"Democrats Neglect People of Color While Failing to Woo White Trump Voters" [View all]

[Garrett78]

An interview worth listening to: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/7/31/billion_dollar_mistake_democrats_neglect_people

A couple quotes from Steve Phillips:

So, the challenge the Democrats face is to focus on the math, and not on the myth, of what happened in 2016. And so, the myth is that all of these Democratic voters, all of these working-class white voters who had supported Obama, defected from the Democrats and then flocked to Donald Trump’s campaign and backed him, and that’s what the—that’s why Democrats lost, and that’s why they have to pursue them to be able to actually try to reassemble their power and get back into positions. But that’s not actually what happened, and it’s certainly not why they lost the election.

We had unprecedented—or, unprecedented in 20 years, black voter turnout drop-off. More than a million fewer black voters came out. And you had a splintering of the progressive white vote. And you had a larger increase of voters for Johnson and Stein—I sometimes call the JohnStein voters—than you did for Trump. And if you look in a place—Wisconsin is where it’s clearest. Trump got fewer voters in Wisconsin than Romney did. So it wasn’t like everybody flocked to him. It’s that the progressive votes splintered and was depressed. And that’s the challenge that the Democrats face, is how to reinspire, bring back out African-American voters, bring up Latino vote and bring back the whites who defected to third and fourth party.

The country is under conservative assault because Democrats mistakenly sought support from conservative white working-class voters susceptible to racially charged appeals. Replicating that strategy would be another catastrophic blunder.