers to be more receptive response from the working class?

But there are signs of change, as some politicians are developing their own plans. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti has proposed his own Green New Deal, calling for the second-largest city in the country to have a carbon-neutral economy by 2050. Presidential Candidate Beto O’Rourke has proposed new federal policies that would lead to net-zero emissions by 2050 and $5 trillion in spending over 10 years for investments in clean energy and extreme weather preparation.

Energy companies are even getting involved. Worried that they will not be able to control legislation, they are trying to demonstrate their commitment to the environment through family-friendly and alternative energy commercials touting their work addressing climate change. Yes, these same companies had rejected climate science for years. Some, like the Koch brothers, used their financial strength and political clout to disrupt  the building climate and workplace justice movements.

To build a just and inclusive movement to fight climate change and overcome past environmental classism, we need empathy, shared values, and organizing. This is what the Green New Deal promotes. In a short film about the resolution, Ocasio-Cortez imagines a green future that links carbon use with job guarantees that provide workers with good wages and benefits. But the GND’s most important contribution may be its call to build an environmental movement where no one is left behind.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his facebook page:

Should Democrats Be Talking More About Foreign Policy?

Yes, but the trick it to talk about in a way that voters can understand and identify with. A report from CAP describing and analyzing a major new survey of public views on foreign policy provides useful guidance along these lines. The first thing to note is Trump has serious vulnerability in this area. As summarized by EJ Dionne in his Post column on the survey:

“[T]he survey…found that foreign policy is a genuine vulnerability for President Trump. While voters narrowly (50 percent to 48 percent) approved of the president’s handling of the economy, a large majority (57 percent to 40 percent) disapproved of his handling of foreign policy. Just 31 percent of voters said that “the United States is more respected in the world because of President Trump’s leadership,” while 62 percent picked the other option: “Under President Trump, America is losing respect around the world and alienating historic allies.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Two new articles highlight two ways in which Biden might maximize the Democrats’ chances of beating Trump. I emphasize the “might”–it is possible Biden is not the best Democratic candidate to do these two things. But it seems to me unarguable that the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, must do very well in both of these areas.

1. The White Working Class Vote. The subtitle of Ron Brownstein’s new article is “Joe Biden’s candidacy is a proxy for the larger question of how the party can best rebuild a successful presidential majority.” As, Brownstein puts it:

“No choice in 2020 divides Democratic activists more than the question of whether the party needs a nominee best suited to winning back these white voters, who have been drifting away from the party for decades, or one best positioned to mobilize the party’s new alliance of minorities, young people, and white-collar whites, especially women.”

After noting the ongoing decline of the white working class share of voters, as underscored by recently-released Census data, Brownstein makes the following indisputable observation:

“The long-term erosion of blue-collar whites as a share of the national vote is unmistakable and irreversible. That trend has ominous long-term implications for a GOP that is relying more heavily than ever on squeezing greater advantage from that shrinking group. But those white voters are disproportionately represented in the pivotal Rust Belt battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (as well as in Ohio and Iowa, which have trended further away from Democrats). Democrats wouldn’t need to focus as obsessively on those states, and on courting their large working-class white populations, if they could tip some of the diverse and growing Sun Belt states where those whites are a smaller share of the vote, such as North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia, much less Texas. (Arizona, probably the top new Sun Belt target for Democrats in 2020, actually houses an elevated number of non-college-educated whites because it attracts so many white retirees.) But until Democrats can reliably flip some of those Sun Belt states, they can’t downplay the Rust Belt in presidential contests.”

To bring this point into focus, projections indicate the voting electorates in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2020 will probably be, respectively, 56 percent, 52 percent and 49 percent white noncollege. If turnout patterns are particularly favorable to the Democrats, you might knock another point off these levels. But that’s still a lot of voters. Biden says he can reach these voters better than Clinton did in 2016. Maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s wrong. But his Democratic rivals need to make the case that they’d be as good or better than Biden among these voters. Otherwise, they’re asking Democratic voters to draw to an inside straight.

2. The Union Vote. Nate Silver has a good item in his most recent “Silver Bulletpoints” column. Silver cites Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) data showing:

“Trump’s union support [was not] merely a matter of white men shifting en masse to Trump. While white women and nonwhite men in unions mostly voted for Clinton, her margins with those groups were considerably narrower than Barack Obama’s in 2012.

In fact, the shift among union voters was enough to swing the election to Trump. According to the CCES, Obama won union voters by 34.4 percentage points in 2012, but Clinton did so by only 16.7 points in 2016. That roughly 18-point swing was worth a net of 1.2 percentage points for Trump in Pennsylvania, 1.1 points in Wisconsin and 1.7 points in Michigan based on their rates of union membership — and those totals were larger than his margins of victory in those states.”

