**Click Source**
Quote:
One finding from the polling stands out: A shockingly large percentage of these Obama-Trump voters said Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy — twice the percentage that said the same about Trump.
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Priorities USA, the super PAC that is working to restore Democrats to power, conducted focus groups of Obama-Trump voters in Wisconsin and Michigan — two states that Trump snatched from Democrats — in late January and polled some 800 Obama-Trump voters nationally at around the same time. The pollsters also conducted focus groups with so-called drop-off voters — people who voted for Obama in 2012 but didn’t vote in 2016 — in the same states and polled 800 drop-off voters nationally.
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50 percent of Obama-Trump voters said their incomes are falling behind the cost of living, and another 31 percent said their incomes are merely keeping pace with the cost of living.
A sizable chunk of Obama-Trump voters — 30 percent — said their vote for Trump was more a vote against Clinton than a vote for Trump. Remember, these voters backed Obama four years earlier.
42 percent of Obama-Trump voters said congressional Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy, vs. only 21 percent of them who said the same about Trump. (Forty percent say that about congressional Republicans.) A total of 77 percent of Obama-Trump voters said Trump’s policies will favor some mix of all other classes (middle class, poor, all equally), while a total of 58 percent said that about congressional Democrats.
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” When it comes to communicating a message of economic opportunity that wins over both “communities of color” (where some drop-off voters are concentrated) and “struggling exurban families” (the types who went for Trump), Cecil acknowledged that Democrats “clearly have a lot of work to do.”
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Cecil pointed out that Democrats favor far more in the way of Wall Street accountability and oversight than Republicans do. But he acknowledged that Democrats must do more to take on Wall Street and said the party should represent a substantially more ambitious economic agenda:
“The deck is stacked against most Americans in many ways. Pharmaceutical companies that gouge consumers, for-profit prisons that abuse inmates and do nothing to reform them, for-profit colleges that offer false hopes and incredible amounts of debt (my brother went to one). Democrats must take on these systemic problems and we must name names.
“The second part of the argument must include a real, forward-looking economic plan that does more than rehash the same four policy proposals from the last 20 years. How do we deal with automation and huge company mergers? What do we do to address opportunity deserts in rural and urban areas where real investment is almost impossible to find?”
This is pretty much EXACTY what Thomas Frank warned about in his book
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People a full year before the election.
Personally, I don't think the Dems will learn this lesson, and if they don't, I do think they will squander their chance to retake congress in the midterms.
I live in a neighborhood that's about 90% immigrant and mostly poor. Democrats think these people and their children will inevitably become democratic voters.
What I see in my neighborhood are: strong, nuclear families, very hardworking, entrepreneurial people and FUTURE REPUBLICANS--if the Democrats cannot come up with a compelling economic message and palatable social policies.
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No man is free who is not master of himself.~Epictetus
07 May 2017, 12:17 pm
