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This is something that I hear and read frequently, and it always annoys me: People who say “blue collar” or “working class” when what they mean is white working class people. As if people of color somehow don’t count as part of the working class. Ever since the election, this has come up a lot in “why did Hillary lose” analysis.
I don’t usually laugh at my own cartoons, and what I do laugh at is sort of random. But the final line in this comic strip, for whatever reason, makes me chuckle.
(The two paragraphs above, taken together, summarize the job of being a political cartoonist:: Think of something that pisses me off, and then try to make it funny. )
Right now the art looks pretty good to me – but it usually does, right after I finish drawing it. I mainly concentrated on trying to keep the figure drawings loose and lively; I have a real tendency to stiffen up which I’m always fighting against.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
Panel 1
Two women are having a discussion on the street, a brunette and a redhead. Redhead is speaking intensely.
REDHEAD: Democrats abandoned blue collar voters! That’s why they lose!
Panel 2
BRUNETTE: But don’t democrats push a lot of stuff to help the working class? Minimum wage, obamacare, college grants, the dream act…
REDHEAD (dismissively): Those all help urban people.
Panel 3
BRUNETTE: Besides, Clinton WON blue collar voters, so-
REDHEAD: She only won the blue collar vote if you count urban voters.
Panel 4
Redhead is now looking annoyed, with her arms folded; Redhead leans forward and yells angrily.
BRUNETTE: So to clarify, when you say “blue collar,” that means white?
REDHEAD: I HAVE NEVER ADMITTED THAT!
I’ll admit it. The Democrats don’t offer much to white people. And while that might be a positive outcome for people interested in social justice, it’s cold comfort for someone in the rust belt who just lost their job, watching people in a city blame people with their skin tone for everything bad in the world. In this day and age of Our Turn To Eat politics, it’s delusional to think that people like this wouldn’t feel left out.
And in what parallel universe does the Dream Act help workers? I was kind scratching my head at minimum wage increases, but please… Please connect the dots that lead to Dreamers benefitting The Middle Class.
Um… “blue collar”, “worker”, and “middle class” are not precisely synonymous, but in any case, there are dreamers in all three of those categories.
Which goes to show: all of those words are not just used to code for “white”, but also for an imaginary group that skews “over 45” and “male” too.
About the art: I don’t like how one of the hairdos seems to impact the head shape of the character. I know that doing these “big head people” is hard, because there’s no real-world “big head people” to go look at, but I think that basic head shape (and positioning above the neck) should read as semi-realistic, even when size isn’t.
Between Middle Class/Workers/Blue Collar… Pick whichever one you think serves your assertion best, because I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to the question, and then answer the question I actually asked, which was: “Please connect the dots that lead to Dreamers benefitting (your choice)”.
“Dreamers can be in (your choice)” doesn’t answer that question, because the question was talking about the effect Dreamers have ON the group. That the Dream act benefits Dreamers is obvious… How it benefits (your choice) as a group, much less so. What I’m looking for here is the elevator pitch… If the assertion is that “Democrats push a lot of stuff that benefits” (your choice), one of which was “The Dream Act”, then explain to (your choice) how the Dream Act benefits them.
“Besides, Clinton WON blue collar voters…”
This is fine rhetorically for a cartoon, but I have to harp on my pet peeve. The single truest fact about voters in the US is that they vote for the same party as last time. If you tell me who you voted for last time, I can tell you who you are going to vote for next time with amazing accuracy.
Elections tend to be decided on the shifts of people who for various reasons do the improbable–change. So if Democrats normally win 70% of the working class vote, but Clinton only wins 60% of it, you would still be correct that she “won” the working class vote. But compared to what you would expect knowing that people rarely change the party vote for, you would be more correct (in the context of how elections work) to note that she somehow “lost” an enormous portion of the vote that you would expect to go to her.
The swing against Clinton in the working class was enormous in the white working class, but still existed throughout most of the other demographic slices of the working class (including for example, black working class voters).
Interestingly I would also say that the second panel shows the weakness of the Democratic Party position.
