4/5/2017, “Democrats still ignoring the people who could have helped them defeat Trump, Ohio party leaders say,” The Washington Post, William Wan “"The workers we’re talking about don’t want to run computers, they want to run back hoes, dig ditches, sling concrete block,” he wrote. “They’re not embarrassed about the fact that they get their hands dirty. . . . They love it and they want to be respected and honored for it.”
He sent his memo to [Hillary] Clinton’s top campaign adviser in Ohio and other senior party officials. But [Mahoning County Democrat Party Chairman] Betras never heard back.
Months later, he [Betras] said he thinks his [Democrat] party leaders still haven’t gotten the message….
The dinner was supposed to be a Democratic strategy session for an upcoming county election. But the mood grew darker as conversation turned toward the future of their party.
One by one, members of the Mahoning County Democratic Party poured out their frustrations: Just months after the presidential election, they felt folks like them were being forgotten – again. The party’s comeback strategy was being steered by protesters, consultants and elitists from New York and California who have no idea what voters in middle America care about.
But worst of all, they said, the party hadn’t learned from what they saw as the
biggest message from November’s [2016] election: Democrats have fallen
completely out of touch with America’s blue-collar voters.
“It doesn’t matter how much we scream and holler about jobs and the economy at the local level. Our national leaders still don’t get it,” said David Betras, the [Mahoning] county’s party chair. “While Trump is talking about trade and jobs, they’re still obsessing about which bathrooms people should be allowed to go into.”
Since the election, Democrats have been swallowed up in an unending cycle of outrage and issues that have little to do with the nation’s working class, they said, such as women’s marches, fighting Trump’s refugee ban and advocating for transgender bathroom rights.
The party’s national leaders have focused on decrying Trump, opposing his Supreme Court pick and tying his administration to Russia. That approach – trying to defeat Trump solely by attacking him and his policies – already has failed once, many at the dinner said.
Meanwhile, they think few are talking about issues that really matter to people in places such as Youngstown: Stagnant wages, vanishing jobs and sputtering economies. Even the Democrats’ recent success in blocking Trump’s attempt to repeal President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act matters little in the face of those core interests, local party leaders said.
And unless the party begins addressing those blue-collar issues, they said, there will be real and dire consequences in states like theirs.
Others around the restaurant table nodded.
In more than a dozen interviews, party leaders across Ohio--from local precinct captains to the handful of Democrats who remain in Congress--said they are deeply worried.
“Every time Trump so much as sneezes, we as a party are setting our hair on fire and running around like it’s the end of the world,” Betras said as the dinner wound down. “Most people around here don’t care. They are living paycheck to paycheck, just trying to hold on. After everything that’s happened, if we as a party still aren’t speaking to them, then we are never getting them back.”…
At a bar on the hollowed-out edges of Youngstown, Betras slid a memo dated May 12, 2016, across the table. It was then that he saw the wave of anger coming and tried to warn Clinton’s campaign.
“I know I am just a chairman but I am a chairman in the trenches,” Betras wrote in the three-page memo, begging Clinton to focus on jobs.
In Mahoning County – a Democratic stronghold decimated by the manufacturing industry’s decline – Betras was seeing GOP yard signs suddenly popping up. During the primaries, he learned that 18 of his own Democratic precinct captains had crossed party lines to vote for Trump. Some areas had to print extra Republican primary ballots just to keep up with the demand.
“That’s when I knew something was wrong,” he said.
He warned Clinton that she had lost all credibility with working-class voters by waffling on trade and offering tepid solutions. He urged in his memo that she talk about infrastructure instead….
When Ohio leaders talk about their party, they often recall the old days when its core depended on the typical union worker. Now, those workers feel taken for granted or outright abandoned, said Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, 70, whose district sits on Ohio’s northernmost edge.
“Just look at the leadership in both parties,” said Kaptur, whose mother was an auto union organizer. The GOP’s recent leaders – House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, former speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and Vice President Mike Pence of Indiana – have largely hailed from middle America, but top Democrats have not. House and Senate minority leaders Nancy Pelosi of California and Charles E. Schumer of New York come from the wealthy, urban coasts.
That geographic disconnect has translated into policies that alienate the heartland, Kaptur said, overlooking, for example, the devastation of globalized free trade on places such as Ohio. “They paid lip service to it, but the underlying attitude was, ‘You’re not modern enough, not educated enough, not willing to adjust,‘ ” Kaptur said….
To Kaptur, the two sides – this new diverse coalition and the traditional working-class voters she knows – represent the party’s future and past. But neither can win in the present without the other….
“We’ve got one wing that deals with labor and economics and another that deals with social issues and ethnicity. And we have to find a way to fuse these two wings or we’re going to keep falling from the sky.”
For now, the Democratic future in Ohio looks bleak.Trump not only flipped the state but also won by the largest margin of any presidential candidate since 1988.“…top image from zero hedge
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Comment: Neither political party has the slightest interest in working class voters.
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