Free Republic

President Trump calls them suppression polls, the endless surveys the liberal media puts out there showing how the support for this administration is in the toilet. It’s meant to demoralize his base. It didn’t work in 2016 and it won’t work in 2020. The polls were wrong. Right now, 2020 general election polling is trash. It’s worthless. It’s way too early. Everyone knows that—and even some Democrats would admit that they’re not going to win by a nine-point of double-digit margin next year. If anything, the media just reminds Trump voters that they need to vote next year. In the...

Democrats will do everything for the so-called “white working class stiff” except be one. Democrats Can Kiss Their Lost White Working Class Vote Goodbye Mickey Mouse had Goofy, a cartoon character whose full name has occasionally been given as Goofus D. Dawg. Barack Obama had vice president Joe Biden, ‘officially’ known to deplorables as ‘Bite Me’ or just plain ‘Uncle Joe’. Good thing that someone in the Obama administration had an official name.

Still smarting from Hillary Clinton's unexpected election loss in 2016, the Soros crew at the Open Foundation Society has got to work looking for reasons to hammer it down and ensure it never happens again. A new study of 450 working class whites from five cities has come out, with the aim of finding out how these recalcitrants and deplorables can team up with other ethnic groups to elect Democrats. Oh that's not how they put it, but it seems to be what it is. According to the Daily Caller, which spotted the study: While the study’s primary stated goal...

A recently-released research study sheds light on the values of white working-class voters in the United States and the reasons these voters strongly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Three researchers from three different universities authored the study, titled “White Working-Class Views on Belonging, Change, Identity and Immigration.” Open Society Foundations, a network of political organizations controlled by left-wing billionaire George Soros, funded the study. The trio of researchers conducted the study by visiting four places between August 2016 and March 2017: Birmingham, Alabama; Dayton, Ohio; Tacoma, Washington; Phoenix, Arizona; and — for some reason — the New...

Everyone's looking for what Winston Churchill called a pudding with a theme. How did the likes of Donald Trump make it to the forefront of American politics? How did the British break their strong link with the Europeans just across the channel? The common denominators, so we're told, are "revolution," "down with the elites" and "power to the people." Or, as Che Guevara put it: "The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall." The idea of revolution, of course, does not apply to Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee,...

The spectacularly dreadful debut of Obamacare represents the greatest political opportunity for conservatism and the Republican Party in two generations. Big government stands rebuked. It has overreached, overpromised, and, embarrassingly, failed to deliver. Even if the website's gremlins are banished, and even if Obamacare purrs along like a BMW from now on, voters will be disillusioned. They will be disappointed because the president and his party promised that the program would provide coverage to the uninsured, expand the services provided at no charge to customers, cover those with pre-existing conditions, oblige insurers to keep adult children on their parents' policies,...

The white working class is one of the largest and most important groups in the electorate. Understanding it is key to political success for both parties. One of the most talked about groups in recent elections has been the white working class. Although the group has declined as a share of the nation since World War II, it is still very large at nearly 40 percent of the national electorate. Understanding its views and values is essential to political victory, so it isn’t surprising that politicians of all stripes are working hard to gain such an understanding. Andrew Levinson’s...

A West Virginia state senator leaves the Democratic party.In West Virginia, a fed-up Democratic state senator is changing parties — and hoping to represent his state in Congress. State senator Evan Jenkins is done with President Obama’s vision for America. “The Obama agenda has become crystal clear,” he says, pointing to the president’s support for “immigration reform that includes amnesty provisions” as well as “his limitations on our constitutional rights relating to gun ownership,” “his environmental agenda, which spells the end of coal and coal jobs,” and “the government takeover of health care.” “Those are issues and positions that I...

Between the baby boomers on one hand and Generations X, Y and Z on the other, cultural and economic changes have transformed the landscape of our culture. It's difficult to wrap a description around what sociologists call a "cohort." "I'm not a real person yet," says a 27-year-old college graduate in the movie "Frances Ha," the latest and hippest of the contemporary coming-of-age scenarios. She has no credit card and explains that she even has to look for a cash machine to pay a dinner check. But if she doesn't yet feel mature enough to assume "personhood," at least she...

