Frank Rich: "No Sympathy for the Hillbilly"

[Hindsight was 2020]

How do you gain votes from an electorate convinced that tax cuts spur economic growth, and that healthcare costs can be lowered by letting insurance companies operate beyond state lines (whatever that entails...), that unionization of the manufacturing sector lowers workers' standards of living -- and all that other rot -- that their deeply held political principles are just shibboleths? Efforts by the Democratic Party to argue otherwise just amounts to Democrats lecturing voters that their false beliefs are indeed false -- and no likes a lecturing hectoring know-it-all.

Well, for starters, the Democrats could study how the Republicans convinced these voters of those things in the first place.

Race baiting (and similar, like gay baiting)? I mean, you have to accept that the reasons these sorts of voters turned to the Republicans are mostly unsavory, either explicitly, or, more often, implicitly.

Well there is always the fact that it is TRUE that tax cuts spur economic growth, as many economics professors would tell you.. mostly those professors would debate about how to distribute the tax cut for optimal growth.  But your point is more directly the issue... Republicans have won these voters over on cultural issues (anti-BLM, anti-gay causes)...  This board is blind if it thinks they will win these voters back by offering them free health care, etc.  Obamacare was already passed and the biggest beneficiary states aren't voting Democrat.

Agreed entirely. Social issues are a much more powerful voting motivator than economic concerns, which voters almost unanimously (wealthy and poor, urban and rural, white and minority alike) do not really understand. People talking about "outreach to the white working class voters" seem to be in denial that doing so in a serious fashion requires hurling minorities under the bus, which I for one am not willing to countenance, and anything else is talking past their concerns.

That is depressingly true the true key going forward is not "outreach to the white working class voters" but Trump like Carter is so clearly bad they aren't motivated for a second round while also putting forth a progressive dem who wins back people who protest voted for Johnson and Jill

[Hindsight was 2020]

It's really hard to feel empathy for a group of people who justify the wall an ban around the idea of "f**k your feelings"

[Hindsight was 2020]

I think most white Americans bailed when the left got looney, and became obsessed with identity politics.

They began representing small segments of the population and calling the rest "deplorables".

The only one obsessed with "identity politics" is the one who wants to ban a religion from coming here

[Hindsight was 2020]

I think most white Americans bailed when the left got looney, and became obsessed with identity politics.

They began representing small segments of the population and calling the rest "deplorables".

The only one obsessed with "identity politics" is the one who wants to ban a religion from coming here

And people who are transgender from using the bathroom.

Excessive hyperbole alert.

But accusing the left of being "looney" an "obsessed with identity politics" isn't? Hypocrisy alert