The Clintons Have Lost the Working Class
Clinton lost among young voters by nearly 6–1, and among independents by 3–1. Most arrestingly, Sanders won voters with an income of less than fifty thousand dollars by 2–1.
.. There’s a lot of talk about Clinton’s campaign repeating the chaos and errors of 2008, but that year she had the white working-class vote. Clinton’s candidacy looks narrower than ever, more confined to those whose experience of life approximates her own. Last night, in New Hampshire, the rare demographic group she won was those with incomes of more than two hundred thousand dollars a year. For now, at least, Clinton has become the wine-track candidate.
.. Bill Clinton, once the Party’s great channeller of working-class pain, surfaced, gaunt and joyless and wearing lumberjack red plaid. But his speech on Sunday had little of the old empathy; it was just a nasty blast at Sanders, whom the ex-President called “hermetically sealed” from reality.
.. Perhaps residual working-class loyalties, and her own strengths, will be enough to carry Clinton through the primaries. But the enthusiasm for her candidacy increasingly seems concentrated among affluent, older voters who are already committed members of the Democratic Party. That is not the most promising platform from which to begin a general-election campaign in any year, and especially not in a vigorously populist one.
.. But, in Iowa and New Hampshire, the trouble seemed broader than that: it ran through all of those people who have not yet made it. During the nineteen-nineties, the Clinton coalition ran along aspirational lines, drawing a hard line between virtuous workers and welfare recipients, and between hard-working professionals and capitalists, to summon the upwardly mobile. But the revelations of inequality have meant that aspirational talk has fallen flat, and the experience of 2008 has fractured faith in established leaders to fix it.