For all the excitement about left-leaning demographics, a real majority party needs better numbers among blue-collar whites. In the months since the 2012 elections it has become apparent that the victorious Democratic coalition Obama assembled is still not sufficiently large to overcome the unprecedented Republican obstruction and sabotage of the normal processes of American political life.Although long-term demographic trends(PDF), such as the increase in minority voters and the rise of the Millennial generation, are favorable for the Democrats, translating those trends into true political and electoral dominance will remain difficult so long as Democrats rely on simply turning out core...

excerpt: When he speaks to black or Latino communities to pump up his base, he changes his tune. Out pops the community organizer, ginning up resentment and victimhood and thereby indirectly blaming the white middle class and promoting a divisive us-against-them mentality. Speaking on the Latino station Univision: And if Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, we're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us, if they don't see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it's gonna be harder...

When Carolyn Coulson was deciding how to vote in 2008, she found Barack Obama’s rhetoric “exciting,” especially when he talked about a “different kind of politics.” Then a student at Vanderbilt, she said John McCain was dull in comparison. Coulson, now 25 and a Wall Street consultant, finds no trace of that Obama today. “His rhetoric is aimed just at specific groups of people, not as someone who would bring the country together,” she said. Identity politics is something you do when you don't have the worst economy since World War II, according to David Woodard, a Clemson University political...

Unlike Obama, House Democrats will have trouble forging a majority without that demographic. Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously remarked that all politics is local. But this year, it’s the rhetoric of John Edwards that rings truer--in assessing the House race landscape, there are indeed two Americas. President Obama believes the way to win a second term is by rallying elements of the party base, but House Democrats trying to take back the majority face the added burden of winning the votes of increasingly disillusioned white working-class voters. When looking at why Republicans are likely to retain their 25-seat majority--The...

What’s up with the white-working-class vote? For years, the horny-handed blue-collar worker was the star of the New Deal Democratic coalition. It was for him, and his wife and family, that Democrats taxed the rich, invented Social Security, and supported militant labor unions.Well, that was then, and this is now. White working-class voters — or white voters without college degrees, the exit-poll group most closely approximating them — are now a mainstay of the Republican coalition.Ronald Brownstein, a clear-sighted and diligent analyst of demographic voting data, provided some useful perspective in his most recent National Journal column. His bottom...

So it’s unanimous, then– Thomas Edsall was right: In the aftermath of Obama’s gay marriage flip, pundits seem to have concluded that Obama’s Democratic party has indeed given up on white working class voters. They’ve been dropped from the winning coalition, which is now composed of three main groups: “young people, college-educated whites (especially women), and minorities,” according to Ron Brownstein. Bill Galston agrees. Ruy Teixeira–who once wrote a book called America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters–agrees. Here’s Teixeira on how Obama can win Arizona: First, the share of Hispanic voters must grow and their support...

Almost no one noticed, but around George W. Bush's reelection in 2004, the nation crossed a demographic milestone.From Revolutionary days through 2004, a majority of Americans fit two criteria. They were white. And they concluded their education before obtaining a four-year college degree. In the American mosaic, that vast white working class was the largest piece, from the yeoman farmer to the welder on the assembly line. Even as late as the 1990 census, whites without a college degree represented more than three-fifths of adults.But as the country grew more diverse and better educated, the white working-class share of the...

Foreclosures, plant closings, offshored jobs, underwater mortgages, miserable rates of unemployment, stagnating incomes: Is there any end to the woes of the struggling American middle? Apparently not, because now comes news of a trend guaranteeing trouble ahead for the more than half of the nation that make up the moderately educated and moderately earning middle — even if the economy improves. That seismic shift, outlined in a new report from the National Marriage Project and the Institute for American Values, is towards more divorce, more out of wedlock births and, ipso facto, fewer kids with a hopeful future. Family breakdown,...

The Obama campaign’s recent outreach effort aimed at non-college educated white voters may work because the demographic’s tepid support for President Barack Obama is partly offset by its low regard for the GOP presidential candidates. First Lady Michelle Obama will be in Florida a the Ford 400 NASCAR race making the Obama campaign pitch next week and then back to Washington for the “Country Music: In Performance at the White House.” The one-day event features a line-up of famous county music singers, including Dierks Bentley, Alison Krauss and Kris Kristofferson. Focusing on this demographic makes sense: A new CNN poll...

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class. All pretence of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second,...

President Obama‘s choice of Scranton, Pa., to talk taxes today isn’t just coincidence: it’s a strategic backdrop for a pre-election pitch aimed largely at white working-class voters in critical swing states. In a speech at Scranton High School — a setting identical to one used last week in Manchester, N.H. — Obama will plug his plan to extend and expand a payroll tax cut for workers and impose a new payroll tax cut for small businesses. He’ll also likely underscore Republican opposition, which has included GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney. Obama’s campaign strategists say the goal is to articulate in real,...