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- [00:00]
A
What you need to do on cultural issues is to connect with working class values in a respectful way and not assume that other people are projects that God put you on earth to enlighten them, that their lives may give different truths than your lives give and that that means sometimes you're not going to get your own way. Democrats college educated base it doesn't mean you have to sell people out, but you can't talk in the way you feel most comfortable with. Choose the policy priority you must feel most comfortable with and the issue you feel most comfortable with and insist on all three and expect to have a coalition with people who don't agree with you.
- [00:51]
B
Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Drew. By now the story of how Graham Platner was recruited to run for Senate is well documented. Two Democratic socialist aligned operatives, Daniel Morath and Leanne Phan, set out to find a similarly minded candidate to run against Susan Collins in Maine. As Platner told Jon Stewart at The end of July 2025, some people came to his house who had been in Maine for a few months working with the afl, CIO and other labor unions. They were looking, as he put it for quote, a kind of a working class person on kind of working class economic policies. End quote. Over a couple weeks of conversations, the recruiters convinced Platner to run, telling him he could land Bernie Sanders endorsement. He announced his candidacy in mid August and landed that endorsement by Labor Day. Moraf told the Wall Street Journal that they did not run a traditional background check on Platner. The process of candidate recruitment usually stays in the background of electoral politics, but given the spectacular way in which this all blew up, it's become a big part of the Platner post mortem and recriminations within the Democratic Party. It has also put a spotlight on Democrats efforts to attract working class voters. Recruiting candidates like Graham Platner is one approach, but is it a good one to talk about the Democratic Party's relationship with working class voters? I had to reach out to none other than Joan C. Williams, author of the book Outclassed how the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. Joan is a distinguished professor of Law at University of California Law, San Francisco. Welcome back to the podcast Joan.
- [02:24]
A
Delighted to be here Galen.
- [02:25]
B
I'm delighted to have you and I have to say you're actually here in part thanks to my father. So my family was together over the July 4th holiday and he was like, you have to have Joan on to talk about this whole Graham Platner ordeal. So here we are.
- [02:40]
A
Thank you. Galen's father.
- [02:41]
B
Yeah, exactly. His name is John. If you're listening, I, you know, at least this one time, I listen. I listen to your advice, dad. So I want to start just by asking what your reaction has been to the way that this has all blown up.
- [02:58]
A
What can you say? Disheartened, Horrified. As someone who has long been a feminist since pretty much since I started to speak, and is also extremely committed to explaining how to the, to the Democratic Party they can connect with more working class voters. This was a very painful episode for me and many, many other people.
- [03:22]
B
Before we dig too much deeper here, I want to take a step back and define our parameters. Who are we talking about when we're talking about the working class?
- [03:31]
A
I define them based on research about who, which voters have veered to the right. There's a lot of confusion initially in 2016, because we were using college grads, non college grads. And so people were assuming that these folks were the poor. They're actually not low income people. Households in the bottom 30%, although horrifyingly, households under $50,000 veered towards Trump in 20. But that's not why he won and why Orban and all the rest of them win. They are supported by middle status people in routine jobs who still are holding on to economic stability, but are very fearful that they'll fall out of the middle class. So I define them as the middle 50% by household income, non college grads. That's the best kind of functional definition.
- [04:34]
B
I'm curious what you make of the actual process of going out and finding Graham Platner to represent the Democratic Party and try to appeal to those types of voters. Do you think that wearing the costume, if you will, of a working class American is a way to win them over politically?
- [04:56]
A
Wearing a costume is not a good way to win any voters politically and especially not working class voters, because they have very well attuned shit detectors. On the other hand, going out and in a genuine way trying to recruit more working class candidates. That's a great idea. There used to be a lot of working class people in Congress and now there are just vanishingly few. So I think, yes, it's a good idea to go out and try to, to try to recruit working class voters.
