No. of Recommendations: 2
How could they know that if they didn't "hear the words"?
Because the stuff wasn't in the bill. You don't need someone to tell you that the Democrats failed to include an extension of the child tax credit in the IRA (past the one year); when the credit is no longer available, you know that it doesn't exist any more. So when the Democrats didn't enact more child tax credit, and didn't include the PRO act provisions, and didn't provide for more housing assistance, and didn't put in the child care subsidies, all of the working class voters that would have benefited from those programs simply....didn't. Whether they heard anyone talking about it or not, their priorities weren't addressed. Instead, the priority was climate change.
Even though the Democrats' beliefs are more in favor of the working class than Republicans, when they actually have to set priorities, they ended up prioritizing something that the working class doesn't much care about. Climate change, rather than almost anything else. When push came to shove, Democrats enacted the preferences of the college-educated progressive faction of the party, not the working class faction.
That's a big problem. Democrats' stated beliefs are more supportive of working class voters than those of Republicans, but that doesn't necessarily translate into stuff happening in the real world. And voters don't need anyone to tell them that to be aware of it. The most vivid and visible example of that is high speed rail. Democrats love the idea of high speed rail, and have allocated billions and billions of dollars to building it = but it hasn't happened yet. Democrats want HSR to exist (far more than Republicans do), but it still doesn't. Voters don't need Alex Jones to tell them that they can't take HSR from LA to San Francisco - they know it, even though they don't "hear the words."
Democrats main message to voters is that if they get elected, they will use the power of government to do things to improve their lives. But when they get elected, that doesn't always happen - and often doesn't happen for certain segments of the party. Sometimes it's because the Democrats are choosing to prioritize other things (DREAMers and Unions have been at the low end of the pecking order for the last two trifectas). And sometimes it's because the government can't actually do stuff the way it used to back in the Rooseveltian 'good old days.' We're half a century past the point where the Congress could approve a project in January and they'd be breaking ground in six months. Democrats are having a lot of trouble making the pitch to working class voters because they have a hard time delivering to working class voters, both because government just can't work that way any more and because the working class voter faction in the party doesn't have the juice compared to the progressive faction.
