If the Montana elections demonstrate anything, it's that white people will not save the Dems

[WellDarn]

22. I know this won't be accepted

but you are both 100% correct and yet 100% wrong.

As much as I would like to think that how we vote decides elections, it does so ONLY if we can get a high enough percentage of white folks to join us.

That, however, has nothing to do with whether your suggestion is the correct one. You could not be more correct. As a party, we should be firmly committed to a goal that every single person of color of voting age be registered to vote, be given the opportunity to vote, and actually vote. It is our moral obligation to do every single thing we can to reverse the ultimate disenfranchisement.

I cannot thank you enough for putting this in terms of it being not just politically advantageous but also morally required.

The thornier question, and, quite frankly, the one that divides our party (not to mention this website), is "Which of the white folks do we think we can get to come along with us to get it close enough for our votes to be the deciding factor?"

Your post answers this question with "Well it sure as heck isn't the white working class.&quot not a real quote, obviously)

What you miss is that, if Hillary Clinton would have pulled the same percentage of white voters as Rob Quist, pulled yesterday, this country would now be the leader of the free world instead of its laughing stock because Hillary Clinton would be our president. As a matter of fact, if Hillary Clinton had pulled the same percentage of white voters across the entire economic demographic spectrum as she pulled from working class voters in states like Michigan (where she actually won among the working class demographic), we would also now be the leader of the free world instead of its laughing stock.

What I am going to say next may not apply to you in the least and I apologize if it does not, but I have a suspicion that many of the folks who ignore this fact do so because they have an ulterior motive in casting working class voters as unreachable. That motive is that they either oppose policies which are favorable to the working class, or (and I suspect this may be more often the case) because such policies could (admittedly) alienate white upper middle class voters and they believe those voters (perhaps because they are a large and likely to vote bloc that is spread throughout the country and not concentrated in particular cities and/or regions) are the key to electoral victory. The voters in THAT bloc, however, are the ones who abandoned Obama in 2012 (after they found out he was black and that the ACA was helping middle and lower class people more than it was helping them) and stabbed Hillary Clinton in the back in 2016. To bring them back to the Democratic Party fold in sufficient numbers to make create what you correctly see as a winning coalition, however, would require us to move to the right and moving to the right is abandoning people of color, the poor, and the oppressed.

I cannot deny that moving to the right worked in 1992 and kept the White House in our hands in 1996. Welfare reform, the Ominibus Crime Bill, the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Don't Ask Don't Tell, and other concessions to upper middle class sensibilities kept enough upper middle class white voters in the fold to help us win two elections after we had suffered a string of humiliating defeats with liberal candidates. I can see the argument that such policies were not too great a price to pay for controlling the White House.

However, after Obama . . . after the honesty he brought when he told white people to their face that race and privilege were determinative factors in social "success" . . . after he called out the racism in the criminal justice system . . . after he passed a health care bill which, yes, helped poor people and the working poor more than the upper middle class people we targeted in 1992 and 1996 . . . after his Justice Department led the fight for marriage equality . . . after he stood for people of ALL faiths, including Islam . . . after every thing he accomplished . . .

I, as a black man, as a liberal, as an American, will not move back to the "center." I will stand with working people. I will stand with people of color. I will stand with LGBTQ. I will stand with all the oppressed because in this "glorious" capitalist system there are way more of us than there are of them.