- [05:32]
B
I don't know if it's, in this case maybe fair to say costume. Grant Platner, of course, is in fact a veteran. He is an oysterman. There's some debate over how much of an oysterman he is. If he just sells his oysters to his mom's restaurant. But maybe put the costume accusation to the side. It seems like Democrats are in part trying to win over working class voters by running people or selecting people like Tim Walsh who can channel the sort of football coach Hunter, Mr. Fix it Persona, even maybe AOC who has a sort of bartender Persona. You know, these are people who have college degrees. AOC went to Boston University. Ultimately, these candidates are still far left on social issues though on immigration, crime, gender identity in a way that puts them at odds with many working classes voters. And it suggests to me that left wing Democrats almost think that you can win over working class voters by by mimicking them in a sense in terms of their tastes and style and culture without actually representing their social values when it comes to policy. Is that true?
- [06:49]
A
I think it's an astute question, Galen. There is a lot of research and a lot more coming out that working class people, these middle status people, that's who I'm going to refer to as working class, are very different from Democrats upper middle class, college educated base. Culturally they're closer economically, although not identical, but they're quite different culturally. And I'll just give a couple of examples. My crowd suspect your crowd. We're very proud of being cosmopolitan, taste for food, travel, people from cultures not our own. It's a way of signaling sophistication. But these middle status people are very rooted and they're very patriotic. Also our crowd, one of the ways we signal again elite status is through sophistication, including embrace of like sophisticated, edgy, non traditional sexualities. Whereas middle status people are much more likely to be traditionalist. And I think what you're saying is that just embracing a blue collar ethic without actually building a coalition with people who are quite unlike Democrats, college educated base isn't going to work because that's not how coalitions get built. Coalitions get built through give and take, not take, take, take and perform an aesthetic.
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B
Can we dig into that a little bit deeper? I think you've been doing some thinking about what does actually work in terms of changing who you appeal to in electoral politics.
- [08:42]
A
Yeah, I'm eager to go there, but I also want to take a step back and just point out some research that hasn't received the amount of attention that it should. This is from the center for Working Class Politics. What the center for Working Class Politics has found is that working class candidates in fact do appeal more to working class voters. Not surprising, but that shouldn't assume that sort of a Graham Platner, John Fetterman, bad but bold blue collar masculinity is the only kind of working class candidate on offer. In fact, what the center for Working Class Politics found in one report is that teachers, veterans, small business owners and construction workers, they were all more or less equal in their appeal to working class voters. The single most popular candidate profile was a middle school teacher, then a warehouse worker, doctor, small business owner, nurse, and only then construction worker. So one fear I have is in these laudable efforts to reach out and cultivate working class candidates, we're ending up with sort of an upper middle class caricature of a working class person, in other words, an oysterman. And we're not, we're ignoring the fact that that is not the only working class type of person. And in fact, it's not the most appealing working class person to working class voters. And that also is really helpful, Galen, because we've tried this bad but bold masculinity before as a way to reach working class voters. And it does. Sometimes it does work. Klattner was very popular until he self destructed. John Fetterman has exactly the same sort of bad but bold tough guys working class Persona, but that kind of brand of oppositionalism that comes as part and parcel of that bad but bold package. It's kind of risky. That's just what we saw.
- [10:56]
B
This makes me think of something else, which is that, you know, Platner was very successful in the Democratic primary in Maine. You know, his profile rose like a rocket and he did a lot of things right.
- [11:09]
A
He did a lot of things wrong too.
