The people at the Sanders community meeting that I listened to, were very
enthusiastic. I don't remember the name of the county in West Virginia. It
was not a typical Sanders rally. There were people from the community, a
teacher, a lawyer, a labor guy, etc. who talked and after each person
talked, Sanders linked what that person said to socialist theory and also,
to his campaign points. It was a fascinating exercise in community
organizing. Maybe he won't win the state, but I'll bet a lot of people who
participated in that meeting, are more knowledgeable about the issues and
may be active in the future.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2016 8:31 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Media Myth of the Working-Class Reagan
Democrats
Last month the polls had it that Sanders was running ahead of Clinton in
West Virginia by double digits. Now it is the day before the primary
election and the polls have them just about even with Sanders just slightly
ahead. Last month I just about knew why Sanders was running ahead. It was
similar to the 2012 primary when Keith Judd was running in the West Virginia
primary against Barack Obama. Judd got forty-eight percent of the vote.
Since Judd had not taken a position on any issues whatsoever it was very
unlikely that he got that many votes because of him or what he stood for. I
expect that it was unlikely that most of his voters knew that he was running
from a prison cell in Texas either. It was a vote against Obama. Similarly,
I expect that the apparent support for Sanders in the polls does not reflect
a pro-Sanders sentiment. It is anti-Clinton. Now that the polls indicate an
about even potential vote for the both of them I suspect that Sanders has
lost ground because the voters have heard a bit more about him. By the way,
Keith Judd is now out of prison and on supervised release and is on the
ballot again.
There is another name on the ballot too who is an unknown. I forget his name
right now, but he is a West Virginia lawyer who apparently had a couple of
thousand dollars lying around that he decided to blow on the filing fee. He
also has taken no positions an has done no campaigning.
It will be interesting to see how these two do with the voters who will be
rejecting both Sanders and Clinton. I would expect, though, that most of the
Sanders voters who only vote for Sanders because they are against Clinton
will be very likely Trump voters.
On 5/9/2016 11:58 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
You're right about those people not crossing over to Trump, but thereDonald".
are huge numbers of Bernie supporters who are discontented with the
Democratic Party and have been conditioned to behave like
Libertarians. Those are the ones I believe Trump could coax to his
side, better than Hillary.
At any rate, it shapes up to be a lively summer and fall.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/9/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have difficulty believing that the people who are drawn to Bernie
would turn to Trump as an alternative. I was up later than I should
have been on Saturday night, watching a video of a community meeting
that Bernie ran in West Virginia. It involved community leaders
talking about the issues that poor people face there, and Bernie
explaining to the large gathering of residents, how socialist theory
applied to the issues. The kind of people who are drawn to this kind
of presentation are not, I don't think, going to turn to Trump.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl ;
Jarvis
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2016 10:54 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Media Myth of the Working-Class
Reagan Democrats
They say that figures don't lie. But Liars can twist the polls
around to say whatever they want. What is more disturbing are the
reasons Trump supporters are giving for placing their trust in "The
well-educated.I listened to Democracy Now this morning and several Trump Worshipers
attending his rally in Lynden, Washington, gave garbled reasons for
believing that he will take care of Working Class America. Some of
the reasons were very scary.
If Hillary is counting on Bernie's supporters being forced to support
her, she may be in for a big shock. Trump is reaching out to the
angry, and disillusioned Working Class of both Parties. He could
well capture more Bernie supporters than will Clinton.
Remember, the confusion and misplaced trust among the 99% is the
making of the Corporate Media, bending to the orders of the Empire.
Sewing hatred, mistrust and self-serving among the Masses has come
home to roost. The Empire, in its desire to control and rape the
Working Class, by turning them inward upon one another, has the
consequence of creating a revolution. And the worst sort of a
revolution. It will be a Headless Explosion. Each faction,
carefully cultivated by the Empire, will blame the others for their
troubles.
And then they will turn on the government. And then, most assuredly
they will turn on the Ruling Class. Remember the French Revolution?
