Democrats and Republicans Need New Champions

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 19:34:53 -0400

These are strange times in American politics. Slowly but surely, the Democrats have been losing their historically working class and multi-racial base, with Hispanics in particular drifting Right. This shift was starkly evident in the recent New York Times/Siena poll which showed that, for the first time ever, Democrats had a larger share of support among white graduates than among non-white voters, achieving effective parity with Republicans over the Hispanic vote.

The shift has unsettled each party in less than attractive ways. The Democrats’ growing reliance on college-educated affluent white people reflects the policies pursued by the Biden Administration, which is both inept and widely unpopular. Although there are the de rigeur calls to help the middle class, the President has identified himself with the issues that animate the activist element in the upper classes. These include aggressive climate change policies, near limitless abortion access, lax immigration controls (opposed by two-thirds of Americans) and the implementation of critical race theory in schools. Amid soaring inflation, working class voters have been worst affected, many of which include the increasingly influential Latino voter as well small business owners, whose confidence is at a near half-century low.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.