- [11:10]
B
Yeah, yeah. He trounced the incumbent governor in Maine, Janet Mills, who's won statewide, everyone knows, et cetera. But it's important to remember that that was a Democratic primary electorate within which we're judging Graham Platner. And I want to read a quote from friend of the pod, Lacha Jane, who wrote this in March of this year before the some of the more serious accusations came out. He wrote, quote, despite his reputation as a working class whisperer, Platner is actually doing far better with upscale Democratic whites than with non college Democrats. Each primary poll with regional breakdowns has shown a common theme. Mills does far better among the blue collar Democrats in the rural north of the state, while Platner cleans up with wealthy coastal liberals who skew college educated. In other words, the data suggests Platner is not the candidate of the working class, but rather of upwardly mobile Mainers who have an idealized working class aesthetic to back that up even further. A New York Times poll looking at the Senate race in Maine showed Platner losing to Collins by 21 points amongst non college educated voters, whereas it had a generic Democrat losing by nine points to a generic Republican in the race for Congress. That suggests that Platner was actually doing 11 points worse than a generic Democrat amongst non college educated voters. So this sort of suggests that, yes, this maybe upper middle class idea of what a working class guy is, is appealing to exactly those people to whom the upper middle class. But that this brings me back to the policy. Whereas, like, are there real policy positions missing in this appeal to working class voters? Because you take, you know, not that everything needs to come back to Trump, but he's a high flying billionaire from New York City who's not particularly religious, but he reflects the priorities of the Republican base back to them. It almost, in that dynamic seems to me like the policy positions and the fourth forcefulness with which you deliver them are more important than the package that they arrive in. Whereas it seems like some of these consultants are doing the reverse. They think the package is more important than the policy.
- [13:33]
A
Yeah, I'm not sure I would go in the package versus policy direction. The policies are important, but I think there's a lot of research that shows that people vote as an expression of their identities and they vote for somebody who, a candidate who communicates. I'm like you, and I like you. And Democrats have pretty much gotten not great grades on that recently. And in preparing for talking to you today, I was actually looking around at which Democrats are incredibly good and maybe not so good at connecting with working class voters not purely through an aesthetic, but by connecting with working class values. Now, I think this is different than the policy versus package rubric that you're suggesting because this is generally connecting with working class people just by gesturing respect, by connecting with their values. And you know who came out smelling like a rose? Two people, actually. Andy Beshear and John Ossoff. Also does pretty damn good.
- [14:46]
B
All right, we're wading into the 2028 speculation here.
- [14:50]
A
One key thing which by now everybody knows is economic security is an incredibly high aspiration and value for these middle status folks who feel economically fragile because they've been losing touch with the American dream because American workers used to earn 70% of GDP and now it's like 54% of GDP. Andy Beshear talks about the American dream a lot. He has created the largest private sector investment in Kentucky in its history. So he has delivered on this key economic theme you know, without which nothing else matters. But he also connects with working class values in other really important ways. He uses anti elitism. This was one of the things that Platner did really well, is he deployed anti elitism. Both Bashir and John Ossoff are using anti elitism really beautifully in quite different ways. Bashir was talking about what he called the Big Ugly bill in a podcast I was listening to and tying, of course, the Big Ugly Bill, tax cuts for millionaires to cuts in Medicaid. And he had the number of workers that were going to be laid off, the number of rural hospitals closed, the number of Kentuckians who were losing their health care. So he was channeling anti elitism. Now, it wasn't with this blue collar aesthetic, but, but it was very effective. One of the things that Republicans have done so well is depicted Democrats as condescending and sadly, we often have been condescending. But Bashir is flipping that. And he was talking about how, giving examples of how Trump is disrespecting our troops, talking down to our troops. J.D. vance looks down on rural America and he's saying, look, you need to be able to talk like a normal human being in that way. Bashir also is connecting with blue collar values. He's not flashing his knowledge at every corner. I was also looking at a Gavin Newsom video. And Gavin Newsom named two point headed books within the first five minutes, talked about self development. The name of his book is literally A voyage of personal discovery or the like. That is the my crowd's self development ethic. Whereas people who understand how to connect with working class voters. I think it was Gretchen Whitmer. She said, you know, I'm not any smarter or more important than anyone else. Those are the ways to connect with working class values. Bashir also, he eschewed our sophistication, my crowd's sophistication for traditionalism. He said, why am I doing this? I'm driven by my family and my faith and the golden rule. In other words, ethic of service, not Gavin Newsom's self development. And so Bashir knows how in a far more subtle way than just parading a flannel plaid shirt to connect with deeply held working class values.
