{"id":918112,"date":"2022-12-13T13:55:02","date_gmt":"2022-12-13T13:55:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2022\/12\/democrats-working-class-voters-republicans-populism-railworker-strike\/"},"modified":"2022-12-13T13:57:04","modified_gmt":"2022-12-13T13:57:04","slug":"democrats-keep-handing-working-class-voters-to-republicans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/12\/13\/democrats-keep-handing-working-class-voters-to-republicans\/","title":{"rendered":"Democrats Keep Handing Working-Class Voters to Republicans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

The Democratic Party has sold out and ignored workers over and over in recent years \u2014 so much so that despite Republicans\u2019 steadfast commitment to the rich, they\u2019ve also made significant inroads in winning over working-class voters.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n Sens. J. D. Vance (R-OH) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) speak with reporters at a campaign rally on May 1, 2022 in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. (Drew Angerer \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

\u201cThe rail workers had good reason to threaten a strike,\u201d a US senator wrote<\/a>\u00a0last week. \u201cRailway workers wanted sufficient paid leave to cover illnesses, and the big companies didn\u2019t want to provide them, despite the fact the rail companies are more profitable than ever. How have they gotten so profitable in just the last few years? By cutting the number of rail jobs and working laborers harder. The record profits of the rail industry have been a tremendous victory for Wall Street. Not so much for workers.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you think the senator who wrote that was Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or some other Democrat, think again. It was January 6\u00a0fist-pumper<\/a> Josh Hawley, the Republican from Missouri.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right, while President Joe Biden was behaving like a villain from Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 busting workers\u2019 strike and then\u00a0eating<\/a>\u00a0caviar and lobster at a black-tie dinner with the French president \u2014 Hawley was penning that essay, which culminated in him declaring: \u201cWall Street and Washington say this anti-worker agenda is the natural order of things. They\u2019re wrong, as usual. We don\u2019t have to follow this path \u2014 and we shouldn\u2019t a moment longer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many liberals will stop reading right here, insisting that Hawley is an insincere insurrectionist \u2014 which happens to be true. Indeed, Hawley, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), and other fake populists<\/a>\u00a0are often\u00a0LARPing<\/a>\u00a0a good game about paid sick days, the\u00a0$15 minimum wage<\/a>, and\u00a0COVID-19 relief checks<\/a>, but they\u2019ve avoided backing legislation to strengthen union rights and routinely cast\u00a0votes<\/a> with the GOP\u2019s big donors. It was the same with Donald Trump: for every decent health care<\/a>\u00a0initiative and\u00a0direct aid<\/a>\u00a0program the former Republican president stumbled into supporting, he was spending far more time as a\u00a0standard-issue shill<\/a>\u00a0for capital against labor.<\/p>\n

And yet, laughing at the GOP\u2019s fake populists as if they are politically irrelevant ignores a significant and dangerous trend: Democrats\u2019 genuflections to their corporate donors \u2014 whether\u00a0breaking a strike<\/a>, authorizing\u00a0corporate giveaways<\/a>, or\u00a0stalling a $15 minimum wage<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 have been handing conservatives myriad opportunities to court working-class voters.<\/p>\n

And lately, polling data show those voters have been responding.<\/p>\n

Since the 2018 midterm elections, Republicans have gained seven points among voters whose annual income is below $50,000, according to\u00a0exit<\/a>\u00a0polls<\/a>. In this year\u2019s midterm elections, those surveys show the GOP won a plurality of all voters whose income is below $100,000 \u2014 also a seven-point gain since the last midterm. Republicans also won\u00a042 percent<\/a>\u00a0of union households.<\/p>\n

The gains are reflected across demographic lines.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is an impressively large decline in the Democrats\u2019 margin among nonwhite working class voters between 2018 and 2022,\u201d\u00a0noted<\/a> poll analyst Ruy Teixeira. \u201cIn 2018, Democrats carried this group by 57 points. By 2022, that margin was down to 34 points, a stunning 23 point decline. This was even larger than the fall among white working class voters where the Democrats\u2019 deficit ballooned from 20 points in 2018 to 35 points in 2022.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a downwardly mobile country whose affluent class is shrinking and whose working class is growing, these numbers are bad news for Democrats and good news for Republicans. That is why the Hawley crew,\u00a0Steve Bannon<\/a>, and other far-right icons are so focused on spotlighting Democratic betrayals that sell out workers. It\u2019s also why conservatives recently\u00a0launched<\/a>\u00a0a new\u00a0think tank<\/a>\u00a0to try to devise policies and messages that\u00a0court<\/a>\u00a0the working class. All of them are dreaming of a realignment in which the GOP wins big as a conservative working-class party.<\/p>\n

Young<\/a>\u00a0voters<\/a>\u00a0prevented that dream from becoming a reality in the last election. They\u00a0rescued Democrats<\/a> after President Biden was successfully pressured to advance<\/a>\u00a0the student debt relief he had promised during his presidential campaign. And for all the Hawley crew\u2019s bluster about the working class, the GOP is still mostly the party of Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, and corporate money \u2014 as evidenced by Republicans mustering\u00a0only six Senate votes<\/a>\u00a0to give rail workers adequate paid sick days.<\/p>\n

But things can change fast, and the threat of a realignment will persist if Democrats remain complacent.<\/p>\n

What does that complacency look like in practice? In the current moment, it would look like Democrats using a lame-duck session of Congress to pass strike-breaking legislation against workers trying to get paid sick days, then refusing to extend the\u00a0child tax credit<\/a>\u00a0while preserving\u00a0tax breaks for private equity billionaires<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 all things that have or could happen in these final weeks of the party\u2019s control of Congress.<\/p>\n

That this is even a possibility illustrates the \u201clet them eat cake\u201d nonchalance among Democratic leaders who believe they can coast on the assumption that GOP extremism makes Republicans unelectable.<\/p>\n

That may be true for now \u2014 but as long as Democrats insist on almost never using their power to materially improve workers\u2019 lives, Republicans will still have chances to misportray themselves as fight-for-the-little-guy populists. If Democrats are not delivering, those lies are likely to continue reaping the American right more working-class support, bringing the GOP\u2019s fake populists ever closer to the real power they so desperately crave.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n

You can subscribe to David Sirota\u2019s investigative journalism project, the\u00a0Lever<\/i>, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe rail workers had good reason to threaten a strike,\u201d a US senator wrote\u00a0last week. \u201cRailway workers wanted sufficient paid leave to cover illnesses, and the big companies didn\u2019t want to provide them, despite the fact the rail companies are more profitable than ever. How have they gotten so profitable in just the last few [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1777,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918112"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1777"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=918112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":918113,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918112\/revisions\/918113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}