Minimum Wage–this is probably the most useful, but rhetorically not as much as you think. Most skilled working class people don’t make minimum wage, so don’t think of minimum wage bumps as helping them much. There probably would be bump up effects, but they aren’t as clear. What they want is some job security at a good job, some guarantee that they will share in the bounty of companies they work for, and some respect. The minimum wage doesn’t speak to that.
Obamacare–this is good, though normally seen as a backstop for when they lose their job or if they can’t get a good job (see above).
College Grants–this is an interesting one. We may have played out the “college fixes things” card at this point, so I’m not sure of its applicability to the working class. This is much more of a middle class/upper-middle class benefit. Which doesn’t make it bad, but probably not blue collar. It might be bad signalling though because it plays into the “you’re a loser who shouldn’t be allowed to have a good job if you don’t go to college” frame that seems to float around. (Btw, we seem to be having a ratchet effect on that with Masters degrees of late. Jobs that wouldn’t have needed a BA now are suddenly showing up with a Masters ‘requirement’.)
Dream Act. I think it is a huge injustice that kids who were raised here at a young age ever get deported. I think it is a huge injustice that we don’t let lots of people become citizens if they want to be. I don’t see how it appeals to most arguments about “voters”, especially in a cartoon that wants to call out white voters. (Black voters have mixed feelings on immigration compared to say college educated whites).
The head on the woman to the left is really bothering me, especially in the last panel. It just looks like it’s been stretched front to back.
Ledasmom: Yeah, I was trying out a different head shape there, just for variety. I might have taken it too far. :-)
Well, you hit on my objection: When someone uses terms with incredibly broad meaning, selects one particular semantic option, and suggests that the other ones are somehow “coded” or racial in nature, that suggestion itself might be a part of the problem.
For some folks, “blue collar” has an association with “heavy industry,” for other folks it includes “all manual labor.” And so on.
Besides, as the cartoon asks:
The answer depends on what you mean by “help” and “working class,” right?
Nothing is free, after all.
Minimum wage helps some folks (people whose wages go up,) at the expense of other folks (employers, small business, people on the hiring margin, people outside of urban high cost districts, etc.)
Obamacare helps some folks (people who needed insurance and couldn’t afford it) at the expense of other folks (people who now pay more for their insurance, or who had to change doctors’plans).
Even college grants represent a transfer of money to some folks (always a zero-sum issue), increase competition to the degree they are resource limited, and, to the degree folks aren’t fully qualified (a real problem in the US) make it harder for non-degree-holders to compete.
And obviously the dream act is great for people who are illegal aliens but is in direct opposition to folks who prefer enforcement of immigration laws, and is also, to the degree that illegal immigration is functionally counted towards quotas, is in opposition to people who prefer to immigrate legally.
Union support, another Democratic stronghold: great for people in the unions; not so great for people who are shut out by the unions; not so great for people who want lower costs on projects; not so great for those aforementioned working-class or blue-collar students who believe they would be better served by charter schools but are stymied by teachers unions.
Or, to move outside politics: Walmart: great for people who need cheap stuff; great for people who would otherwise have been fully unemployed; not great for competing store owners who are displaced; not great for folks who would have gotten better jobs had walmart not shown up and who are now only able to work there; etc.
And so on.
That’s OK. You can’t serve everyone, it literally isn’t possible. But Dems should own it. Cartoons like this are the opposite of owning up to it.
I’d like the stretching more if it was a progression. It takes a step back in panel 3.
What annoys me about these “THE DEMOCRATS ABANDONED THE WORKING CLASS!!!!!!” bleatings is that they reverse cause and effect.
The southern white working class was a core component of the New Deal Coalition, but they started defecting to the Republicans in the late fifties – a process that accelerated after the Civil Rights Act and the Goldwater/Nixon Southern Strategy – and by the mid eighties the transformation was complete.
This process was complicated by the destruction of factory jobs and the family farm as the deliberate result of targeted Republican policies, which reduced the bargaining power of both groups relative to the previous generation, but the end result was clearly to the benefit of the Republicans.
So the pillars of today’s Democratic Party are minorities, and women, and highly educated urban white men. Of course the Party will cater to these groups, for that is how coalition politics has always functioned and will forever function. Which is to say, nothing sinister about it.
