The Shifting Class Politics of the Democratic Party
The battle for the presidential nomination has exposed ideological and class fault lines within the Democratic Party. The opposition to Hillary Clinton’s position on trade and other economic issues reveal the sense among many registered Democrats that the Party establishment has abandoned their economic concerns. The shift in the class interests of the Party has not been a sudden one, precipitated by the Trans-Pacific Partnership or even NAFTA, but part of a longer story of transformation, a shift of the Democratic base away from its roots in the labor union halls in northern cities and toward white-collar tech workers in the suburbs and gentrified enclaves of major metropolises. Since the 1960s, suburban knowledge professionals and high-tech corporations have supplanted urban ethnics and labor unions as the party’s core constituency. …
The Republicans’ Trump Problem
The Republican Party has a problem. At the time I am writing (March 24, 2016), Donald Trump enjoys a clear lead in the race for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination. With nearly 60% (739) of the 1,237 delegates required for the nomination, more than both of his remaining opponents, Ted Cruz of Texas (465) and John Kasich of Ohio (143). According to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com website, Trump is expected to win all or a majority of delegates from Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Indiana, West Virginia, Washington, California, and New Jersey. If he wins significant minorities of delegations from the remaining states (Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, Montana, and New Mexico), he …
A Working-Class Hero Is Something To Be
Bernie Sanders and the White Working Class
A good deal of ink has been spilled over the question of Bernie Sanders’s relationship to African American voters, and it still remains a real question whether he can attract enough black Democratic voters in the upcoming primaries to close the distance between himself and Hillary Clinton. Even his historic upset in the Michigan primary only won him 28% of the African American vote. However, the Michigan results may reveal something even more significant. Sanders won the white working class vote in the Democratic Primary, putting him over the top. Even more stunning is that this is the constituency that had provided Clinton with one of her strongest bases of support in her 2008 contest with Obama. …
