The New Yorker: The Clintons Have Lost the Working Class
Why can’t Hillary Clinton’s campaign get going? By most conventional measures, she had a pretty good week in New Hampshire: a commanding performance in Thursday night’s debate, an emotive one in Wednesday night’s televised town hall. But the scale of her loss to Bernie Sanders was striking, and its shape was revealing. Clinton lost among young voters by nearly 6–1, and among independents by 3–1. Most arrestingly, Sanders won voters with an income of less than fifty thousand dollars by 2–1. There’s a lot of talk about Clinton’s campaign repeating the chaos and errors of 2008, but that year she had the white working-class vote. Clinton’s candidacy looks narrower than ever, more confined to those whose experience of life approximates her own. Last night, in New Hampshire, the rare demographic group she won was those with incomes of more than two hundred thousand dollars a year. For now, at least, Clinton has become the wine-track candidate.
During this long New Hampshire week, the Clinton campaign was a mash-up of Democratic Parties past and present. Bill Clinton, once the Party’s great channeller of working-class pain, surfaced, gaunt and joyless and wearing lumberjack red plaid. But his speech on Sunday had little of the old empathy; it was just a nasty blast at Sanders, whom the ex-President called “hermetically sealed” from reality. Careening across southeastern New Hampshire yesterday, I noticed that the polling places were thick with Clinton signs, many advertising her endorsement by a plumbers’ and pipe fitters’ union. At Oyster River High School, in Durham, near the University of New Hampshire, some of the union men were out in person. The institutional Party—the unions, the elected officials—was doing what it could for her. It didn’t seem to make much difference. Heading in to vote, past the union men, was a steady stream of state-school students.
Like everything else in New Hampshire, the working class here is distinct: less diverse than in the rest of the country, and less organized. Certainly, Clinton’s strong support from political organizations in minority communities will help in other states, though black and Latino Americans have, on the whole, grown more receptive to radical perspectives, not less. Perhaps more striking, union organizers have already been expressing worry about sympathy for the Trump campaign within their ranks. Those organizers themselves are likely to be sympathetic to Sanders, whose politics more closely match their own. Perhaps residual working-class loyalties, and her own strengths, will be enough to carry Clinton through the primaries. But the enthusiasm for her candidacy increasingly seems concentrated among affluent, older voters who are already committed members of the Democratic Party. That is not the most promising platform from which to begin a general-election campaign in any year, and especially not in a vigorously populist one.
“I know I have some work to do, particularly among young people,” Clinton said last night. Others have emphasized the large margins that Sanders has won among young women. But, in Iowa and New Hampshire, the trouble seemed broader than that: it ran through all of those people who have not yet made it. During the nineteen-nineties, the Clinton coalition ran along aspirational lines, drawing a hard line between virtuous workers and welfare recipients, and between hard-working professionals and capitalists, to summon the upwardly mobile. But the revelations of inequality have meant that aspirational talk has fallen flat, and the experience of 2008 has fractured faith in established leaders to fix it. This primary was held in a white and comparatively wealthy state in a generally prosperous time. Compare Sanders’s winning speeches to Clinton’s losing ones this week, and it appears that middle-class voters are simply more willing to see themselves as stuck in place than they have been for a very long time. That aspirational vein is hard to find.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-clintons-lose-the-working-class
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