- [18:19]
B
We've mentioned a few of them. What are the chief working class values as you see them?
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A
I boiled them down helpfully to basically five. Realize that economic and personal security are number one. You know, again, remember the yellow vest sign? Elites care about the end of the world. We care about the end of the month. These People care about the end of the month. They don't assume they're going to have economic security. They sure as hell don't assume it after the last four decades because they don't have economic security, especially given inflation. What is it like? Some huge percentage of Americans have changed their grocery buying habits in the past few years because they don't have enough money. Personal security is also absolutely central. Personal security is kind of assumed for my crowd. Not a big issue. It's as a given. But for working class people it is a very high priority. And that means border security is. That's one of the reasons that's a flashpoint.
- [19:21]
B
And so we're talking personal security, we're
- [19:24]
A
talking crime, immigration, we're talking crime and disorder. Yeah, that's why disorder at the border is such a beautiful term. Because settled middle class families who feel they are in danger of falling out of the middle class and don't live in the same kind of super safe neighborhood that I live in, that kind of disorder is very, very much to be avoided. So personal and economic security number one. If we don't get those right, nothing else matters. Self discipline, not self development is the second one. People in the middle, they're not hung up on credentialism. They find it really off putting and they're not. They don't feel entitled to that kind of self development because it's not on offer in their jobs. Their jobs require them to show up on time without an attitude and do something that ain't necessarily all that fascinating. Often the third one is cosmopolitanism as opposed to rootedness and goes with that patriotism, which is part of rootedness. My crowd, we gain honor by being cosmopolitan in outclassed. I don't know if I mentioned this to you before. It just struck me about a number of months after the book was published. The epigram is in Spanish and the editor wanted me to translate it and I said no, everybody can look on Google. And then all of a sudden I realized that is me as an elite displaying my cosmopolitanism. I grew up speaking Spanish, I want you to know it. But if you are a tire salesman married to a bookkeeper in Indiana, you're proud of being an American. That's what you got. What I got is growing up in Venezuela speaking Spanish. Everybody's proud of what they got. And their lives are very, very. They're very place loyal and they're very rooted. People in the middle are. And yet we're very happy, you know, we're very happy and comfortable. So long as we're in Boston, Mumbai or Berlin, you know, Indianapolis, not so much. And then we've talked also about sophistication as opposed to plain spokenness and traditionalism. So I mean my taste is cosmopolitan and sophistication. Those are just like my little parochial class. Parochial tastes. But I gotta learn how to talk to people whose tastes are for plain spokenness, traditionalism and rootedness. Democrats can do it if they try.
- [22:05]
B
GD Politics is powered by you, the listeners. If you enjoy the show, the data driven analysis, the genuine curiosity and lack of partisan bs, and yes, sometimes the silliness too, please consider becoming a paid subscriber@gdpolitics.com paid subscribers help make the podcast possible and they also get twice the number of episodes and access to the paid subscriber chat where you can send me whatever questions you've got. Independent political media only works if the people who value it support it. So if GD Politics is part of your week, head to GDPolitics.com and become a paid subscriber. That's GDPolitics.com I so appreciate it. Thank you. It strikes me in hearing you talk about this that the Democratic Party has gotten a lot more comfortable talking about the poor and the marginalized and ways to help the poor and the marginalized and escape their lot in life. And is not all that used to talking about ordinary people. People for whom life may not be luxurious or grand, but it's also not a daily struggle. And on one hand you could say well, politics is about solving problems. If you have an ordinary life, you don't have a problem and I might not need to solve it. But we live in a very rich country. After all, the majority of Americans are somewhat ordinary. The majority of Americans are not a sort of rags to riches tale. So how do you connect with ordinary people while still being an inspirational politician or something like that?