As a cautionary note, the New Deal coalition relied heavily upon the votes of open racists – as does the Republican Party of today. Talk of appealing to the white working class carries the implicit assumption that we can bribe just enough of these guys to join us and hand us electoral victories without pulling in so many that they take over the party and turn us into a spectral version of today’s Republicans. I hold that this is a fool’s errand.
Humble Talent, most of what the Democrats offer white people is health care, and the chance to educate their kids. If you don’t want to believe you’ll ever get seriously sick, it’s tempting to think you don’t need health care.
It looks to me like some people think they want to go back to the Good Old Days, when a man with a high school education could get a job in manufacturing and make enough money to support a family by working only 40 hours/week. Maybe buy a house. If his kids were ambitious, they could go to college — summer jobs and part-time work would pay for most of their tuition. It’s a dream that’s very tempting, if that’s how your parents lived OR how your parents hoped to live.
It doesn’t occur to them to accept the medical care that came with those Good Old Days. I see crowdfunding for chemo or open heart surgery and remember when a person that sick would simply have been doomed. The treatment hadn’t been invented. It’s kind of staggering. How can you budget for something like that, when it barely fits in your worldview?
I suppose there’s an interesting question about why minority working class people voted for Clinton. Did they vote for her because they thought she would be better for minorities, or did they vote for her because they thought she would be better for the working class? If they thought she would be bad for the working class but the benefits to minorities would out weight that, does that impact conclusions about who “won the working class”?
“Defecting” is such an interesting word choice. Why do you think they did that?
Look, it’s almost undeniable that over time, party positions change, and demographic positions change, and sometimes they end up aligning more closely, and sometimes they end up separating. Why did working people leave the Democrats in the late 40’s, early 50’s? Maybe they were turned off by all the Communists and Nazis the Roosevelt and Truman administrations let in, and Democrats embraced after the end of WWII?
Nothing sinister… I think you just answered that question more honestly than a whole lot of other people would have… The thing is, it’s not a winning mix. Women have never been nearly as willing to vote as a bloc as minorities in particular, and the majority of Americans aren’t minorities or the college educated. Writing off the majority demographics in America only makes it harder to win the next time around.
I’m not going to say that you don’t have a point. But does healthcare matter if you don’t have a job to begin with? I think a winning platform would be something like: “Get people to work, make sure they can afford shit”. I’m not sure which party that candidate comes from, although it strikes me that Bernie was close. The American Dream as envisioned by the Democrats seems to have shifted from “Work hard, do better” to “Pay taxes, collect benefits”, and the Republicans have shifted to “Pay nothing, you’re on your own.”
Here is the main problem both parties face with regards to the rural/rust belt working class (that is who are mostly talking about in the discussion so far, as far as I can tell): the old factory type jobs are gone, and they are NEVER coming back. This is due to automation and technology more than anything else. Most new jobs requiring unskilled labor are in service, which is much lower paying. Many new jobs in manufacturing require semi-skilled or skilled labor, and that usually means training beyond high school in some way.
There are many creative, hard working people who live in places that are not creating many new jobs that can support the lifestyle they are accustomed to/aspire to. Many of these people do not want to move to areas where they might find work for various reasons. We need to think about how to help these people who have been left behind before the next wave of automation sends millions more out of work (like when self-driving vehicles handle most commercial traffic, for example). Neither party is handling this reality particularly well.
In terms of sheer numbers, there are probably more working class people in the urban Democratic strongholds, so the Democratic strategy to focus more on them while supporting a stronger social safety net that would also help people outside those areas mostly makes sense, at least on the national level. As far as I can tell from speaking with friends and family who live in rural areas, they actually don’t want a stronger social safety net. They want the clock turned back, and so will vote for those who say it can happen.
“Working people.”
So do you mean these working people?
Or these construction workers?
Or these workers? Or these? Are these the working people you’re saying turned away from the Democratic party?
Or is there something else you mean when you say “working people”?
And by the way, the Dixiecrat movement – which would eventually morph into a exodus of many white Democrats to the Republican party – was explicitly begun in response to Truman’s support of civil rights.