Even the Russian Revolution crumbled into a dictatorship, despite the
People believing they had established a People's Government. Out of
the confusion that is swirling about our heads today, there can be
little hope for a positive outcome.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/9/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > The Media
Myth of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats
________________________________________
The Media Myth of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats By Neal Gabler
[1] / Moyers & Company [2] May 8, 2016 Now that Donald Trump is the
presumptive Republican presidential nominee, we are likely to get
all sorts of mainstream media analysis about how his narrow pathway
to Election Day victory runs through white working-class America,
the way Ronald Reagan's did, while the presumptive Democratic
nominee, Hillary Clinton, must corral young people, minorities and the
gain from the system.In case you haven't noticed, there is an unmistakable media bias inangry workers blowing gaskets.
this - one that was framed perfectly in a Newsweekcover story by
Evan Thomas [3] eight years ago. It was about Barack Obama's alleged
"Bubba Gap," and illustrated with a picture of arugula - and beer.
Democrats, naturally, were the arugula eaters.
This idea that Republicans are "real" Americans and Democrats aren't
is now a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had
tremendous repercussions for our politics. It used to be that
Republicans were the effete ones and Democrats the
salt-of-the-earth. Then Ronald Reagan came along and pried
working-class voters away from the Democrats - the so-called "Reagan
Democrats" - and suddenly the media reversed party roles, deciding
that America tilted right, and that Democrats were elitists.
This idea that Republicans are 'real' Americans and Democrats aren't
is now a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had
tremendous repercussions for our politics.
I have no idea who will win the election this November, but I can
pretty much assure you of this: we will be hearing an awful lot
about Trump Democrats who, like those Reagan Democrats, may abandon
the Democratic Party because they allegedly find it too high-blown.
But this is what you probably won't hear: those Reagan Democrats, at
least not as we usually think of them - urban, Rust Belt laborers -
didn't last much beyond Reagan. They were a temporary blip who
didn't realign American politics the way the media tell us they did.
Trump Democrats might be something of a myth, too - a collaboration
of the MSM and the candidate to portray him and his party as the
agents of blue-collar, middle America because it fits the media's
stereotype of
Let's get a few things out of the way when we talk about Republican
hegemony and the party's appeal to disaffected Democrats. Yes,
Republicans control both houses of Congress, and, yes, they are
dominant at the governor and state legislature levels. This,
however, is largely the product of certain peculiarities in the
American political system rather than any great Democratic defection
or love of
Republicanism: things like low turnout in local and midterm
elections among minorities and the poor, who are likely to vote
Democratic; subsequent gerrymandering of districts to benefit
Republicans; absurd disproportions in which Wyoming, with its
population of 584,000, gets the same number of senators as
California with its 39 million; and the role of money in elections,
as money generally flows more freely to Republicans than to
Democrats for the obvious reason that the GOP's benefactors have more to
well-educated.If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probablyRonald Reagan.
never guess that actually there are fewer self-identified
conservatives in America than there are self-identified liberals, or
that Democrats outnumber Republicans 29 percent to 26 percent in the
latest Gallup Poll [4].
These are, says Gallup, historically low figures for both parties,
but they may heavily discount Democratic identification. According
to a survey by Republic 3.0 [5], if you add in self-declared
Independents who nevertheless lean toward one party or the other,
Democrats actually constitute 45 percent of Americans, while
Republicans constitute just 33 percent. So if you have been thinking
that this is a conservative GOP country, think again.
If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probably
never guess that actually there are fewer self-identified
conservatives in America than there are self-identified liberals.
Which brings us to those Reagan Democrats. As Thomas Frank wrote in
his
2004
best-seller, What's the Matter With Kansas?,the "dominant political
coalition" in America is the union of business voters and
blue-collar voters, many of the latter one-time Democrats diverted
from their economic interests by the bloody shirt of social wedge
issues from abortion to gun rights to immigration. That was the
great Republican prestidigitation. Now you see economic distress,
now you don't. And the great political realignment that followed was
laid at the foot of
But was it true? In 2006, in theQuarterly Journal of Politicalpercent.
