Democratic Consultants Puttin' On The Ritz To Understand Working Class Voters

This is not a super-duper strategy.

Donald Trump is insane. I’ve covered this at length. He’s a terrible human being who lacks the normal sociopathic capacity to hide his worst impulses. Not that there’s any need to do so because he’s been his authentic terrible self and still achieved tremendous political power. He’s never lied about who he is. It’s his supporters who have had to deny reality.

Trump posted a typically unhinged Memorial Day message, which I won’t share, not long after The New York Times ran a piece about “How Donald Trump Has Remade America’s Political Landscape.” He apparently did this all with extra crazy and even more cowbell.

I observe reality, whether it’s fair or not, and it’s true that the Republican Party has made significant gains across the country under the leadership of its coup-plotting, trade-war launching mad king.

King Henry Trump

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Republicans are steadily gaining ground among working-class Americans, including people of color, while Democratic gains are concentrated among more well-off communities. According to the Times, 1,433 counties have steadily moved to the right since 2012 and “only three, or just one-fifth of 1 percent, had a median household income above $100,000.” Conversely, “18 of the 57 counties moving steadily to the left, or nearly a third, had a median household income above $100,000.” Democrats won voters with an income of less than $50,000 in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012.

2012 exit polls

Republicans are running away with voters without a college education, a demographic that was 57 percent of the electorate in 2024. Democrats won voters with a high school degree or less in 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012. Now, they are performing the best with well-educated voters, a smaller portion of the electorate, especially in the key swing states. (Mitt Romney actually won college graduates in 2012.)

All of this is difficult for Democrats to accept, and they are still more inclined to blame racism, sexism or other “isms” for their slow erosion among the very demos that helped elect Bill Clinton and Barack Obama during elections when there wasn’t a global pandemic and we could freely leave our homes.

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Trump has increased the Republican Party’s vote share in each of the three presidential elections where he’s appeared on the ballot. The counties that have steadily become more Republican are in what was once considered Democratic strongholds, such as New York City, Philadelphia, and Honolulu. The GOP is still losing there but by less, while Democrats are losing by more in the nation’s “reddest” areas, and elections are won on the margins.

All told, 435 counties voted more Democratic in 2024 than did so in 2012, by an average improved margin of 8.8 percentage points.

And 2,678 counties became more Republican, by an average of 13.3 percentage points.

This is not good news, and while some Democrats believe these gains will vanish when Trump is no longer on the ballot or a presence in Republican politics (itself a big “if”), such optimism seems misplaced. The Democratic Party is losing ground with voters who were once part of their winning coalitions. This includes young men of all races. Democrats have tried lecturing them and are all out of ideas, so they’re turning to high-priced consultants and their army of focus groups.

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Shane Goldmacher at the Times reports that “Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.”

Democrats are paying consultants to stay at ritzy hotels — perhaps even ones with “Ritz” in their names — to discuss how they can reconnect with the working class. They probably write off any tips to the bell boy as a research-related business expense. No, this isn’t satire. It’s our sorry-ass reality.

This is a $20 million effort intended to “reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online.” Yes, that sounds weird, but don’t worry it has a clever code name — SAM, which is short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan.” The code name “TAMATP” — short of “Throwing Away Money At The Problem” — is probably more apt, but even Democratic donors and strategists know that “TAMATP” is not a common name for young men.

The $20 million investment will “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces,” which definitely sounds like how normal human beings communicate. They’ll place ads in video games and other places where young men are dudes together.

This all sounds like a shockingly complex way to avoid actually talking to people. It’s obvious that Democrats must find new ways to rebuild and maintain a broad coalition that can speak to each other like fellow humans even if everyone doesn’t agree or see the world in the same way. MAGA is the zombie apocalypse and the cheerleader and the jock have to work together with the goth and the future tax accountant. We have to move past the point in the movie where the goth thinks the cheerleader is no better than the zombies because she eats red meat and believes law enforcement should exist.

I first voted in 1992. The two most successful Democratic presidents of my adult life — Clinton and Obama — had a coalition that included working class voters from both rural Ohio and urban New York. It’s not impossible, nor do you need to offer up vulnerable people as ritual sacrifice. But Democrats have to try. Insisting that the media is stacked against them and voters are terrible — even if true! — isn’t a productive strategy.

Despite Chuck Schumer’s personal fantasies, the only time a supposed “evolved” coalition of Rockefeller Republicans and suburban Democrats has won was during Covid when the incumbent president was presiding over a financial and public health catastrophe.

When I made this observation on social media, a perfectly sane and rational person responded as follows:

That’s more times than the 0 times Bernie has ever won.

I can’t stomach blacks like you. You’ve ingested white leftist propaganda at an alarming rate because you like being invited to their cocktail parties.

And they like blacks like you for esthetic reasons.

No offense.

This is MAGA-level delusion and paranoid QAnon-style conspiracy thinking. I am not a leftist nor have I ever voted for Bernie Sanders. I am a stone cold capitalist who enjoys luxury hotels, but I realize sleeping on high-thread count sheets won’t help Democrats solve the Mystery of the Vanishing Working Class.

The “white leftists at cocktail parties” stereotype also is a bit dated. Besides, people want invitations to my cocktail parties. I serve great drinks.

Anyway, you need more than $20 million to fix this level of ignorance and bigotry. Racial minorities, young adults, and adults with a lower income are more likely to receive their news from social media. What they encounter online probably isn’t promoting the truly inclusive environment that normal Democrats actually want.

After the 2012 election, when Democrats believed demographics were their destiny, Republicans responded with laws suppressing the vote among the demos that didn’t support them. It was evil but it was a practical solution rooted in reality. Unfortunately, now that demographics are less in our favor, there are self-identified Democrats who just want to shrink the tent further. You don’t need consultants to tell you this is a bad strategy.