Again, Biden can make the case that he’s the best candidate to appeal to these voters. That doesn’t mean he’s right but it does mean that other candidates need to show how and why they’d be better than him at reaching union voters. And at the moment I’m not hearing any candidate besides Biden saying things like: “I make no apologies. I am a union man (or woman). Period.”

So Biden–love him or hate him, he’s got a real case. I’m ready to hear a better one, but so far I’m not overwhelmed.

President Trump’s racist immigration policies have kept him popular with a disturbingly-large segment of G.O.P. rank and file and elected officials. But he has failed to sway a majority of Americans, who now view immigrants as a positive force in our society. The latter trend provides Democrats with an edge in upcomming elections — if they promote policies that line up well with public opinion on immigration issues.

In his FiveThirtyEight post, “Can Democrats Win On Immigration Policy In 2020?,” Geoffrey Skelley defines the challenge Democrats face:

Immigration is likely going to be a major topic in the 2020 election. From issuing a travel ban on many majority-Muslim countries to shutting down the government while seeking funding for a border wall, President Trump has made immigration perhaps the central defining issue of his presidency. And Democrats have so far successfully punted on tackling the issue head-on, opting to try to block Trump’s policies rather than propose a full-fledged alternative agenda.

However, survey data suggests that public attitudes toward immigration may be somewhat more in line with Democrats’ positions than Republicans’, so Democrats might do well in 2020 if they campaign on their vision for overhauling the immigration system. Yet this move still carries risks…

Skelley notes further, that “Some views held by members in the left wing of the party — like abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — don’t poll well with voters and could be particularly alienating among Americans who are worried about border security…This January, 62 percent of Americans said that immigrants strengthen the country, while just 28 percent said they felt that immigrants were a burden, according to the Pew Research Center. But as you can see in the chart below, this is pretty much a complete reversal from where the public stood when Pew first asked this question in 1994.”

Skelley adds that a 2018 Gallup Poll indicated that “a record share of Americans — 75 percent — thought immigration was a good thing for the country.” However, cautions Skelley, “just because more Americans have a positive attitude toward immigration doesn’t mean they want to see more immigration. In early 2019, 30 percent of Americans told Gallup they wanted immigration levels to increase while 31 percent said they wanted levels to decrease and 37 percent said they should be kept the same.”

Skelley goes on to cite several polls which show that most Americans believe border security is a major concern. But most Americans don’t see Trump’s wall as the overarching priority: “Gallup found that 75 percent of Americans favored hiring significantly more border patrol agents, while Fox News found that 68 percent of Americans favored spending more on border security measures other than building a wall.” In addition, “most Americans oppose more barrier construction on the U.S.-Mexico border, and so Democrats have fought to limit the amount of funding available for that project.”

Trump’s family separation policies are highly unpopular, according to polls, and his national emergency declaration was opposed by 64 percent of respondents in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll. Also, “just 30 percent of Americans said they wanted it to be harder for undocumented immigrants to request asylum” while 61 percent said they wanted assylum policies to be “left as is,” or made “easier.”

Recent polls idicate that Democrats would be wise not to advocate abolishing ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement), which political analyst Ruy Teixeira includes among “The Four Don’ts of the 2020 Democratic Campaign.” Dems should instead urge reforming the agency and support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

As for the best policy mix for Democrats, the overall challenge is “to craft an immigration strategy that’s both humane and “also takes border enforcement seriously,” according to Simon Rosenberg, president of the liberal think tank NDN. Instead of just blasting away at Trump’s immigration policies, Dems must pass comprehensive immigration legislation of their own in the House — even though it will be killed in the senate — so they can make a credible claim to be the only party that has a serious plan for both border security and sound immigration policies.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Joe-Mentum?

Morning Consult just released their weekly tracking poll of likely Democratic primary voters and the results for Joe Biden are very good. The rollout of his formal candidacy has widened his first choice lead over Bernie Sanders from 6 to 14 points (now 36 to 22 percent).

Interestingly, despite all the brouhaha about the Anita Hill hearings and Biden’s overly-familiar physical style, he is doing quite well among women (38 percent support) and, especially, black women (47 percent).

How can this be? I would refer you to the very interesting article by Trip Gabriel of the Times on Biden’s appeal in Pennsylvania. Gabriel notes that Biden “has the potential to attract suburban moderates defecting from the Republican Party under President Trump, to invigorate black voters who were underwhelmed by Hillary Clinton and to reverse at least some losses among working-class white voters.”

