Donald J. Trump has been reelected
president of the United States. Kamala Harris got throttled in the 2024
election, once again toppled by the average American voter. It was a
working-class uprising buoyed by a shift in suburban white women and
Hispanics. It’s not accurate to say this election was a red wave—this
was the red tsunami that was brewing in 2022. How Latinos voted in this
election should be the final sign for liberals to realize that open
borders, lax immigration enforcement, and mass amnesty are losing
arguments. We can discuss that later, but again, Democrats got thrashed
because they don’t know how to talk to working-class voters anymore.
To boot, they don’t have these voters, the former backbone of the
Democratic Party, within their ranks anymore. CNN might be awash with
liberal tears, but they’ve had some moments of clarity where the divide
on education is explicitly clear: Democrats are viewed as too elite and
educated and, therefore, cannot relate or communicate with working
families. The irony of the 2024 cycle is that the Democrats are the
'weird' people.
You cannot win the election with just white
college-educated voters, single women, and some black folks. The initial
base is too small; most Americans don’t have college degrees. To
compound the communication issue, Democrats view the less educated as
less than at best and neo-Nazis as worst. These people had enough of
these white, wealthy, college-educated elites telling them their
concerns aren’t necessary because they lack a higher education degree.
Even worse, how many times have you heard these blue-haired freaks say,
‘I have a degree,’ to shut down debate? That means nothing, child. It
means you likely wasted a home mortgage on a worthless degree. It also
doesn’t give you a leg up in any debate.
Some were rather
prescient in their observations about a Harris loss. If that were to
happen, it would be because the Democratic Party and their consultant
class have totally lost the ability to communicate with the average
voter, who views these people, rightly, as aliens from space (via The Guardian):
…Harris reminded her supporters of Project 2025, the
“detailed and dangerous plan” that she believes an “increasingly
unstable and unhinged” Trump will follow to cement “unchecked power”.
She sounded the alarm about the dire threat Trump poses to “your
fundamental freedoms” and how in his second term he would be
“essentially immune” from oversight.
This is hair-raising stuff.
And the campaign thinks that menacing warnings like these will motivate
some urgency to march to the polls for Harris. The only problem is that
voters, especially working-class voters, seem uniquely uninspired by the
appeal.
The Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) recently
tested a variety of political messages on voters in Pennsylvania, a key
battleground for both campaigns, to determine what kind of rhetoric is
working to nudge blue-collar voters toward Harris. In collaboration with
the polling firm YouGov, we polled a representative sample of 1,000
eligible voters in Pennsylvania between 24 September and 2 October 2024.
We asked respondents to evaluate different political messages that they
might hear from Harris and Trump, and to score them on a scale of
favorability.
In line with our past research, we found that
economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist
narrative fared best relative to Trump-style messages about Biden’s
competence, immigration, corrupt elites, critical race theory,
inflation, election integrity and tariffs. No surprise there. Meanwhile,
Harris’s messages on abortion and immigration fared worse than any of
the economic or populist messages we tested.
Yet no message was as unpopular as the one we call the “democratic threat” message.
Much
like Harris’s recent rhetoric, this message called on voters to “defend
our freedom and our democracy” against a would-be dictator in the form
of Trump. It named Trump as “a criminal” and “a convicted felon” and
warned of his plans to punish his political enemies. Of the seven
messages we tested, each relating to a major theme of the Harris
campaign, the “democratic threat” message polled dead last.
It
was the least popular message relative to the average support for
Trump’s messages. And it was the least popular message among the
working-class constituencies Harris and the Democrats need most.
Among
blue-collar voters, a group that leans Republican, the democratic
threat message was a whopping 14.4 points underwater relative to the
average support for Trump’s messages. And among more liberal-leaning
service and clerical workers, it was also the least popular message,
finishing only 1.6 percentage points ahead of the Trump average. Even
among professionals, the most liberal of the bunch and the group that
liked the message the best, the message barely outperformed Trump’s
messages.
The exact opposite is true for the “strong populist”
message we tested. This message, which combined progressive economic
policy suggestions with a strong condemnation of “billionaires”, “big
corporations” and the “politicians in Washington who serve them”, tested
best with blue-collar workers, service and clerical workers and
professionals.
[…]
…the distaste for the democratic threat
message among working people, and the total obliviousness to that
distaste among campaign officials, is evidence itself of the huge
disconnect between Harris and the working-class voters she desperately
needs to win. Worse, every ad or speech spent hectoring about the
Trumpian threat is one less opportunity for Harris to focus on her
popular economic policies; one less opportunity to lean into a populist
“people v plutocrats” narrative that actually does resonate with the
working class.
If Harris loses, it’ll be because the campaign and
the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many
working people – a party that has given up on mobilizing working people
around shared class frustrations and aspirations.
The ballots have been counted, which is exactly what happened on
November 5. The Democrats have been here before with Hillary Clinton in
2016, but it was largely ignored, possibly because the former first lady
won the popular vote. Trump won the Electoral College and the popular
vote, while the GOP retained the House and reclaimed the Senate. The
working-class voter had to smash the Democrats over the head with a
sledgehammer again. Will they get the point? Or will they wallow and
drown in more anti-Trump hysterics? It’s more of the latter right now,
as the Left is incapable of self-reflection due to the cancer of
self-righteousness and nauseating arrogance.
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