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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Adder

Maybe Dems have lost workers, but they've definitely lost Silicon Valley billionaires. I'm much more concerned about those people's ability to shape "worker's" beliefs than I am whether Dem policy and messaging appeals to "workers."

Then we're all fucked, because figuring out how to bring those billionaires back into the fold is not the path to any kind of political success.

eta: I do think the media environment is a huge thing to solve, and the best thing I've seen about that is this piece by Brian Beutler.

A taste:

Every honest person working in politics, including the remaining few honest Republicans, knows which party is mission-driven to help working-class people directly, and which party is not. Some of these Republicans might claim to believe that the GOP’s austere, plutocratic goals are in the long-run interest of the working class; that catering to the productive rich produces trickle down benefits for those who pick themselves up by the bootstraps, etc. But everyone at the professional level knows the score: When Democrats win power, they reach for levers that direct more economic and political support to they working class. They reach for the minimum wage (though have lacked the votes to overcome a filibuster), for food support, for improving health and child benefits, and so on. Republicans reach for tax cuts and deregulation.

Thus, it should not be controversial to stipulate here that if working-class people without firm partisan attachments studied and understood these two parties and their budgets, they’d view Democrats as the better steward of their interests every time. They’d never drift secularly toward the GOP.

But of course, that’s exactly what’s happened.

So what’s gone wrong then? As I see it, at least one of these things is true:

1. Working Americans either can’t perceive the differences between Democrats and Republicans because Democrats don’t deliver enough, or workers don’t think the Democratic agenda is sufficiently better than the GOP agenda to merit partisan loyalty. The Democratic agenda lacks zhuzh or oomph, or ideal indicators of class-based solidarity. Without radical change, workers will vote on other bases.
2. Too many working Americans don’t know elemental facts about the parties’ economic commitments. The problem is mostly about information. Perhaps a weakness in Democratic messaging or a triumph of obfuscatory right-wing propaganda or a combination of the two.
3. People’s perceptions of the economy don’t form solely on the basis of their material well-being—they can be made to feel insecure or aggrieved even when their standards of living are on the rise.
4. The theory is wrong—working class people do not dependably cast votes on a single-issue class basis. Improving their understanding of the differences between the parties through platform changes, policy reforms, and/or better messaging will not translate into a political re-realignment.
There may be some merit in all of these, but I believe this election strained the first explanation to its breaking point. And if the story is mostly a mix of 2, 3, and 4, the counsel is similar: flood the information zone, ideally with credible messengers. Either you need these voters to absorb the binary truth about partisans politics and the material state of the world, or you need them to like you on other bases, or both. And the only way to do that is to clean up misperceptions with constant reminders. That is, through media. ...