The material on black voters in this article is the most interesting. Most white liberals fail to understand that Ta-Nehisi Coates and like commentators do not represent the median black voter, who comes from a more pragmatic and, in important ways, more conservative place. Indeed, recent public opinion data show clearly that white liberals themselves are now to the left of blacks on many issues concerning race and racism.

Gabriel interviewed black voters in Philadelphia. He found that:

“patrons [of a black-oriented coffee and book shop] universally said Mr. Biden was at or near the top of their list, in no small part because of his eight-year partnership with President Barack Obama….

Kerry Chester, 53, a network engineer working at his laptop, said he voted for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2016 Pennsylvania primary. But for 2020 he thinks it is so important to defeat Mr. Trump that Mr. Biden is preferable, even compared to the two top African-American candidates, Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California….

Neither Mr. Chester nor other black voters interviewed said Mr. Biden’s record of championing anti-crime bills — as a Delaware senator in the 1980s and ’90s — that led to mass incarceration were impediments to their support.

“That was 20 years ago,” Mr. Chester said. “I can’t hold everything against him.” He added that compared with other candidates, “I trust him a lot more.”

Nasya Jenkins, 21, who works at a Boys and Girls Club and is an aspiring influencer on Instagram, said she did not penalize Mr. Biden for his treatment of Anita Hill in her 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony. Mr. Biden called Ms. Hill recently to address some of her concerns, a conversation she said left her dissatisfied.

“I’m not really so caught up on what happened in the past,” Ms. Jenkins said. “We’re here now, with all the problems we have. What do you plan on doing to change that — period?”

Sure, this is anecdotal stuff but it seems consistent with preference patterns we’re now seeing in the data. It may be the case that Biden could not only do a better job reaching white working class voters than Clinton but also do a better job mobilizing black voters, including women. That’s pretty important.

Look, I don’t want to go overboard on Biden. He has lots of problems, including possible lack of appeal to young voters. And if I was backing someone strictly on the basis of policy and who would do the best job as President, I’d pick Warren. But the data as they come in do suggest that Biden has a case as the candidate best-suited to Job #1: taking out Trump.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

I liked this piece by Paul Krugman. It’s a commonplace among what you might call the hard environmental community that high carbon taxes are the way to go and that everything else is second best and beside the point. Eat your damn spinach!

Krugman says that one thing he likes about the Green New Deal is that it seems to understand that this sort of approach is doomed politically and that if a clean energy transition program is ever going to be passed, it’s going to have to be a Christmas tree bill with lots of goodies for lots of people. Suffer now to avoid the apocalypse later is just not going to work. The Green New Deal, as currently discussed, may not be the right Christmas tree but we still are going to need a Christmas tree.

As the Democrats debate the merits and pitfalls of impeaching Trump as soon as possible, it’s helpful to review the importance of securing as much information as possible about his taxes. The following exchange comes from Jon Weiner’s interview of David Cay Johnston, the top investigator of Trump’s finances., “What Is Trump Hiding in His Tax Returns? The Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter explains what’s likely in Trump’s returns” at The Nation.

“JW: The really interesting question is, what do you think is in Trump’s tax returns? Why do you think he’s trying so hard to keep them secret?

DCJ: There are at least three reasons here. Number one, Trump’s tax returns will show that he is not anywhere near as wealthy as he claimed. Remember during the campaign he kept saying he was worth more than $10 billion. But after he became president, he signed under oath his financial disclosure statement, and 90 percent of his wealth vanished. Even that statement, which I’ve analyzed, overstates his wealth. There’s never been a scintilla of verifiable evidence that Trump is a billionaire. And I’m the guy who revealed, back in 1990 when he said he was worth $3 billion, that he wasn’t a billionaire. We eventually found that he had negative net worth of about $295 million—minus $295 million.

Secondly, Donald Trump is a tax cheat. He had two civil trials for income tax fraud, one by the State of New York and the other by the City of New York. In both cases he lost. In one of those trials, his own long-time tax attorney and accountant, Jack Mitnick, testified against him. Mitnick was shown the filed tax return, which was a photocopy, and testified, “That’s my signature on the return, but neither I nor my firm prepared that tax return.” That’s as good a badge of fraud as you’re ever going to find. It indicates that Donald Trump took the tax return that was prepared, changed it, and then with a photocopy machine put the signature of Jack Mitnick on it. Donald Trump is also a confessed sales tax cheat. Mayor Ed Koch of New York said he should have served 15 days in jail for his crime. Trump has a long history of hiding records from auditors, cheating governments, using two sets of numbers. So his tax returns are highly likely to show tax cheating.

