Why Democrats can't win over (more) white working-class voters (Slate)

[TJ in Oregon]

The article frames it primarily in racial terms, and part of it certainly is that, but it goes deeper than that. Quite frankly a lot of the working class whites were better off in the 1950s than they are today and there are a ton of structural factors behind that.

When I was growing up in blue collar rust belt northern Ohio, most of the kids in my class whose parents were college educated were Republicans and most whose parents were not were Democrats. Granted, this is northern Ohio not the rural south and auto manufacturing was the main industry. Now the two have swapped a little bit. A decent chunk of the Republican kids went off to college and went crunchy granola social lib, meanwhile a decent chunk of the Democratic kids who didn't go to college have slowly turned into nonvoters or Republicans, not because they've gone racist, but because they find the Democrats' rhetoric insulting for one reason or another and thus believe the Republicans are better looking after their interests. One issue the article didn't mention but is huge right now in the minds of the blue collar types back home is immigration. They largely feel that letting more immigrants stay here will increase the competition for their own jobs. It's not that they hate Hispanics; they just fear being laid off. That's just one example but there are dozens of small ways by which the Democrats have turned them off.

As PR already noted, the rhetoric is probably the Democrats biggest hurdle here. Much like the Republicans when it comes to trying to appeal to blacks, it's gotten to the point where the Democrats almost can't even address the issue with insulting working class whites somehow. The article and PR's response for instance implicitly assert racism as a major reason why they vote for Republicans and the charge of racism is itself generally viewed as an insult. Thus we circle the wagons on the topic.

On the whole though, the Democrats don't need to win the white working class vote. It's a shrinking portion of the electorate, one they have won without and can win again without. They aren't going to win it back as a cosmopolitan liberal party. They can peel off enough to win without the rest.

[TJ in Oregon]

They're already here. Can't do anything about that. If you give them amnesty, they have no reason not to demand the same sort of wages that non-immigrant workers expect. There's no fear of deportation, so employers have lost that leverage.

On this issue I was speaking about the Rust Belt in particular here, where almost no immigrants have settled to this point. A sizable portion of the industrial workers are legitimately worried by amnesty because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that there will be more immigrants with it than without it, or that more future immigrants will come because of it to take their jobs.

Don't get me wrong; I agree amnesty is necessary at this point. But a whole lot of people back home disagree with that statement and racism and xenophobia have little to do with the reason. The reason why I mentioned immigration here is because it is an example of why working class whites may believe it is the Republicans who are looking after their interests rather than the Democrats, which is at the end the day the real reason why many of them vote Republican, not simply to express their outrage at the Democrats for having offended them.