A few weeks ago, a tweet from Bloomberg politics reporter Sahil Kapur got us thinking about the so-called “White Working Class” (WWC) demographic:
A provocative take — but is it true? After some rumination, we’ve developed a somewhat contrarian take in a new post, which we’ve put on GitHub. Here’s an excerpt:
Political strategists and pundits are split on how Democrats ought to address “White Working Class” (WWC) voters: convince them or ignore them? We think they’re both half-right. WWC voters are, as a group, too attached to the Republican party to convince, but also too large to ignore. We think the key is energizing the progressive base of the Democratic party, while also finding common ground with some WWC voters on issues they care about.
We think the answer is “yes” and “yes”. Of course we need to get our base to turn out — GOTV is going to be a huge part of winning in 2020. But at the same time, there are WWC voters whose core needs and preferences align much better with Democrats than Republicans, and we need to engage, energize, and mobilize these folks too. Bringing WWCs into the progressive tent is the morally right thing for us to do, strategically sound as we look beyond 2020, and tactically critical in the upcoming election if we want to capture battleground states with large WWC populations.
There’s lots more in the full post — click here to read the whole thing.
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Header photo via In These Times.