Why do the Democrats Need RFK?

Because their Traditional Base is Fleeing

The Democratic Party has had an identity crisis for some time.

While it was the party of labor and civil rights for decades, the party leaders decided they didn’t want to be that anymore. In the end, the party ended up abandoning its traditional base, choosing instead to become the party of more affluent and higher educated white voters. In other words, the Democrats became the party of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), a term coined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1977. 

This process of the party abandoning its base has been taking place since the Bill Clinton era of the 1990’s— an era which saw a Democratic White House offshore US industry and millions of good union jobs with it. Appropriately, it was a Clinton, Hillary, who in 2016 finally made the new trajectory of the party explicit when she decried working class voters in middle America as “deplorables.” Hillary Clinton, so contemptuous of these voters, did not even set foot in the state of Wisconsin after receiving her nomination as the Democratic candidate.  All of this cost Hillary the election, but rather than come to terms with this reality, she blamed her loss on the fairytale of Trump “collusion” with Russia.   

I recall the 2016 Presidential election well. At the time, I was working as in-house counsel for the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO (USW), based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was in charge of overseeing legal issues in USW District 8 – the Appalachian region of the union which includes Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia.  The unionists I dealt with in District 8 were largely supportive of Bernie Sanders and his campaign calling for  universal health care and a general expansion of the social safety net for the working class and poor.  This all made sense as the Appalachian region of the US is one of the poorest areas of the country, and in much need of assistance from the federal government.  However, instead of endorsing Bernie Sanders, the USW was an early endorser for Hillary Clinton who easily won the Democratic nomination.  

Many of the unionists in District 8 ended up voting for Donald Trump. A good percentage of them had supported Sanders, but felt rejected by a Democratic Party which openly viewed them as “deplorables.” It was these types of voters who certainly made the difference in the election outcome. And indeed, The New York Times would later confirm this, explaining in 2018:

Republicans have been the party of the rich and Democrats the party of the poor for about as long as political scientists have collected data on American elections.

That might not be quite so true anymore, at least among white voters.

Hillary Clinton won the nation’s richest and most exclusive neighborhoods by a wide margin in the 2016 presidential election, according to an Upshot analysis of election results from Ryne Rohla of Washington State University and census data. And Donald J. Trump fared significantly better than Mitt Romney in the white districts that were the least affluent and least educated.

If it were honest with itself, the Democratic Party would have realized that there just weren’t enough affluent voters to ensure the Party a victory. It appears that this reality may be starting to sink in, as indicated by one of the loyal mouthpieces of the Democratic Party—NPR—in its article entitled “Labor Day is now a key to Election Day for Democrats and Republicans alike.”  In this article, NPR details “the long postwar pattern by which the Democratic Party has departed from its traditional geographic and demographic bases.” 

As NPR explains, “[i]t is no longer surprising that elements of the Republican Party have eagerly embraced voters in those bases who felt the Democrats had simply abandoned them.” As NPR relates, “[i]t has been some time since the Democrats could simply call themselves ‘the party of the working man.’” NPR concedes that this is a problem, explaining that “[i]t is hard to find an observer who thinks Biden could be reelected without doing at least as well among working people as he did in 2020.”  This may be quite difficult for Biden given that rising consumer inflation and higher interest rates are making it harder and harder for working people to afford everything from food to health care to housing.

And now, another shoe is dropping, perhaps signifying a mortal blow to the Democratic Party’s prospects in 2024 – the disillusionment of African-American voters with the Democrats. As a recent Reuters article explains, Black men in particular are starting to turn away from the Democratic Party. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted July 11-17 found that “18% of Black Americans would pick Trump over Biden in a hypothetical matchup, compared to 46% who favored Biden, including about one in four Black men, compared to about one in seven Black women.” This 18% figure is up from the 12% of Black Americans who voted for Trump in 2020.  And, as Reuters explains, this shift among Black voters away from the Democrats is happening for the same reasons that the white working class is fleeing: concern about “economic issues - economic security, inflation, job security.” In the infamous words of James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist, “it’s the economy, stupid!” 

What working class voters of all races are seeing and experiencing is a decline in their standard of living and quality of life. Further, they see that this decline is, in truth, being driven by the policies of the Biden administration. Instead of focusing on the needs of working people in America, President Biden has devoted vast amounts of our precious resources to the war in Ukraine , and he has imposed sanctions on Russia which have led inexorably to rising inflation and interest rates–all of which are destroying the purchasing power of ordinary Americans.  

There is only one candidate in both parties who has plans to fix the economic issues plaguing the American people, and that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK).  For example, RFK has a concrete plan to make homeownership affordable again and to alleviate homelessness which is mounting in all of our major cities.  Furthermore, he wants to end the war in Ukraine through negotiations. In general, RFK seeks to redirect military spending toward addressing the desperate human needs of people in the United States.  

Pointing to the problem of homelessness in cities like San Francisco, RFK has stated, "[W]e need to take care of Americans. Thirty-five percent of Americans today are on the precipice of ending up on a corner like this . . . . Thirty-five percent of Americans do not make enough money to pay for their basic human needs, for transportation, for housing, and for food, and they are on a cliff where any of them could end up here.” As RFK rightly declares, meeting the needs of these Americans is “more important than funding wars, it’s more important than funding overseas adventures.”  

This is a message which will resonate with the vast majority of working people of all races throughout this country. This is the message which can bring the Democratic Party to victory in 2024.