Science, [6] the brilliant political scientist Larry Bartels, then
of Princeton and now at Vanderbilt University, took on this story in
a searching analysis of Frank's thesis. Looking at voting trendlines
over a 50-year period, from the
1952 presidential election of Eisenhower to the 2004 reelection of
George W.
Bush, Bartels found that there was, as Frank and pundits said, a
decline in Democratic support - roughly six percentage points; not
huge over five decades, but still significant.
But wait! That decline was among white voters without college
degrees, which was the demographic Frank chose to use. If you
include non-white voters without college degrees, Democrats actually
enjoyed a two-point increase.
You may notice that when the MSM talks about the whole Reagan/Trump
Democratic conversion, they are focusing on whites, too, even though
the share of white voters in the electorate is falling while that of
minorities is rising. Basically, it's the media equivalent of the
three-fifths compromise of the Constitution in which slaves, for the
purpose of calculating representation, counted for less than whites.
Further, Bartels found that if you look at income rather than
education, the results are even more pronounced in favor of Democrats.
The percentage of low income voters going Democratic has actually
risen since the 1980s. In 2012, Barack Obama received [7] 60 percent
of the votes of those with household incomes under $50,000, roughly
the American median, and only 44 percent of those over $100,000.
And here is something else Bartels discovered [6]. Nearly all the
Democratic decline among low-income white voters without college
degrees came in the
South: 10.3 percent. Outside the South, the Democratic percentages
actually increased (11.2 percent) for an overall national increase
of 4.5
Again, that is just among whites. The inescapable conclusion: Allonly be fact-providing.
those blue collar workers who are supposed to have left the
Democratic Party for Reagan and then stayed in the GOP, or who might
soon be leaving for Trump, didn't in the first case, and aren't
likely to do so in the second.
I suppose there is a reason why the MSM doesn't feel comfortable
broadcasting those numbers. Doing so would force them to label
Republicans for what they are: the party of white, rich,
disproportionately Southern folks, as opposed to the Democrats, who
are a diverse party racially and economically. When put that way, it
inevitably sounds like the media are taking sides, even though it
would
This isn't to say that in 1980, when it came to union households,troglodytes.
Reagan didn't cut seriously into the lead Carter had over Ford in
1976. And he made some inroads into the working class as defined by
income as well. But the real story of the so-called post-Reagan
Republican tilt is that white Southerners, who had long been
departing the Democratic Party, until one of their own, Carter,
stanched the flow in 1976, were the primary defectors.
And presumably they were leaving not over economics but over race.
That's another story neither the MSM nor the Republicans are eager
to tell because it makes the GOP out to be overly dependent on
racist
For the MSM to tell the truth this way would, again, seem to beOK.
picking on Republican salt-of-the-earth rank and file, and the MSM
won't risk doing that. Picking on allegedly Democratic elitists?
That's
None of this is to say that Trump won't attract lots of angry, white
working-class voters. It isto say that it's highly unlikely he will
draw many working-class voters away from the Democrats, in large
part because there probably aren't a whole lot of white Democratic
votes left in the South to take away, and because most blue-collar
workers still identify with the Democratic Party. So get ready to
hear about all those angry, blue-collar white guys who love Trump
and might hand him the election. But when you do, remember this:
Democrats drink beer too, even though the MSM has you thinking
they're all sipping chablis as they munch their arugula.
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA
TImes Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA
Today's biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior
fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society
and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
Share on Facebook Share
Share on Twitter Tweet
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [8]
[9]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/media-myth-working-class-reaga
n-
democr
ats
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/neal-gabler
[2] http://billmoyers.com/
[3] http://www.newsweek.com/cover-story-obamas-bubba-gap-86197
[4]
http://www.gallup.com/poll/188096/democratic-republican-identificati
on
-near-
historical-lows.aspx
[5] http://republic3-0.com/myth-independent-voter-stefan-hankin/
[6] https://www.princeton.edu/%7Ebartels/kansasqjps06.pdf
[7]
http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-groups-voted/h
ow
-group
s-voted-2012/
[8] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Media Myth ;
of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats [9] http://www.alternet.org/ ;
[10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > The Media
Myth of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats
The Media Myth of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats By Neal Gabler
[1] / Moyers & Company [2] May 8, 2016 Now that Donald Trump is the
presumptive Republican presidential nominee, we are likely to get
all sorts of mainstream media analysis about how his narrow pathway
to Election Day victory runs through white working-class America,
the way Ronald Reagan's did, while the presumptive Democratic
nominee, Hillary Clinton, must corral young people, minorities and the
gain from the system.In case you haven't noticed, there is an unmistakable media bias inangry workers blowing gaskets.
