I read this story from The Hill with great interest:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Sunday made an appeal to supporters of Donald Trump to back his candidacy for president instead.
[...]
“Look, many of Trump’s supporters are working-class people, and they’re angry,” Sanders said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And they’re angry because they’re working longer hours for lower wages. They’re angry because their jobs have left this country and gone to China or other low-wage countries.”
“And what I’m suggesting is that what Trump has done with some success has taken that anger, taken those fears, which are legitimate, and converted them into anger against Mexicans, anger against Muslims,” he added.
I think we may posit the following things:
— This is a Hail Mary pass on Sanders’ part. He’s not making much in the way of inroads with the current (and increasingly nonwhite, non-male) Democratic base, so he’s taking his case directly to those voters who, if economic issues were what motivated them to vote, should be flocking to his cause.
— It will go over like a lead balloon. In fact, it already has. Just look at this choice selection from the comments thread for that article:
Sanders is the last person any working supporter of Trump would support. Working Americans can't afford to have any more of their pay checks taken away to support the deadbeat mob that supports Sanders.
The commenter is singing from the Southern Strategy Hymnal, whose words were first set to the music we now know best by Lee Atwater and his fellow Republicans back in 1968:
It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
This is what got Ronald Reagan (who opened his 1980 campaign with a “states’ rights” speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi) elected. This is what flipped Congress in 1994 from Democratic to Republican, and kept it Republican for most of the next twenty-one years. This is why impoverished white Kentucky voters backed Matt Bevin even though they knew he was going to take away their health care:
BOONEVILLE — The 66 percent of Owsley County that gets health coverage through Medicaid now must reconcile itself with the 70 percent that voted for Republican Governor-elect Matt Bevin, who pledged to cut the state's Medicaid program and close the state-run Kynect health insurance exchange.
Lisa Botner, 36, belongs to both camps. A Kynector — a state agent representing Kynect in the field — recently helped Botner sign up for a Wellcare Medicaid card for herself and her 7-year-old son. Without that, Botner said, she couldn't afford the regular doctor's visits and blood tests needed to keep her hyperthyroidism in check.
"If anything changed with our insurance to make it more expensive for us, that would be a big problem," Botner, a community college student, said Friday at the Owsley County Public Library, where she works. "Just with the blood tests, you're talking maybe $1,000 a year without insurance."
Yet two weeks earlier, despite his much-discussed plans to repeal Kynect and toughen eligibility requirements for Medicaid, she voted for Bevin.
"I'm just a die-hard Republican," she said.
As brooklynbadboy said in the comments of a diary devoted to this phenomenon:
This illustrates my point precisely. Ownsley County is one of the poorest places in America, not just Kentucky. It is 99% white. Yes, this county voted 81% for Mitt Romney. They voted 70% for Matt Bevin. They voted overwhelmingly against the very President who got 70% of them their healthcare and for the people who want to take it away.
Why?
Because these people care more about social issues than they do about their economic well being. Even their own health. It is obvious. I'll bet you right now Trump is leading this county by a mile. A Manhattan billionaire. And folks tell populism is going to win these people over to Democrats? Please.
There is nothing to be done with these voters if Democrats are to remain Democrats. They are Republicans. Its a shame they let their social issues matter more than anything else, but we cant make them change.
They are voting their interests.
The bad news: These particular sorts of white voters aren’t going to be voting Democratic, much less Socialist, any time soon. If it’s not about sticking it to blacks, it’s about sticking it to LGBTQ folk, and Bevin made a point of chaining himself to Kim Davis’ side throughout the last days before the election.
The good news: Demographics and the gradual legal downfall of gerrymandering and other forms of Jim Crow means that nonwhites and single women are coming into their own as voting blocs. And they’re getting a bit of unintended help from none other than Donald Trump, who as Kos has documented in diary after diary scares the GOP establishment so much they fear he’ll cost them Congress as well as the White House.