Working class whites - when did we lose them?

[whatthehey]

95. Whole bunch of reasons

I am white, male and working. I personally am comfortably off but my hobbies, workplace and habits mean I associate almost entirely with very much working class white males.

Are some of them sexist and racist? Sure! It's anecdotal but I'd guess maybe 30% of them really would have problems voting for a female or POC president.

But 99%+ of them are what the DU purity crowd would call racist and sexist, and the 70% who really aren't so resent that. Being told you can't be a real liberal if you aren't furious and outraged every time somebody mentions CP time or uses bitch as a verb, and that it's no different a mark of your character than standing on street corners in a pointed robe shouting "All N...ers must die!" by many of a party's strongest advocates is not going to endear that party to you.

For anything but urban-dwelling white males, and even for many of them, the obssession with limiting guns, and demonizing gun owners, is a slap in the face to centuries of traditional American culture. Yes it's an easy sell that lunatics don't need machine guns, and it wouldn't be too hard to tighten up checks etc, but when such measures inevitably come along with pointless silliness like cap limits and the war on ugly black rifles, the heavily armed white working class just do facepalms.

For the less well educated, jobs are becoming scarce and either low pay, unpleasant or both. For all the wrong reasons, the fathers of the current white working class middle-aged Trump bloc didn't have to compete for jobs with women and POC as much as they do. When the Dems still spend so much of their political influence on these competitors, a zero sum game assumption is hard to refute. Yes people who follow such things closely know that women and minorities aren't even on a level playing field, but that's scant comfort to Stan when he sees Deshawn or Emily get "his" job and still have programs pushed by Democrats to assist them. We need to change messaging somewhat to support equality but to stress equality for all and at the cost of none. When there are almost no safety nets out there for men without children (and when men are rarely granted custody of them), resentment again is hardly a surprise.

We do not offer as simplistic a vision as the Reps do. Yeah yeah elitist liberal snobbery yadda yadda but if you are asking about a less well-educated demographic, you can't with any honesty be hypocritical and pretend they are slavering at the bit to hear wonkish data on GINI coefficients and race-biased sentencing. This really is the main reason why I favor Sanders over HRC despite hardly approaching socialism or the doctrinaire far left; he's the best on our side I've ever seen about explaining to non-wonks what the problem is and how to fix it, in easy and compelling strokes that sell WIIFM.