Ignoring Low-Wage & Low-Wealth Voters Cost Harris

November 15, 2024 | johnmudd
When Biden’s boosters were confronted with polling that most Americans felt negative about the economy, their response was to point to aggregate data. Yet, no one lives in the aggregate. You remember the day the sheriff puts you out of your home.

In the immediate aftermath of Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat, the Washington Post op-ed page blamed the Democratic Party for its embrace of progressivism. This ignores entirely the decision to move the party to the center to accommodate  Rep. Lynn Cheney and her small army of disaffected Republicans who had been exiled out of their own party.

Of course, what actually moves a nation like ours is the confluence of circumstances of the American people who make their choice for president in the privacy of the voting booth and based on their economic reality.

There are hard questions that have to be answered by the nation’s labor leaders about the obvious disconnect between them and huge parts of their rank and file.

Maybe forcing your retired members onto a predatory Medicare Advantage plan that’s been documented to short change both taxpayers  and program participants undermines your theme of unity and equity?

When you have your presidential campaign strategy designed by David Plouffe, who converted his Obama win credentials into being a highly paid tool of Uber, you know you are going to get a top down corporate playbook totally disconnected from the 44 percent of Americans that can’t afford to cover a $1,000 emergency expense.

These professional millionaire plus Democrats can only speak to the middle class because it’s their only social frame of reference. If they were to recognize the size of the struggling low-wage cohort they would have to question the way they make their living serving the banks and multinationals against  the public interest.

The current form of winner take all late stage vulture capitalism has led to unprecedented wealth concentration and income disparity. The post-pandemic increase in wages in no way can compensate for the lost opportunity cost of a generation of flat or real wage loss that was replaced by predatory consumer credit and student loans.

Having former President Obama lecture Black male voters about anything is going to backfire. Yes, he won the White House, but how many Americans of every color lost their homes as a consequence of Wall Street’s mortgage backed security crime wave that hit Black neighborhoods hardest while the former President just looked on sympathetically.

That kind of moral injury has generational consequences. It’s just like the lingering anti-labor legacy left by President Clinton’s embrace of all things free trade that gave us NAFTA, that promoted the use of  the U.S. tax code to reward corporations to ship jobs overseas.

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