- [23:46]
A
Well, I mean first of all, again you're dead right. There's one study that estimated that fully half of Democrats loss of non college voters in recent decades has been because they shifted their attention to from making a stable life for these ordinary folks to a focus on redistribution for the poor. Now I'm a Democrat, I think redistribution for the poor is important. On the other hand, especially if you design it through a means tested program that excludes people in the middle, you're going to pit the have a littles those people in the middle against the have nots. And that is not going to work well. And that's what we've seen. So one of the problems. I think one of the, frankly, the intellectual challenges that the Democratic Party faces is that the values of these folks in the middle, they're not quote, sophisticated in our universe. They believe in the value of hard work. They believe in faith and family. The way that elites display their high human capital is through a taste for novelty and the edgy. And these values are the opposite.
- [25:07]
B
What happened in the Republican Party when there was a meaningful break between the preferences of the political professional class and the actual voters was that the voters won out. And the sort of center right, Bush, McCain, Romney, part of the party basically doesn't exist anymore. But a lot of those upper middle class, college educated voters now find themselves in the Democratic Party, which probably makes it even harder for Democrats to pivot back to being either a party of the working class or even just shoring up their losses with the working class because they now increasingly rely on, on these upper middle class voters who have a lot of the preferences and tastes that you're talking about and have very leftward social cultural preferences in the Republican Party. In some ways, that break between the professional political class and the voters was resolved by Donald Trump. How does this get resolved for Democrats? Is it resolvable?
- [26:12]
A
Oh, I think it's resolvable. I mean, what you're posing is really an empirical question of if the Democrats began to connect better with working class voters, would that cost them support among their core college educated voters in the top 25, 40% by household income? That's an empirical question. In fact, Jared Abbott and I have been doing a series of reports to try to get some data on that and a lot of these other issues and to try to develop an evidence based way. Do I sound like an elite, an evidence based way to connect with working class values without selling our souls? Because, you know, I'm just, I spent the last 10 years as a DEI trainer. You know, there, there are lots of lines I'm not going to, I'm not going to cross now. I think it's really different though to say I'm not going to sell out my most cherished values and saying I'm not going to change one bit. I'm just going to express my values. Because you know what, my values are framed within the context of an elite life. That's how values gets framed. And I am going to have to use a lot of imagination. And I just gave you an example of how Andy Beshear does it. John Ossoff does it very different way. There's a million ways to do it, but we're going to have to use our imagination to figure out the ways to build bridges to between these two very, very different class cultures without simply just trying to ape Trump.
- [27:55]
B
You mentioned that Democrats have relied on the sort of bad but bold caricature in trying to pursue working class voters. You mentioned Graham Platner and John Fetterman. The Democratic Party is not just dealing with a loss of working class voters. I think they're also worried about a loss of men. Do you see these as one and the same? Almost like, is it they've lost working class men in the same way that you would pursue working class men as the way that you would pursue all working class people? I mean, how does a party that's seen as more feminine win over men?
- [28:30]
A
Yeah, at one point before Fetterman had so many troubles, I called him the maestro of masculinity. You know who I think is the current maestro is Jon Ossoff. Jon Ossoff is, and we saw it recently in the hearing, the Jay Clayton hearing for the Cabinet where Jon Ossoff just went after him in a very. Jon Ossoff, as you know, started out as a documentary filmmaker and he went after him, asking him who won the 2020 election. And he kept pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing. That was a display of masculinity. It's not bad, but bold, but it's definitely masculine assertiveness. Ossoff also is reportedly bulked up. So I think there's, there's a lot going on there. There's a lot going on there, which
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B
I guess is, I don't know. How do you, how do you inter. Is that a way to win over men?
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A
Sure. Hey, you know, at some level, most of us are simple creatures.