From the Dixiecrat’s official platform:
Amp,
Given that your cartoon uses the terms ‘blue collar’ and ‘working class’; and given that you clearly have a definition in mind (or that you at least appear to disagree with how some folks use the term) maybe you will cut through all the semantic-argument mud:
Using whatever level of precision you deem appropriate, how do you define those terms? Then we can all try to use the same terms and level of precision.
(For example, a lot of folks I grew up with used “blue collar” primarily to refer to factory work, as opposed to “farm work” or “service work”. But I can have a discussion using your terms, so long as I know what they are.)
Ok… First off: Some of those pictures were plantation workers. You’re damn right they turned away from the Democratic party.
Second… Your point, if I’m reading you right, is that black people work too. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s the gist. Yes. Of course. But are those workers supporting democrats on social, or economic measures? I mean… Black Americans show more conformity at the polling station than any other demographic. Often more than 90% of black people that vote in any given contest vote D. This is similar regardless of age, gender, ability, socioeconomic, or working status. And at that point… Yeah, people need to work, black people fit into the Venn diagram of “workers”, but why would you think that differences in labour policy is the reason they vote the way they do?
When I say things like “Why did working people leave the Democrats in the late 40’s, early 50’s? ” I’m 1) Obviously talking about the ones that did, because they all didn’t. And 2) Talking about people who will actually be swayed based on self-interested economic policies.
Jane Doh @ 14:
True. But, increasingly, that training is not college. Either political party would profit from starting to support technical schools and apprenticeship programs whose designs have a great deal of input from the people desiring to employ their participants. After watching my own two children go through engineering programs at two well-known universities I have seen that a great many students who are NOT engineering students treat college as an extension of high school with the absence of adult supervision and with the addition of alcohol and other drugs and casual sex and to put a considerable amount of coursework in their schedule that is not challenging – and not so astonishingly end up walking across a stage to get a degree that represents an academic curriculum that did little to prepare them for employment. Now, education’s end point is not simply to prepare you for work. But that should be one of the objectives, especially if the school knows full well that the student has ended up borrowing an average of $30,000+ to do so, with some having borrowed considerably more. The best way to avoid this is to divert public support (e.g., grants to the schools and loan guarantees to the students) from such an outcome and towards programs that actually DO prepare students to be self-supporting adults upon completion.
That’s true… But this goes back to a conversation I’ve never had here but would love to sometime: Social Justice isn’t justice. Social justice is the idea that the group is more important than the individual, that individual injustices can be ignored in favour of broader trends. That if you’re having a hard time personally, but share the tone of your skin or the shape of your genitals with a demographic that generally does OK, you can be ignored. There are bigger problems to deal with.
People who have lost their factory jobs, or their coal jobs, they don’t care who they get help from, they need help. And Democrats offer them nothing. You have whole states of poor, disenfranchised people, and you’re beating them down for grasping at hope. Maybe the Republicans are lying to them about their prospects, but at least they offer lip service. Back to Hillary “We’re going to put coal companies out of business” Clinton, she was right, and it was inevitable… But it was also tone deaf and what was offered instead? Employer subsidised ACA exchanges? You don’t get that if you aren’t employed.
What people working for coal companies – and the people who sold them their food and clothing and educated their children, etc., etc., heard from Hillary Clinton was “You work in an evil business and deserve to lose your jobs.” Now, coal companies have been losing business for some time. So these folks looked around at communities that were alive and thriving when they were kids but are turning into ghost towns now and said “Hell, it’s going to get worse!” They know that promises of re-training and green or STEM jobs are empty, because those promises have been made for years but their communities are still collapsing. And what Hillary also didn’t realize is that she wasn’t talking about urban residents when she talked about things like ACA> She was talking about rural residents. Rural residents on an individual basis have a culture that sees living on government benefits as undignified. They don’t want to do so on a long-term basis – it destroys their self-respect. They want to support themselves with jobs and the benefits they earn from their employer.
RonF–I totally agree with you about technical/vocational school (whatever you want to call them). I have a few friends from high school that went that route, though it was quite unpopular where I live, and got useful, relevant training that helped them get good jobs. I am certainly not a person who believes everyone needs a 4-year degree. That sort of thinking is ruining universities for those who really want/need one, since so many think of college as 4 years of partying and fun before work.