Finally, the returns may well establish how much money he has been getting from Russians, Saudis, people from the Emirates, and elsewhere. They may show whether he has been engaged in money laundering for these people through real estate transactions and other actions that make no business sense, but, when closely examined, show exactly what we see when there’s money laundering. I think the record is pretty clear that he has been doing that.”

Meanwhile, Washington state, New Jersey and Illinois have advanced state laws requiring President Trump to release his tax records to get on their state ballots. Dems should  encourage other states to do likewise.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

Who Do the People on Twitter Represent?

Well, they represent themselves quite well. The rest of us not so much.

This important article from Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy focuses on how left Twitter posters differ from not just the American public as a whole but also from their fellow Democrats. Frankly, this has always been obvious to anyone reasonably acquainted with actually-existing public opinion. But it’s nice this pointed out in a major article with solid data.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

One of the points I made in my book, The Optimistic Leftist, was that “the political dynamic unleashed by right populism will actually contribute to its own demise”. No one paid much attention at this time, since everyone was busy panicking about Trump. But perhaps I wasn’t so crazy, given the way things have been unfolding lately.

Along these lines, I was very interested to see this piece on Bloomberg from columnist Karl W. Smith. Smith is not a conventional leftist; he is rather a “liberaltarian” who is a fellow at the Niskanen Center, the split-off from hard-libertarian Cato Institute. Here’s some of what Smith had to say:

“Trump’s election was supposed to have heralded a political realignment in America. The Republican Party, long associated with the interests of business and more affluent Americans, would now be fueled by the white working class and a powerful nativist sentiment. In the Democratic Party, the interests of organized labor and the working class were giving way to those of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the cosmopolitan elite. The new partisan divisions would be based not on class but on openness to globalism.

To be blunt about it: This didn’t happen. (To be fair, some were skeptical at the time.) Instead, the entire country is shifting in a more populist direction, and Democrats are dominating the policy debate.

Exhibit A is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her off-the-cuff mention of a 70 percent tax rate, which has sparked a national discussion. Polls show that it’s popular not only with Democrats but with a plurality of Republicans. Celebrated left-wing economists argue that high tax rates are necessary to prevent the U.S. from slipping into an oligarchy, a message that is likely to resonate strongly among anti-globalist Trump supporters.

Likewise, Ocasio-Cortez has forced elites on both sides to at least grapple with the economic tenets of modern monetary theory. MMT, as it is known, suggests that a government with its own currency does not need to raise taxes in order to increase spending. So far MMT has faced strong pushback from elites of the left and right. But its basic contention, that deficit spending isn’t as bad as you have been led to believe, is gaining support.

These two propositions — that the government should check the power of private-sector billionaires and should spend freely to alleviate social ills — form the core of the classic leftist platform. And these positions are becoming more influential, not less, in the Democratic Party….

If their nominee in 2020 is someone like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown, then I predict a rapid shift. Democrats would win back many of the white working class voters they lost and cruise to victory. Centrist pro-business Democrats would be sidelined, and the only resistance to the president’s tax and spending priorities would be from Senate Republicans. That would just drive more populists out of the Republican Party and into the Democratic Party, which would enter a period of almost complete electoral dominance.

If, on the other hand, Democrats nominate a more centrist candidate, such as Kamala Harris or Cory Booker, then the uneasy status quo would remain…..

In the long run, however, the end result in both cases would be largely the same. America is moving leftward. And that shift infuses the left of the Democratic Party with an energy that is unmatched anywhere else along the political spectrum.”

Interesting times!

Donald Trump’s blatant and vicious appeal to pure prejudice regarding immigrants and immigration has led many progressives and Democrats to respond in an equally categorical way, describing all objections to immigration as simply a smokescreen for racism.

Since opinion polls have consistently shown that most Americans are not bitterly anti-immigrant and do not support draconian measures like mass deportation, this reaction does not immediately seem to present a major problem for Democrats in 2020.

But, in fact, it does. While most Americans do not share Trump’s visceral loathing of Latin Americans and actually support a range of positive measures such as providing a path to citizenship for long time, law-abiding undocumented immigrants, a very substantial group also supports the demand that America regain control of the southern border and prevent further “illegal” immigration.

Simply dismissing all these voters as racists who do not deserve any response other than condemnation is a profound mistake–one that will endanger Democratic hopes of winning the presidency in 2020 and almost certainly place the Senate entirely out of reach. Democrats need to provide a reasonable response to the concerns that do exist, particularly among working class Americans.

To meet this challenge, the Democratic Strategist presents the following TDS Strategy Memo:Democrats need to understand how to talk to working class voters about immigration–and not just dismiss them as racists.