Seth Masket: “A substantial chunk — let’s say 90% — of the story about the working class leaving the Democratic Party over the past 50 years is a story about race. To simplify, it’s about working class whites starting in the 1970s, and Latinos more recently, being mobilized against the Democratic Party due to resentment toward Blacks.”
Also: “We have never had a consensus definition of ‘working class.’ It could mean people without a college education, or lower-income people, or people in specific types of jobs like manufacture or service, or something else. It is also a populist cultural designation — one that Donald Trump has exploited well — signifying the tastes of “regular” people (often somehow rural whites) who might have money but still want to stick it to elites. Just who has left the Democratic Party and when is highly contingent on one’s conception of ‘working class.’”
