Subject: Re: Mob boss Trump
I'm not disputing your point, but Joe Sixpack is going to hear the speeches (mostly), and seldom read the position papers. In which case, he heard about jobs. And no more tax cuts for billionaires. I think what defeated Kamala was a glass ceiling, and propaganda saying the economy was terrible when it wasn't.

Sure, if you read the minutia of Dem policy positions, climate change is there. But who reads that?

But that's exactly my point. The Democrats' problem isn't (entirely) about what they say. It's about what they do.

Democrats say that they want to advance the issues that are important to the working class - and I don't doubt that they're genuine in that sentiment. But when it comes down to making actual choices, they don't always do that.

That's why I mentioned the IRA. It was one of the Democrats' most important accomplishments. There were tons of different things that were jockeying for inclusion in that bill that would have improved the lives of the working class: the PRO act for unions, extended child tax credits, housing relief, child care subsidies. But in the end, the Democrats chose to dedicate most of the money to fighting climate change. Probably the one item on the least that the working class would least want to be the main part of the bill, but the one that the college-educated progressives most cared about.

Voters didn't read Democratic policy papers, and they didn't listen to many of Harris' speeches. But they didn't need to hear the words to know that the IRA didn't have much of what they wanted in it. That's why it was impossible for Democrats to get a lot of credit for it. It was a lot of spending and resources....being spent on something that most people didn't care about.

You were asked in another thread how the Democrats keep losing elections. This is part of it. The Democrats may genuinely care more about the interests of the working class than Republicans, but when it comes to actually setting policy they don't follow the priorities of the working class. This bites them on climate change, it bites them on immigration, and it bit them a lot on crime. Progressive (and largely college-educated) members of the party centered their focus on the racial inequities of the carceral state, which led them towards the reforms that were branded (horribly) as "defunding the police." But actual working class people had to live in neighborhoods that were more threatened by crime, and they didn't want policing reduced or resources reallocated. They wanted better police, not less police.

The other part, BTW, is lack of delivery. The Democrats are genuinely committed to doing things to fight climate change, for example - but billions of appropriated dollars didn't actually result in lots of new EV chargers, much less an actual high-speed-rail network in California. The days when Congress could vote on something like rural electrification and have the work in full swing a few months later are long gone.

This is why progressives getting a larger voice in the party probably won't fix things. The parties have sorted on educational attainment, and climate change is far too important to the college-educated professionals that predominate among progressives for them to give it the lack of attention necessary to solidify working class support. This isn't just a U.S. issues - center-left parties all over the West have bled support to their populist rivals over Green issues, because working class voters don't rate climate changes as importantly relative to having affordable energy.