In terms of rural folks in dying towns wanting local jobs, not handouts, I do understand that, but I don’t see that happening on a large scale in the near future. A friend was telling me that at her workplace, there are maybe 80 people working per shift doing the work of thousands a generation ago. There was all this talk about outsourcing tech support and other telework to rural communities, but let’s face it, labor costs in the developing world are much, much lower because the cost of living is much, much lower. It is a real problem that many of the long term unemployed live in places where there are no jobs now and unlikely to be jobs in the future. I don’t see an way out of this that does not involve levels of government involvement that are currently politically unpalatable.
(After a discussion of how Black people tend to vote in a group for Democrats)
Congratulations, you have just perfectly illustrated Amp’s cartoon.
Just thinking about the ways in which education policy seems to me to be so much like healthcare policy.
You get a wide variety of inputs, some of which are controllable; we don’t really do much to discuss controlling them and both systems ‘take folks as they are’.
You have arguments on both sides about expanding the scope of services, many of which are becoming rights-based.
The neediest folks are also the most expensive to serve, and are often (though not always) those who have less response per dollar spent.
The overall package demands more and more administration to handle the increasing complexity of the rules, and the increasing disparity between the lower- and higher- performing outcomes.
The costs continue to go up, often without a matching performance increase, absent a tech breakthrough.
The vast majority of spending and policy are driven by the location of the deciding line somewhere on the “more equal spending / less equal outcomes” and “less equal spending / more equal outcomes” spectrum. Nonetheless, the decision process and the precise location of the line are almost never discussed openly, and it is very rare for anyone to openly acknowledge a tradeoff between the spending.
Do people disagree? I’m not sure I’m right about how similar they are.
I agree- it makes no sense to talk of the DREAM Act as supporting the working class since it’s meant help illegal aliens, who are only a small part of the working class and can’t vote anyway. When most people say working class in this context, they mean “working class VOTERS”.
Gilad Edelman wrote a good article today demonstrating why “Clinton won working class voters” is missing the point:
http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/06/06/the-straw-man-argument-about-the-election-that-wont-die/
Trump’s support among the white working class was necessary but not sufficient for Trump to win.
In talking about why members of the white working class vote the way they do, it’s worth keeping in mind that most people don’t vote on narrow economic self-interest. What they do vote on is hard to tease out–some combination of randomness, selective information, and values broader than their own interest, probably–but it’s wrong to think the WWC voted for Trump mainly because they thought it would for sure make them better off financially, or at least would be more likely to make them better off than voting for Clinton. Just like wealthy Democrats promote many policies which would result in them taking home less income.
(I like to think of this as “rich people who want tax cuts don’t simply want more money–many of then genuinely believe it is better for the economy as a whole if they have more money.”)
That’s a good link, Michael. I often phrase this another way–middle-class and wealthy white people are why Republicans have a chance at all at the national level; the white working class explains a large part of the difference between Romney and Trump.
I think that part of what is turning the white working class against the Left is the message from the Left that they’re all racist sexist privileged white males. There’s definitely a message that their suffering is somehow less, that their suffering is their own fault. This article in the Washington Monthly sums it up:
http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/junejulyaugust-2017/how-to-win-rural-voters-without-losing-liberal-values/
“Yet how is that different from scapegoating “inner city” residents of America’s “ghettos” as an “underclass” beset by “pathologies,” as liberals rightly castigate conservatives for doing? Telling the white working class that they should just move to San Francisco is like telling poor urban black people that they should stop complaining and relocate to Chappaqua.”
If you don’t believe that left-wingers do that, then look at these comments from D.L. Hughley:
http://atlantablackstar.com/2016/12/23/d-l-hughley-poor-white-people-youve-wasted-whiteness/
“But your assertion is to make America great is to roll it back to the industrial age. You want to bring factories back rather than learn,” Hughley says. “If your a– can’t buy a house in the Rust Belt, you did something wrong. They talk about the white working class, … You blew it.
“If the white working class is not working, they weren’t working when they were supposed to. In other words, they weren’t educating themselves.”
I don’t remember anyone on the left condemning Hughley for saying this.
