Lots of people with agendas to push are falsely insisting that Hillary (barely) lost the Rust Belt because she didn’t talk about working-class people and working-class jobs.
She not only did, she provided plans, detailed plans:
She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs, and the Obama administration’s record of creating private-sector jobs for a record-breaking number of consecutive months. She said the word “job” more in the Democratic National Convention speech than Trump did in the RNC acceptance speech; she mentioned the word “jobs” more during the first presidential debate than Trump did. She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.
With the 52 percent of voters who told pollsters that economics was the most important issue in the election, Hillary beat Trump by double digits.
What’s more is that in a vast majority of swing states, voters said they preferred Clinton on the economy. If last month’s election was all about economics, then working-class voters would have elected Hillary Clinton president.
Of course, to recognize this is to admit to a much wider definition of “working-class voter” than the one most of Hillary Clinton’s critics, right and left, are using. When they say “working-class voter”, they seem mostly to mean “white working-class voter”. The problem is that white working-class voters don’t seem to want what other working-class voters want — precisely because they think it might benefit nonwhites:
Trump’s white voters do support the mommy state, but only so long as it’s mothering them. Most of them don’t seem eager to change Medicare or Social Security, but they’re fine with repealing Obamacare and its more diverse pool of 20 million insured people. They’re happy for the government to pick winners and losers, so long as beleaguered coal and manufacturing companies are in the winner’s circle. Massive deficit-financed spending on infrastructure? Under Obama, that was dangerous government overreach, but under Trump, it’s a jobs plan by a guy they know won’t let Muslims and Mexicans cut in line to get work renovating highways and airports.
It is perfectly all right to woo the white working class by defending Medicare and Social Security. That may be the one economic argument that can conclusively trump Trump’s race-baiting and place-baiting (that is, pitting rural versus urban residents). As for the idea that Democrats need to be more like Bernie when talking to the white working class, we saw Russ Feingold and Zephyr Teachout go down in defeat with Sanders-style campaigns in white working-class areas. Feingold for one significantly underperformed Hillary in a state that Bernie Sanders won in the Wisconsin primary; if anything he should have overperformed her the way that Rick Nolan did next door in Minnesota. Instead, he lost his statewide race by over 99,000 votes against his opponent — 77,000 more than her statewide loss margin - and drew around 1,600 fewer votes than she did overall.
As for calling for an end to “identity politics”:
After the election, some people called for an end to “identity politics” that promotes niche cultural issues over economic policy. But any reasonable working-class platform requires the advancement of policies that may disproportionately help non-whites. For example, hundreds of thousands of black men stay out of the labor force after being released from prison sentences for non-violent crimes. For them and their families, criminal justice reform is essential economic reform, even if poor whites see it as a distraction from that “real” issues that bedevil the working class, like trade policy.
The people who wield the term “identity politics” like a weapon against women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, and other groups are heavily invested in the belief that class struggle is the only issue and that addressing that issue solves everything else. There are several dead middle-class people of color (like Sandra Bland) who would beg to differ on that subject. As would living black millionaires like John Henson, who was unable to do something as simple as shop in a local jewelry store without having the cops called on him. The whole reason the Southern Strategy has worked so well for the Republicans over the past half-century is because most whites put their own identity — their cultural, religious and ethnic values — over class and economic status.
So in conclusion and in the interests of setting the record straight: Hillary Clinton did indeed talk about the working class. She did more than talk — she provided actionable plans. The nonwhite part liked what she had to say. The white part did not.
And that tells the tale.
UPDATE, 1:24 pm Pacific: In response to a comment below, here’s why I mentioned Bernie Sanders — he’s one of the people most vigorously promoting this falsehood about Hillary:
“I come from the white working class,” Bernie Sanders said on CBS This Morning, “and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.”
The Democratic Party did, Bernie. As has already been shown.