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B
I am curious, given that you're bringing out different examples of Democrats trying to shift the coalition or make new appeals to broaden the tent, if you will. What do you make of Zoran Mamdani in New York City?
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A
New York City is New York City. Gillan. He's awesome for New York City. New York City is not Kansas. What do I make of him? I love him. You know, I grew up within 50 miles of new York City. I live in San Francisco. I love Zoran Mondani. I'm a social Democrat. Of course, I love Zoram Madani. What he means for the party is a lot less clear.
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B
I think some people look at him and say, oh, that's they, you know, that's how you can win over more
- [30:15]
A
working class every New York City in the country. I Couldn't agree more. After having poked fun at you, let me actually answer your question. I think Zoram Mandani, I mean, he's a generational talent. And what he did is again, he appealed more to college grads than non college grads too, by the way, although he appealed a lot to Asian American non college grads. But what Sorramandani did is he married the sense of having lost the American dream of slipping out of the middle class that the middle has, because they are slipping out of the middle class, a lot of them, with the increasing furor of young college grads who they can't buy a house, they can hardly afford an apartment or childcare or healthcare. And a lot of them, especially with AI, is going to accelerate this. They can't even get a full time job. And now the job market for young college grads truly sucks. But even before that there was a few years ago there was a New York Times article that was titled why it sucks to be 30. There is the economic coalition for Democrats, the economic anger of people of the, of blue collar voters who got screwed a generation ago, marrying that to the growing economic anger of young college grads who are getting screwed before our very eyes. And that's what I actually called that, the Mamdani Economic Coalition.
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B
That's so interesting that you say that. That sounds like an awfully discordant marriage. So let me lay out this coalition as I see it, which is we're taking the downwardly mobile urban left. They probably have a college degree, but maybe they are freelance graphic designer or a teacher or something like that, making somewhere in the range of $65,000 a year to a hundred thousand dollars a year. Nationally, the median is $65,000 a year for an income. But in New York City, even a hundred thousand dollars doesn't maybe get you all that far. These are people who grew up with a lot of opportunity. Maybe in the suburbs with parents who were lawyers or doctors or something like that. They probably know people that they went to college with who are successful, but they themselves are not. And that is the sort of prime target for Zoran Mamdani. They have elite cultural preferences and not a lot of money to back those preferences up. Or maybe they aren't sort of living the life that they imagined. Or if they cannot express their power through money, they express their power through their cultural, like you said, through their cultural preferences, their taste. And that's like prime Democratic socialist voter.
- [33:00]
A
Yes.
- [33:01]
B
On the other hand, you have what's sort of a prime Trump Voter is somebody who does not have a college degree but is also not low income. So somebody who might be a plumber or an electrician, like I think you mentioned at the top, these stereotypical working class jobs, maybe a truck driver, you can make a hundred grand or more. But you have very different cultural tastes than the, you know, anthropology major living in Bushwick who voted for Zoran Mamdani. And it sounds like you're talking about marrying those two parts of America together. How do you bridge the divides between those people?
- [33:39]
A
Economics. They're all really pissed off because they see their access to their version of the American dream blocked. That's why it's the economy, stupid. What you're taught, this different cultural difference between elites and non elites that you're talking about, which is so important and I'm so happy people are talking about it. That is why James Carville said so many years, decades ago, it's the economy, stupid. Because given that cultural divergence, the glue that keeps the Democratic coalition together is, is the economy. And you know, as I've been saying to people, the bad news is that inequality has gotten so bad that now even young college grads are getting screwed. That's the bad news economically, but politically the good news is that that's the coalition.
- [34:37]
B
I've asked you this already, but let me just try one more time. Does that mean that whoever is going to appeal to both of those types of voters has to say also? And, and look, I don't think that this sort of gender politics around trans people matter nearly as much as analysts have made them out to matter. Like I think probably the median position in America is I respect trans Americans and their rights to live freely, however they want to live, they deserve dignity, jobs, et cetera. Also, I think that trans girls shouldn't play in girls sports or something like that. That's the median 20% in America.