Or look at this article from Arthur Chu:
“It’s a truism that the most openly vicious practitioners of any brand of oppression tend not to be the people at the very top level of privilege, but those in the second-to-last row, desperate for someone at the very bottom that they can feel better than.”
Now this is primarily perpetrating the “nerds are more sexist than “normal” men” meme which is bad enough but there’s also the implication that poor whites are more racist than wealth whites. Again I don’t remember anyone condemning Arthur Chu for this.
In fact, being told that you’re privileged makes being poor, or being a virgin late in life, or being mentally ill WORSE- it’s like other people might have an excuse for those things but you don’t. And the left is willfully blind to this.
I disagree completely… When you look at the two most successful campaigns of this election: Trump and Sanders, Trump who ultimately won and Sanders who gave Clinton, one of the most enfranchised candidates in the history of the DNC, a legitmate run for her money… What strikes me is that they’re flip sides of the same coin: They made economic arguements. People got out and supported unconventional candidates who paid attention to the issues they actually cared about (Holy shit, right?).
From Trump: “We’re going to build a wall (to keep illegal immigrants who are stealing your jobs out), We’re going to bring jobs back, we’re going to Make America Great Again, We’re going to start winning deals.”
From Sanders: “We’re going to tax the rich and cut taxes for the middle class, we’re going to make college free, we’re going to raise the minimum wage, we need single payer!”
You can think these messages are vile, pie in the sky, or outright lies, but the fact of the matter is that these were the messages that resonated, and the social messages fell flat. I think one of the best take aways from this conversation for people arguing that people don’t vote with their financial self interest in mind is a reminder that not all people think like you. The left needs more than social justice if it wants to start winning again.
I disagree completely… When you look at the two most successful campaigns of this election: Trump and Sanders, Trump who ultimately won and Sanders who gave Clinton, one of the most enfranchised candidates in the history of the DNC, a legitmate run for her money…
Wait, what?
How was Sanders’ campaign more successful than Clinton’s when Clinton beat Sanders?
Doesn’t the fact that you called Sanders’ campaign more successful than Clinton’s despite the objective fact that hers was more successful indicate an overwhelming anti-Clinton bias on your part?
Perhaps they’re defining “success” as “achievement beyond original expectations”?
Humble Talent @28:
Sanders’ message was majority economic, yes. To claim that Trump’s was focused on the economy, and Clinton’s wasn’t, though, is cherry-picking in the extreme.
Trump emphasized not only the job-competition aspects of immigrants, but their (supposed) criminality, especially violent criminality. Muslim ban. “Lock her up.” “Drain the swamp.” Inner cities and their violent crime. And in addition to her social policies, Clinton had many economic policies that would have helped the working class (of all races), including policies surrounding childcare and education. Here’s a word cloud from all their debates. White is said equally by both, blue by Clinton, red by Trump. Yes, Trump mentioned NAFTA–but he mentioned Chicago about as many times (and to my recollection that was mostly to talk about crime). Meanwhile, Clinton’s top words include “invest”, “income”, and “affordable” (the latter probably due to the ACA, which, again, big economic policy).
It’s also important, here, to distinguish that when most pollsters are talking about the working class, they are talking about education, not income. Wealthy uneducated people swung to the Republicans in November, while less well-off educated people did not. So when you said @19, Humble Talent:
those are some of the working-class people who swung to Trump, yes. But some of the people who changed their votes are at least economically comfortable; they were responding to Trump’s messaging on the culture as a whole, including the economy, not just a narrow promise of new jobs for themselves. That’s the point I wanted to make with my comment @26.
Humble Talent again:
To be clear: I don’t think people don’t vote for their financial self-interest because I personally don’t do that; I think that because that’s what most empirical research shows. In the spirit of acknowledging mistakes, my statement @26 is part wrong: part of the reason people don’t vote in their own economic self-interest may be that, due to many factors, they don’t accurately judge the economic impact of candidates’ proposals. So some people may have thought they were voting for their own self-interest by voting for Trump, even though they weren’t.
RonF has a good point that Democrats do offer help to the economically struggling members of white working class, but it’s not the kind of help they want. (I don’t mean to imply any judgment on either side by that: it’s just true, as far as I can tell.) That fits in well with Amp’s original cartoon, too, I think.