this - one that was framed perfectly in a Newsweekcover story by
Evan Thomas [3] eight years ago. It was about Barack Obama's alleged
"Bubba Gap," and illustrated with a picture of arugula - and beer.
Democrats, naturally, were the arugula eaters.
This idea that Republicans are "real" Americans and Democrats aren't
is now a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had
tremendous repercussions for our politics. It used to be that
Republicans were the effete ones and Democrats the
salt-of-the-earth. Then Ronald Reagan came along and pried
working-class voters away from the Democrats - the so-called "Reagan
Democrats" - and suddenly the media reversed party roles, deciding
that America tilted right, and that Democrats were elitists.
This idea that Republicans are 'real' Americans and Democrats aren't
is now a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had
tremendous repercussions for our politics.
I have no idea who will win the election this November, but I can
pretty much assure you of this: we will be hearing an awful lot
about Trump Democrats who, like those Reagan Democrats, may abandon
the Democratic Party because they allegedly find it too high-blown.
But this is what you probably won't hear: those Reagan Democrats, at
least not as we usually think of them - urban, Rust Belt laborers -
didn't last much beyond Reagan. They were a temporary blip who
didn't realign American politics the way the media tell us they did.
Trump Democrats might be something of a myth, too - a collaboration
of the MSM and the candidate to portray him and his party as the
agents of blue-collar, middle America because it fits the media's
stereotype of
Let's get a few things out of the way when we talk about Republican
hegemony and the party's appeal to disaffected Democrats. Yes,
Republicans control both houses of Congress, and, yes, they are
dominant at the governor and state legislature levels. This,
however, is largely the product of certain peculiarities in the
American political system rather than any great Democratic defection
or love of
Republicanism: things like low turnout in local and midterm
elections among minorities and the poor, who are likely to vote
Democratic; subsequent gerrymandering of districts to benefit
Republicans; absurd disproportions in which Wyoming, with its
population of 584,000, gets the same number of senators as
California with its 39 million; and the role of money in elections,
as money generally flows more freely to Republicans than to
Democrats for the obvious reason that the GOP's benefactors have more to
If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probablyRonald Reagan.
never guess that actually there are fewer self-identified
conservatives in America than there are self-identified liberals, or
that Democrats outnumber Republicans 29 percent to 26 percent in the
latest Gallup Poll [4].
These are, says Gallup, historically low figures for both parties,
but they may heavily discount Democratic identification. According
to a survey by Republic 3.0 [5], if you add in self-declared
Independents who nevertheless lean toward one party or the other,
Democrats actually constitute 45 percent of Americans, while
Republicans constitute just 33 percent. So if you have been thinking
that this is a conservative GOP country, think again.
If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probably
never guess that actually there are fewer self-identified
conservatives in America than there are self-identified liberals.
Which brings us to those Reagan Democrats. As Thomas Frank wrote in
his
2004
best-seller, What's the Matter With Kansas?,the "dominant political
coalition" in America is the union of business voters and
blue-collar voters, many of the latter one-time Democrats diverted
from their economic interests by the bloody shirt of social wedge
issues from abortion to gun rights to immigration. That was the
great Republican prestidigitation. Now you see economic distress,
now you don't. And the great political realignment that followed was
laid at the foot of
But was it true? In 2006, in theQuarterly Journal of Politicalpercent.