- [35:15]
A
20% of working class people believe that trans girls should be allowed on girls sports, sports teams.
- [35:23]
B
So let's add to that also, you know, the hot button issues of immigration and crime over the past five years or so. And I think probably immigration and crime matter more than trans politics. But again, it's hard to say because these things all, as you mentioned, meld together into a perception of do you care about me or people like me? Are you going to fight for people like me? Do you think that Democrats have to actively jettison the policies of the past?
- [35:51]
A
One of the things to recognize is why are we talking about trans girls on sports teams? I mean, one of the things. I think it was Ossoff. I can't remember this Ossoff or Bashir said, I'm going to spend 80% of my time on issues that affect 100% of the voters. Which I thought was like, wow, that's a really good formulation. Why are we talking about trans girls on sports teams? You know all, there's so few of them. It's because Republicans research effort to figure out the LGTBQ issue that would hurt Democrats the most. They identified trans girls on sports teams and tried to make it a big issue. And what did Democrats do? We walked over there onto that territory tilted like that against us and tried to have a fight. Now that's just, that's not smart. But that doesn't mean you just have to stop talking about LGT group Q rights altogether and fall silent on all of the cultural issues that the college educated base is so married to because it's not going to be convincing. And it's also, keep in mind we have to win working class voters as Democrats, but we also have to keep the college educated base. And so there are some of these slogans like defund the police, which people now realize probably not the best slogan. But that doesn't mean that we can't continue as Democrats to work on addressing racism in policing. I think that one of the answers to the question that you're so correctly asking is we have to go back and figure out what the core value is. For me, it's protecting lgtbq. We're going to do what the Republicans did, but in the other direction. What is the way we can take a step forward on LGTBQ values That is not going to trigger this huge backlash that we currently have because we're fighting on terrain slope like this. And again, that's just an empirical question. That is exactly the empirical question I've spent the last six months looking into and will soon have data on.
- [38:18]
B
Okay, well, you're certainly gonna have to come back on the podcast to talk about it. When you do. I want to turn to Trump for a moment here. How is the Republican working class coalition holding up?
- [38:32]
A
Not too well.
- [38:34]
B
Because this is, you know, there's two, there's two players in this game, right? It's like Democrats pushing working class voters away with their alienating affect on almost everything they do. And then there's Republicans saying like you have a home here, you're being disrespected there and we're going to represent you. So how's that working?
- [38:54]
A
Well, Trump, as you Know, one of the most shocking things about 2024, not only did they have a veer towards Trump of households earning less than $50,000, so even the poor, but there was a very substantial shift towards Trump among black and Latino and Asian non college voters, which really shocked the hell out of people. Also there was a very substantial shift of young voters for all the reasons we've been talking about. Democrats were out there saying, oh, inflation is transitory and Trump is saying, you're getting screwed economically. So the young voters said, yeah, that's not a hard choice. So young voters have veered away from Trump. Black and Latino non college voters have veered away from Trump. But the mind blowing thing is that more recently there's been a veer among white non college voters away from Trump. That's the good news from my point of view as a Democrat. The bad news is that the Democrats are even less popular than Trump. So we gotta just engage in a little bit less malpractice in order to address that situation.
- [40:12]
B
Yeah, I mean, you see it, I think we talked about this at a live show a couple months back where in a tracking poll of young men, they had turned decisively against Trump and over the same period of time gotten even a little bit less hot on Democrats. So they had sort of declined in their support for Democrats by 1 point while also declining in their support for Trump by like 20 points or something like that. So you end up with at the moment, and like, this won't be resolved during the midterms because the unengaged marginal middle that doesn't feel at home with either party is probably not voting in a midterm election. Maybe, you know, maybe you can, I mean, maybe you can try as a party, you know. Yeah, perhaps you want to try to win those people.
- [40:57]
A
A girl can always dream.