Humble Talent:
Came across this while looking for something else… If you look at that quote in context, she was talking about the need to create new jobs to replace coal jobs. She referred to her plans to create jobs and investments, which she (or her campaign writers) talked and wrote about many other times – it was literally the thing Clinton talked about most on the campaign trail (a few examples: 1 2 3 4).
Finally, if you’re poor and unemployed, you almost certainly qualify for free medical care under the ACA, through the medicaid expansion. How does that not help someone who lost their job?
Unless you live in one of the 19 states in which Republicans have blocked the medicaid expansion. But I don’t see how that’s the Democrats’ fault, and Democrats have been pushing to get the medicaid expansion into more states.
How do you know – as “the fact of the matter” – that it was these messages, rather than other messages (such as Trump’s race-baiting), that resonated with Trump voters?
ETA: And I’m really not convinced that lying is the way to go. It’s easy to tell people that you’re going to wave a magic wand and coal jobs will appear, but there really is something wrong with making promises that not only can’t be fulfilled, but which encourage people to have unrealistic expectations about what’s economically possible.
The idea that “the left” – which, in this context, apparently means Clinton – talked about nothing but social justice is ridiculous and counterfactual. Here, by wordcount, is what Hillary Clinton talked about in her 2016 campaign speeches:
Source: The most common words in Hillary Clinton’s speeches, in one chart – Vox
g&w, I took a stab at answering your comment 23 over on the most recent open thread.
So much to reply to…
Because they didn’t start at the same place and the DNC tried very hard to game the system in favor of Clinton. Someone running 150 meters in the 100 meter run with a peg leg coming in a close second to someone who started at the start line and has two legs still ran a hell of a race.
That’s absolutely fair, I said something that kind of touched on that in another post: When Trump (or Republicans) are talking about bringing back coal jobs, they’re lying. Coal jobs are gone. If someone supported Trump with the idea that he was actually bringing back coal jobs, they were horribly misled. But they THOUGHT they were voting in their best interest… And as far as most of them know, as far as most of them believe, Democrats offered them nothing. If you think that Democrats actually offer them something, do we agree that Democrats sold their offering poorly?
That’s fair. I’d argue that his economic policies got more traction than Clinton’s but that’s not because he pushed them more. He definitely ran a more populist campaign (from his base’s perspective) than Clinton did.
I think that’s irrelevant. Look, Trump didn’t talk about the joys of grabbing pussy on the campaign trail, but damned if there wasn’t a whole lot of coverage on those words. People think the media is biased left or right, and they aren’t completely wrong, but I think more than left and right, they’re biased towards sensationalism and laziness. It made a better story that Clinton was going to “put coal companies out of business” so that’s what they ran.
Was it true? Yeah… It was. She had every intention of watching the coal industry die. Did it lack context? Yeah… It did. She offered clean energy jobs and education. Did the context make it any better? Slightly… Selling ephemeral “Green Jobs” in coal country probably went over like a brick anyway, but it WAS something, and ‘education’ doesn’t tend to resonate with people who’ve already been working 20 years. But still… Who thought it was a good idea to have those words come out of her mouth? Completely tone-deaf.
We think it’s normal for some people to spend $250,000 and four years of their time to get a degree in Art History and a minor in Egyptian History*. So why would we be surprised that people give low priority to a set of uber-complex and often-unreliable political-economic predictions?
A more likely reason is that economic self-interest is rarely the highest priority. That is probably part of why you’re a cartoonist and I am a lawyer. Both of us could probably have made more driving trucks or doing something else, but I suspect neither of us wanted to.
Also, I don’t know if anyone really CAN “accurately judge the economic impact of candidates’ proposals” in many cases. The country is pretty damn complicated.
*I pulled these out of a hat as a guess about relatively apolitical, highly interesting, and not especially high-paying areas of study. If you majored in them, no insult intended!
This is not especially convincing:
First, wordcount really relates to rate. Hilary gave relatively long and complex speeches, IMO.
Second, word use and speech emphasis are not the same at all. Example of two uses of “jobs:”
1) “Everything is about jobs. I hate NAFTA, but that doesn’t change the focus of my speech: If you vote for me, I will give you jobs. Thank you!”
