biden-era policies were extremely geared toward the working class, whose wages went up at much higher rates than the top half of earners and saw a job boom, as well as IRA investment in traditional manufacturing regions. they rewarded him by switching heavily to Trump.
Reposted from
W.E.D.em Boyz
Bernie Sanders: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
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Raising that would have been a MASSIVE PR win, an incredibly visible and explicit ‘we are fighting for you’ to the working class.
If you look, that straight line up is $3T being spent.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL
2) Google is increasingly useless as it regurgitates fake AI nonsense
He created a booming economy and people think it’s in recession.
"Stocks hit all-time highs following early-morning news...US yields jumped and the dollar saw its best day since 2022 as investors cheered the Republican’s return to the presidency and the potential..."
"I wonder if Biden just wasn’t an effective enough storyteller for his accomplishments (like IRA) & expected media to report on it. Trump would have been at every factory opening taking credit, driving the narrative."
Plus NYT ran more stories on his age than the IRA
Trump inherited a good economy from Obama... and got the credit for it instead of Obama. Then he wrecked that economy, and left Biden to clean it up... and Biden took the blame instead of Trump.
And the Teamsters snub...
Working class people felt prices, not inflation and they saw governments not helping them enough.
Sanders is correct: the Ds haven't done a good job addressing the concerns of the working class, while the right was quite happy to exploit that anxiety.
Inflation might be down, but lots of people are challenged by grocery prices and rents and mortgages that have tripled.
Saying that the rate of increase has slowed does not help them.
(Not trying to like blame Bernie for this whole thing but the messaging is a mess)
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/19/most-households-can-weather-moderate-expense-shocks-research-finds.html
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americans-wages-are-higher-than-they-have-ever-been-and-employment-is-near-its-all-time-high/
Meanwhile, the fascists squeak on in.
Tale as old as time
What we got was an $8,000 handout - per person living in the United States - to insurance companies that got you one physical, two dental cleanings and a pair of glasses every two years.
If the admin (or Harris promised) had gone after companies price gouging, that likely makes the difference.
I'm almost 70, born working class, always been a proud Democrat. In my experience American leftists have been ineffective at best & disastrous when it's most important. And after entirely too many years of holding my tongue when they blat, I wish them all the karma they've earned.
Large portions of the "working class" have always voted centre-right *because the centre-right aligned with their interests*.
Everyone: I’ve had to tighten my belt and have trouble making ends meet for the last two and a half years because my grocery bill is so high.
Democrats: Well, *actually* you’re making more money than ever, so you should be happy.
Still, if your purchasing power is up 15% since the start of COVID, that's a big deal, and a huge reversal from 50 years of real wage stagnation.
The bottom line is wages have not kept pace with the cost of living which is all that really matters.
Telling someone who needs a payday loan to fix their car to get to work doesn’t give a shit about wages adjusted blah blah blah
*looks inside*
It's Bank of America
So only a quarter of them, not a little more than half.
They’re both too large.
I have a feeling based on who I see homeless for long term. And who I see increasingly homeless
Wages climbed, great, rent 2100 bucks
All Dems ever do is say why shit can't be fixed and people fucking hate them for it. The proof is in the popular vote
I know that things not radically changing is dispiriting, but Democrats talk about the challenges because people have insane expectations
But making deporting 20 million mostly poorer people & seizing their assets the centerpiece of your housing affordability plan is just a horribly sick, cruel joke
https://bsky.app/profile/pkrugman.bsky.social/post/3laqs7jzcbd25
Because the 'strong economy' is a fairytale.
Biden stood up for unions, the environment and health care. So did Harris
When Bernie Sanders or folks in the media refer to "working class", they don't MEAN people who work. They mean aggrieved white people (incl. many collegiates who think they work, & maybe white Hispanics).
Symone Sanders called this out.
Bernie has been an excellent foot soldier these last 4 years, but…shut up and take a nap, old man.
he got the outcome he wanted, frankly, and it owns, because it guarantees nobody will ever give a shit about labor rights ever again until the end of time, so he'll always have it as an issue
and i'll get to piss on his grave too eventually but that's small comfort
I still voted for Harris obviously but be honest
He does this on plenty of issues, all to pretend he's never changed his policies over the decades, which is a weird thing to even claim.
160 years ago elite plantation owners told a bunch of poor white farmers they were on the same side fighting these Yankees and they haven’t let go of it since.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/
And don't give me "b-b-but they suppressed him in the primaries!" crap because the general electorate is not more progressive than the Dems.
If you don’t think his ideas can fail and can only be failed, I don’t think continuing this conversation is going to be productive.
I’d also suggest you apply that perspective to Harris’ campaign
They still voted for him
Trump will now claim all that as his deed, just watch
I get that having Warren (or whoever) call Sinema a worthless piece of shit on MSNBC would have felt good, but it wouldn't have helped anything.