For GOP, White Working Class Is Not Enough

In the final months of the 2016 election, Senator Chuck Schumer infamously took a sanguine line on his party’s declining fortunes with white working-class voters. Speaking at a Washington Post forum in July of that year, the New York Democrat proclaimed: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Four months later, of course, that prediction proved to be hubristic: Democratic inroads with Republican-leaning suburbanites failed to materialize to the degree that Schumer had hoped, and a surge of white working-class turnout for Trump — in which “a stunning one-third” of “the nearly 700 counties” that voted for Obama twice “flipped to support Trump,” the Washington Post reported — delivered Republicans the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Schumer was roundly — and understandably — mocked for his error. The Senate Democratic leader was “helping Republicans consolidate and grow their congressional majorities — by further alienating once-reliably Democratic blue-collar voters who abandoned the party in the last election,” conservative writer Marc Thiessen argued in a 2017 column for the Post. “That means there are millions of Obama voters out there who were sick of Democrats such as Schumer dismissing their concerns and decided they wanted to give Trump a chance.”

About the Author

Nate Hochman

Nate Hochman was a staff writer at National Review.

Featured Tags

In the final months of the 2016 election, Senator Chuck Schumer infamously took a sanguine line on his party’s declining fortunes with white working-class voters. Speaking at a Washington Post forum in July of that year, the New York Democrat proclaimed: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Four months later, of course, that prediction proved to be hubristic: Democratic inroads with Republican-leaning suburbanites failed to materialize to the degree that Schumer had hoped, and a surge of white working-class turnout for Trump — in which “a stunning one-third” of “the nearly 700 counties” that voted for Obama twice “flipped to support Trump,” the Washington Post reported — delivered Republicans the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Schumer was roundly — and understandably — mocked for his error. The Senate Democratic leader was “helping Republicans consolidate and grow their congressional majorities — by further alienating once-reliably Democratic blue-collar voters who abandoned the party in the last election,” conservative writer Marc Thiessen argued in a 2017 column for the Post. “That means there are millions of Obama voters out there who were sick of Democrats such as Schumer dismissing their concerns and decided they wanted to give Trump a chance.”