Science, [6] the brilliant political scientist Larry Bartels, then
of Princeton and now at Vanderbilt University, took on this story in
a searching analysis of Frank's thesis. Looking at voting trendlines
over a 50-year period, from the
1952 presidential election of Eisenhower to the 2004 reelection of
George W.
Bush, Bartels found that there was, as Frank and pundits said, a
decline in Democratic support - roughly six percentage points; not
huge over five decades, but still significant.
But wait! That decline was among white voters without college
degrees, which was the demographic Frank chose to use. If you
include non-white voters without college degrees, Democrats actually
enjoyed a two-point increase.
You may notice that when the MSM talks about the whole Reagan/Trump
Democratic conversion, they are focusing on whites, too, even though
the share of white voters in the electorate is falling while that of
minorities is rising. Basically, it's the media equivalent of the
three-fifths compromise of the Constitution in which slaves, for the
purpose of calculating representation, counted for less than whites.
Further, Bartels found that if you look at income rather than
education, the results are even more pronounced in favor of Democrats.
The percentage of low income voters going Democratic has actually
risen since the 1980s. In 2012, Barack Obama received [7] 60 percent
of the votes of those with household incomes under $50,000, roughly
the American median, and only 44 percent of those over $100,000.
And here is something else Bartels discovered [6]. Nearly all the
Democratic decline among low-income white voters without college
degrees came in the
South: 10.3 percent. Outside the South, the Democratic percentages
actually increased (11.2 percent) for an overall national increase
of 4.5
Again, that is just among whites. The inescapable conclusion: Allonly be fact-providing.
those blue collar workers who are supposed to have left the
Democratic Party for Reagan and then stayed in the GOP, or who might
soon be leaving for Trump, didn't in the first case, and aren't
likely to do so in the second.
I suppose there is a reason why the MSM doesn't feel comfortable
broadcasting those numbers. Doing so would force them to label
Republicans for what they are: the party of white, rich,
disproportionately Southern folks, as opposed to the Democrats, who
are a diverse party racially and economically. When put that way, it
inevitably sounds like the media are taking sides, even though it
would
This isn't to say that in 1980, when it came to union households,troglodytes.
Reagan didn't cut seriously into the lead Carter had over Ford in
1976. And he made some inroads into the working class as defined by
income as well. But the real story of the so-called post-Reagan
Republican tilt is that white Southerners, who had long been
departing the Democratic Party, until one of their own, Carter,
stanched the flow in 1976, were the primary defectors.
And presumably they were leaving not over economics but over race.
That's another story neither the MSM nor the Republicans are eager
to tell because it makes the GOP out to be overly dependent on
racist
For the MSM to tell the truth this way would, again, seem to beOK.
picking on Republican salt-of-the-earth rank and file, and the MSM
won't risk doing that. Picking on allegedly Democratic elitists?
That's
None of this is to say that Trump won't attract lots of angry, white
working-class voters. It isto say that it's highly unlikely he will
draw many working-class voters away from the Democrats, in large
part because there probably aren't a whole lot of white Democratic
votes left in the South to take away, and because most blue-collar
workers still identify with the Democratic Party. So get ready to
hear about all those angry, blue-collar white guys who love Trump
and might hand him the election. But when you do, remember this:
Democrats drink beer too, even though the MSM has you thinking
they're all sipping chablis as they munch their arugula.
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA
TImes Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA
Today's biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior
fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society
and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [8] Error!
Hyperlink reference not valid.[9]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/media-myth-working-class-reaga
n-
democr
ats
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/neal-gabler
[2] http://billmoyers.com/
[3] http://www.newsweek.com/cover-story-obamas-bubba-gap-86197
[4]
http://www.gallup.com/poll/188096/democratic-republican-identificati
on
-near-
historical-lows.aspx
[5] http://republic3-0.com/myth-independent-voter-stefan-hankin/
[6] https://www.princeton.edu/%7Ebartels/kansasqjps06.pdf
[7]
http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-groups-voted/h
ow
-group
s-voted-2012/
[8] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Media Myth ;
of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats [9] http://www.alternet.org/ ;
[10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