- [40:59]
B
Exactly. But given that you only see the number of independents rise, you only see like, it's not that Republicans are doing amazing things and Democrats are doing terrible things when it comes to trying to craft a majority coalition. Both parties are relying on squeaking by on the smallest of coalitions. The game each time they, you know,
- [41:22]
A
put up, you gotta get out of game inches.
- [41:24]
B
Right, right. And it doesn't just have the impact of like the party's always scrambling to try to win the next election. It also has the impact of Americans being horribly divided and tuning out from a politics that doesn't seem enact our
- [41:37]
A
policies in a sustained way. I mean, all of these things are good things.
- [41:42]
B
So I've been asking you some sort of pointed questions, but opening it up to like a long form response. What is the agenda as you see it, that is like the 60% agenda, the 65% agenda. And maybe it's drawing from both sides of the political spectrum or what have you.
- [42:00]
A
Well, one thing it's not is going more progressive or going more moderate. Those are just the wrong categories, folks. We gotta move on. It's some of more progressive and some of what's thought of as more moderate. Very generally it's we gotta go very anti elitist, very assertive on economic populism. That's the sense also in which Zora Mamdani has his finger on the pulse. Cutting taxes for corporations, as Josh Shapiro did, probably not. The direction that we want to go in, we want to say hard work will pay off in a stable life and we're going to make damn sure it does. And that's why having one of these governors like Bashir or like Whitmer, who actually has a history of creating a lot of jobs would be kind of nice. The other thing is that on cultural issues, again, it's not just go to the center because there's quite a lot of research that shows just going to the center is not necessarily going to help you. What you need to do on cultural issues is to connect with working class values in a respectful way and not assume that other people are projects that God put you on earth to enlighten them, that their lives may give different truths than your lives give and that that means sometimes you're not going to get your own way. Democrats college educated base doesn't mean you have to sell people out. But you can't talk in the way you feel most comfortable with. Choose the policy priority you must feel most comfortable with and the issue you feel most comfortable with and insist on all three and expect to have a coalition with people who don't agree with you.
- [43:55]
B
Are you more optimistic or more pessimistic now than when you began writing outclassed? Is there more evidence that Democrats have learned how to speak to the working class or less evidence?
- [44:12]
A
I'm a lot more optimistic. I began writing outclassed in despair, utter despair. This was about a year before Trump was reelected. Cause I just felt in my bones this is not going to end well. And at that point, the accepted wisdom in my circles was that we were never going to be able to appeal to the working class as Democrats because the white working class was just racist and we weren't going to go there. There's a lot of racism out there. It's helping the right and we're not going to go there as Democrats. I think that's definitely true. But the idea that all that was going on as racism was just self delusion. And I had written a book in 2017 basically explaining this cultural difference and how it had driven Trump's first election. And then this oh, it's all just racism interpretation took hold and everybody just turned their minds off to some uncomfortable truths about privilege and class privilege. And now there is a consensus in the Democratic Party that we got to figure out how to connect with the working class. The thing that's blocking progress is the persistent obsession with whether we should become more progressive or become moderate. And I would just urge people to realize that that is an old fashioned and unhelpful way to deal with it. We don't have to either go right or go left. We just have to cut the apple in a different way. And the first step in understanding how to connect with people is understanding where they're coming from.
- [46:00]
B
All right, well, we're going to leave things there for today. Jonesy Williams, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.
- [46:07]
A
Always a pleasure, Galen and I love the podcast.
- [46:10]
B
Thank you. My name is Galen Droock. Remember to become a subscriber to this podcast@gdpolitics.com and wherever you get your podcasts. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes. You can also join in our paid subscriber chat and pass along questions for us to discuss on the show. And you ensure that we can keep making a podcast that prioritizes curiosity, rigor and a sense of humor. Also, be a friend of the POD and go give us a five star rating wherever you listen to podcasts. Maybe even tell us friend about us. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.