I've never understood why so many working class white men and women vote republican.

[HiPointDem]

15. The poorer you are, the more likely you are to vote democrat.

I've never understood why there is this myth about working class people leaning republican. It's the middle & upper classes who lean republican. The working class goes for democrats, & it's precious little they get for their votes, too.

Of the last four presidential elections won by the Republican candidate, the two closest ones (in 1980 and 2000) would have gone to the Democrat had lower-income people voted in the same percentages as higher-income groups....Making it easier to vote isn't enough. Nonvoters need a reason to vote, and this is where the "economic populism" so reviled by the DLC fits in—taking on corporate power, reforming labor law, slowing and reshaping the free-trade juggernaut, returning to a more progressive tax structure.

Writing last year in Dissent, Benjamin Ross noted that while DLC-ers often point to George McGovern's 1972 loss as the nightmare result of a Democrat moving too far to the left, the "New Democrat" strategy actually has a lot in common with the McGovern campaign: both give up on white, working-class voters and organized labor, hoping instead to win with a coalition of upscale suburbanites plus African Americans and other ethnic minorities.

But as Ross suggested, economic-populist policies have the potential to appeal in different ways to all of these groups...

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/0104cervantes.html







Those who don't vote, or don't vote for the person you think they should, do so because in their calculation doing what you think they should doesn't make sense. They're not all brainwashed fools. They don't see a reason to vote, or to vote the way you want them to.