The Ukiah Daily Journal

Biden, Democratic governors and the new (old) class politics

- WASHINGTON >>

The most important arguments in politics are often over what the argument should be about in the first place. The last week should be remembered as the beginning of a new round in this old struggle.

President Biden and the nation's Democratic governors want to talk about jobs, incomes, child care, health care and who wields economic power. Republican­s, led by many of their own governors, want the fight to be all about a packet of cultural issues connected to race, LGBTQ rights, the schools and religion — “woke fantasies,” in the shorthand of Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders's response to Biden's State of the Union address.

There is a subtext to this debate: Leading figures in both parties have decided that the future of American politics rests in the hands of workingcla­ss voters. With the most affluent voters now largely sorted by ideology, the “working middle class” in the poll-tested phrase popular among politician­s, will be getting a lot of love.

Biden's bet — and it's a wager many successful Democratic governors made last year — is that Democrats can win back blue-collar voters. This means not just gaining ground among Whites without college degrees but also winning back Hispanic voters who have drifted toward the GOP, and boosting turnout among the Black working class.

The president reiterated one his favorite formulatio­ns on Tuesday, describing his agenda as “a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America.” His first stop the day after his big speech was at a laborers' union training center in Wisconsin. “For decades, the backbone of America — the middle class — has been hollowed out,” Biden said, adding: “Once-thriving cities and towns became shadows of what they used to be . . . . Now we're going to turn that around.”

The barriers to the conversati­onand coalition-shifts Biden has in mind are substantia­l. Declining faith in government's capacity to make a difference in their economic lives has pushed many working-class voters to cast ballots on cultural issues, some closely connected to race. Many Republican­s, including Sanders, Florida Gov. Ron Desantis and Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, will continue to push these conversati­ons to the fore.

And many Democrats argue that non-economic issues, particular­ly abortion rights, have been key to the party's advances among suburban swing voters. Some abortion-rights advocates expressed disappoint­ment that Biden allocated less than a minute to the cause toward the end of his 72-minute State of the Union address.

Nonetheles­s, one group of Democrats that sees promise in Biden's emphasis on jobs, investment and a blue-collar political blueprint is made up of the party's governors. This is not surprising since all governors, as Utah's Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said during a White House meeting of state chief executives on Friday, like to think of themselves as “the get-stuff-done caucus.”

In conversati­ons during this weekend's meeting in Washington of the National Governors Associatio­n, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, both Democrats, stressed, in Whitmer's words, that “the culture wars . . . are a distractio­n.” They hold this view even as they express pride in their support for LGBTQ and abortion rights.

In the case of schools, for example, “the culture wars . . . are not fueled by what the average parent of school age kids is thinking about,” Whitmer said. “They want their kids to be safe when they're at school. They want a reasonable class size so their kid gets enough attention.” What parents are deeply concerned about is “learning loss” during the pandemic, one reason she is pushing a program of “individual­ized tutoring” to help students catch up.

Whitmer and Hochul each stressed the jobs they have preserved or brought into their states — by working to save a

 ?? ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States