2) “NAFTA and global warming are battles facing this country. If we don’t address the complex issues of global trade, we may not preserve American jobs in the coming centuries. But our increasing opportunities in the green arena will create new jobs, while also serving the equal priority of helping to protect our planet.”
Only one of those is perceived as a “job focus” even though both examples have the same word count.
Amp, I see something odd about #33. I’ve seen a survey that claimed that 16% of Pres. Trump’s voters listed the Supreme Court nomination as the #1 reason they supported him (and frankly, it was the one thing that almost got me to vote for him myself). I find it hard to believe that “Supreme Court/Garland” wouldn’t have hit on that graphic.
If we define “sold your offering poorly” to mean “failed to achieve the desired end,” then I’d agree. Likewise, I’d say that bikers who refuse to use performance-enhancing drugs typically bike poorly.
I keep thinking of Michael Armstrong who, in 1997, took the reins at AT&T and launched an ambitious project to create a superior nationwide telecommunications network based on coaxial cable which could defeat the stranglehold that the Bell Operating Companies had on their wireline customers. The plan was bold and required enormous capital—and by 2000-2001, AT&T simply ran out of money. The various parts of the project had to be sold off for scrap. The AT&T name now lives on as a label purchased by Southwestern Bell.
What went wrong? The business model seemed pretty sound—but the cost of capital for communications projects skyrocketed. Why? Because every time AT&T wanted to issue more stocks or bonds, it had to compete with the wunderkind called MCI, who could always promise a better return. And how could MCI do that? They had developed a secret strategy: THEY LIED THEIR ASSES OFF. Today people scarcely remember AT&T’s failure because it was shortly eclipsed by the unprecedented implosions of MCI and Arthur Anderson.
Clinton offered people a constructive message about a future that, with some effort and sacrifice, we might have been able to achieve. And people might have been willing to receive and embrace that message—if there hadn’t been an irredeemable charlatan telling people that effort and sacrifice is for suckers because you can lose weight using the Chocolate Fudge Diet!
In short, Clinton was unwilling to outbid a lunatic, and thus lost the election. Like AT&T, she will be remembered as a footnote in the origin story of an unprecedented debacle.
I’m not sure that “selling their offering poorly” is the most illuminating way to characterize the situation, but that’s just one guy’s opinion.
Related to this discussion: The Democratic Party Is in Worse Shape Than You Thought – The New York Times
There’s plenty of raw meat there for both sides of this debate – and plenty that cuts against my cartoon. :-p
Indirect link.
Was that seriously random? I did my undergraduate degree in art history and my MA and PhD in ancient Egyptian language and literature. It took more like twelve years, though.
I would think you’re of an age to remember that in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s there was expected to be an expansion in need for university instructors, before the adjunctification of the system. There were also plenty of jobs (or, at least I never had trouble finding them…) for research assistants, secretaries and the like.
We still used film to do copy stand photography, and had slides to remount, file and organize for lectures. We also typed papers and books for older professors who still wrote their work out long hand on pads of lined paper.
Manufacturing and coal aren’t the only areas that have lost tens of thousands of jobs to technology over the past 20-30 years.
This is basically the way I see it. Democrat’s problem is they haven’t found a way to counter Republican lies.
@Ampersand#32- yes, she mentioned retraining- BUT that’s the problem. To most people in Rust Belt states,suggesting retraining is like suggesting drowning puppies. It’s difficult to change careers in middle age. The jobs usually pay much less than their previous job and/or are located 100 miles away. The workers feel like retraining accomplishes nothing for most workers except finding a way to blame them for not getting new jobs. Clinton’s inability to recognize that workers are understandably wary of retraining problems just showed how out of touch she was.
A study in language usage:
Indeed, retraining isn’t very attractive—compared to the fantasy of a resurgent coal industry. But it might seem attractive compared to the reality of unemployment or a lifetime as a Walmart greeter.
In sum, Trump responded to Rustbelt discontent with pie-in-the-sky promises. Clinton responded with practical strategies for addressing real-world problems. And from this, we conclude that the Clinton campaign was “selling their offering poorly” and that Clinton was “out of touch.” Am I getting this right?