The Goat Pen

Professor Tiger wrote:JD citing Breitbart and Washington Times? That's pre-apocalyptic.

Please go back to quoting theroot.com. You're scaring me.

And you're probably really pissing off Tick. He's very picky about what websites are quoted around here.

By framing the election as being decided by which candidate can attract the most “blue collar” whites, the media has an excuse not to cover communities of color. While Super Tuesday and the Flint crisis temporarily put African-American votes on the map, CNN and MSNBC ignore Latino voting entirely. The media ignores the political realities of minority voting power in order to frame their election coverage around the demographics of their viewership.

The Missing “Blue Collar” Worker
The media’s racially biased framing of the election is joined by confusion about class. Chris Matthews and other pundits know that most of the nation’s working class is in the service sector rather than “blue-collar” jobs. But they still talk about the anxious “blue collar” voter as if autoworkers and steelworkers were key to Donald Trump’s base and to the entire election.

There is a major political distinction between blue collar, unionized auto workers or machinists who are reliably Democratic and a white male working at Wal-Mart or 7-Eleven who typically votes Republican. Yet the media lumps all together as part of the “white working class” electorate.

Does Donald Trump really have a special appeal to the “white working class voter” who feels economic insecurity? The media says yes, but that conclusion ignores that Mitt Romney won 59% of the white vote despite bashing the white working class (the bottom 47%) in a highly publicized video. Whites negatively impacted by economic dislocation have been voting Republican in presidential elections for years—and they did so regardless of how badly a George W. Bush screwed up the economy in his first term.

Southern working class whites vote Republican not because Democrats have screwed them in the economy but rather because since the 1960’s they have seen the Democrats as the Party of Blacks (and now Blacks and Latinos). Mitt Romney did not win nearly 60% of the white vote because they thought his economic policies would be better for the white working class—they voted for him as the nominee of the party of white people.